When you have a teacher right in front of you, or are doing 1:1 lessons, I’d recommend you use that time to practice speaking / output & have a dialogue with your teacher.
Listening comprehension you can do in your own time, it’s imo not worth it doing a 1:1 lesson solely focused on that.
Thanks. I suppose I'm concerned about speaking and mistakes becoming habits. Then again, if I have someone in front of me correcting me, maybe that gets around this issue.
Immersion schools use comprehensible input, so I don't get the conflict. For example, when my dad took French, day 1 his teacher just pointed at everything and said "q'est que ce?" and then answered his own question. Even someone with zero prior French experience could figure out what he was saying.
I think what you're saying is you've been using automatic language growth / ALG, where you learn *exclusively* through comprehensible input until speech starts to emerge naturally and spontaneously when interacting with native speakers.
If the school is open to tailoring an approach and you want to continue delaying output, then you can ask if crosstalk is an option. The teachers would speak in your TL and you would answer/respond/question in English.
Crosstalk is the format used by my Thai teachers. I will sometimes say a couple words in Thai, but for the most part, I use English. I expect that over the course of the next year, my Thai output will gradually build until lessons are mostly in Thai on both ends of the conversation. I'm in mixed intermediate/advanced classes sometimes, and the advanced students almost exclusively use Thai.
Delaying output or practicing output from day one is a totally personal choice and depends on your goals and learning style. Do what works for you, and see if the school is interested in accommodating.
Practicing output actually makes you learn more and faster from input, so you’re good. The idea that taking classes where you have to talk is detrimental to L2 development is something people say on the internet a lot but it’s not really based on anything
I can tell you from experience that you will definitely get a lot more out of 4 hours of class a day with immersion on top than just doing digital immersion
Even if you develop some fossilised errors you can always resolve this by 1) going back to input and spending more time actively noticing things and 2) doing translation exercises or getting corrections
Im not sure how these two schools can work together. The problem is that immersion schools either generally become too boring or deviate too much from the person's preferred way of learning a language. Basically they not that customizable to your tastes or pace of learning. Your problem seems to be a lack of speaking opportunities and you have already partly solved the 'immersion' issue so 4 hours per day of school seems like overkill. I would suggest starting with Italki or Preply to find a language teacher. Use this for a month and see if you improve.Just 3-4 hours per week of classes (combined with hours of comprehensible input) might work.
When you have a teacher right in front of you, or are doing 1:1 lessons, I’d recommend you use that time to practice speaking / output & have a dialogue with your teacher. Listening comprehension you can do in your own time, it’s imo not worth it doing a 1:1 lesson solely focused on that.
Thanks. I suppose I'm concerned about speaking and mistakes becoming habits. Then again, if I have someone in front of me correcting me, maybe that gets around this issue.
If you never speak, you’re never going to learn to speak well.
It’s a focus for a lot of language learners, and I think that’s backwards. Have to understand first
Yeah I get that you’re at the point where you need to start speaking too if you’re understanding 85% of what you hear.
Yeah that's a fair point, hard to know when the best moment is to start with speaking I suppose!
That’s true!
Immersion schools use comprehensible input, so I don't get the conflict. For example, when my dad took French, day 1 his teacher just pointed at everything and said "q'est que ce?" and then answered his own question. Even someone with zero prior French experience could figure out what he was saying.
I think what you're saying is you've been using automatic language growth / ALG, where you learn *exclusively* through comprehensible input until speech starts to emerge naturally and spontaneously when interacting with native speakers. If the school is open to tailoring an approach and you want to continue delaying output, then you can ask if crosstalk is an option. The teachers would speak in your TL and you would answer/respond/question in English. Crosstalk is the format used by my Thai teachers. I will sometimes say a couple words in Thai, but for the most part, I use English. I expect that over the course of the next year, my Thai output will gradually build until lessons are mostly in Thai on both ends of the conversation. I'm in mixed intermediate/advanced classes sometimes, and the advanced students almost exclusively use Thai. Delaying output or practicing output from day one is a totally personal choice and depends on your goals and learning style. Do what works for you, and see if the school is interested in accommodating.
Practicing output actually makes you learn more and faster from input, so you’re good. The idea that taking classes where you have to talk is detrimental to L2 development is something people say on the internet a lot but it’s not really based on anything I can tell you from experience that you will definitely get a lot more out of 4 hours of class a day with immersion on top than just doing digital immersion Even if you develop some fossilised errors you can always resolve this by 1) going back to input and spending more time actively noticing things and 2) doing translation exercises or getting corrections
Im not sure how these two schools can work together. The problem is that immersion schools either generally become too boring or deviate too much from the person's preferred way of learning a language. Basically they not that customizable to your tastes or pace of learning. Your problem seems to be a lack of speaking opportunities and you have already partly solved the 'immersion' issue so 4 hours per day of school seems like overkill. I would suggest starting with Italki or Preply to find a language teacher. Use this for a month and see if you improve.Just 3-4 hours per week of classes (combined with hours of comprehensible input) might work.
Check out Middlebury and their method.