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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2016-12-21
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6boGtBCbclc
recently I started to learn a new form I really like the early stage it feels a lot like a kid lego each group of words and grammar of it's like a new lego set it's a lot of fun to learn how to put together the pieces to build the model but we all know but the most fun you have a lego is whenever you take this
apart and you start to mix and match and be creative so you take the laser guns off the space act and you put them on the pirate ship because well what's better than pirates pirates laser guns of course language can be fun like this to you because you learn something simple like the past tense the man walked down the street but then you learn adjectives and
adverbs and you can start to put the men and make sentences like that crazy scary man walked slowly down the dark street but a lot of people when they learn a language they wanna skip ahead to the next level we start having conversations with native speakers because this is where the real language learning happens right you know you start off slow making mistakes but then gradually
as you practice you naturally get better at the line which until it's flowing archer mice like music well I used to think like this I also used to learn like this and teach like this but not anymore here today I am in the first semester of her research monster so very much in the early stages of testing a hypothesis and so my story for you today
is really about the emergence of an idea and it's a story of three amazing women Jackie G. sick I'm Mary who completely changed the way that I think and teach and learn languages Jackie was one of four students that I ever talked I was a fresh face graduate teaching English in South Korea out an adult English academy I was given the level for classes levels one
two and three were taught by Korean teacher so level four was the first time that the students have ever met often a native speaker course they were quite nervous and Jackie was the most nervous I've ever seen anyone she came into class on the first day this tiny skinny little woman grasping her bag with both hands no eye contact straight to her chair she was shaking
so much she dropped her bag on the floor and she went on to get it in half way realize that we were all looking at her so she just kind of froze at the edge I hear her hyperventilating through the rest of the class but Jackie was one of the most incredible women I've ever met the year before she and her husband center only song to
study at university in America and after a couple of months he called back and he said mom I've got an American girlfriend with Jackie she wanted red alert and she felt oh my god he's going to marry her is going to be a wedding in America I'm going to have to speak English I can't speak English they're all going to think I'm one educated they're going
to ignore me oh my god what's going to happen so she took action she came to our school and she started from nothing unless the new year she had worked up to this level for class she was absolutely incredible dedicated smart unmotivated when she came to my class she made quite a lot of mistakes and a lot of students from level three going up to level
four they made a lot of mistakes because level three was still playing with lego you lots of time to think and put the sentence together it suddenly in love before you have to tell stories you had to put multiple sentences together one after the other you didn't have time to think you have to think where you been interesting where you belong topic where you should you
ask a question so the cognitive capacity to focus on the linguistic task got smaller and smaller students made a lot of errors the jockey made sentences like last year my son go America and meet American girl five mistakes not sentence and then I corrector when she did this course not languages not apart strictly correct in every mistake it's button actually gaining confidence in practicing unnaturally getting
better well at the end of that year I felt very proud of my achievements because Jackie on the other students they all seemed really relaxed in my class and they were chanting no they were making still quite a lot of mistakes but I didn't worry because I knew what this new confidence they would practice more and get better my second and third year were spent in
different cities and at different schools but my fourth year brought me back to that for school but not as an experienced teacher I was a level six teacher at the top monsters class I went into one of those classes and there was Jackie she made it right to the top is really great to catch up with her our son did not marry the American girl came
back home he had a Korean girlfriend everything was okay but as I talk to Jackie something worried me kind of hard to understand her the same states that she had been making three years ago were still there but these new mistakes and also cracked and she had grown in confidence so she was speaking at twice the speed so the mistakes are coming rapid fire even quicker
and I hope to really listen carefully to understand what she was saying and it really wasn't fun to speak to her anymore she said she went and visited her son in America I asked hosted to chip talk to anybody she said well I tried but they didn't understand my accent yet Jackie had a great accent on a pronunciation was fantastic just when you make a lot
of even little mistakes very quickly people don't understand well I felt personally guilty because Jackie commence my class from level three fantastic student all the lego pieces perfectly in order but in her nervousness you bungled them together and shown to me and my response was very good you're doing really well keep going so I was responsible for this woman actually many other students I met again
not actually being very good so you know they say karma's a bitch right G. circled her husband moved from the countryside in Korea and to Seoul to open a little convenience store that happen to be next to my apartment I've been teaching English in the day and I've been studying Korean at night but I was doing it the right way I was doing a lot of
reading and watching TV but most of all I was talking to people language exchange partners the cashier in the shop people on the street everyone everywhere and you know what after three years I felt like I was getting pretty good it was not the point where I just wasn't thinking in the language was coming nights and everyone was saying how well I was doing and smiling
encouraging it was brilliant I went into Jackie store are not Jackie skis make I wanted the G. six store on the first day I asked a simple question I said when did you come here which in Korean is young he saw on social psycho which I keep my partner site G. sick made a sign that was like at I looked up unconscious six face she looked
very confused but I thought well what questions correct maybe she didn't understand my pronunciation open I know she's from a different province different accent that's why she didn't understand but ask my Korean friend bite this any set but actually join you don't set yucky saw he said yogi and owns a Osho's there I was dumbstruck by this because this was really simple and I have been
using this all the time everywhere so I went back to that shop every day I spoke to G. sick every day and every day I heart and I learned a new era in my line which production and you know what turn lights there were a lot of errors and I actually wasn't as good as I thought I was Jeez it turned out to be probably the
best teacher I've ever had and she didn't even know what but after about two months she stopped making that some told me that she felt proud of herself because when she first came into so she didn't know how to speak to foreigners but neither she learned how to do it and we all know what she means all of us have experienced a foreigner speaking to us
in our native language and we really don't understand what they're talking about smiling we not Jesus wasn't as good at hiding her confusion as she thought because if I look carefully on her face when I made a mistake her eyes just started dying to the left for a second so every time I once in the shop I start very closely on her face but not only
with her with all the other people I was meeting and you know what each other person when I made a mistake there was a distinctive sign a slight furrow of the Briar even just disliked part blazed expression for a fraction of a second but show that there was some extra cognitive action going on because they didn't understand what I said no I was fascinated by this
but I thought how the hell did I miss this for three years and while I know the answer to that you see even when I talk to people in English I have a bad habit of not looking at them in the face and in fact whenever I'm talking to someone I I look up to them see them staring at me attends to make me do my
father Dougal when he's done something wrong impression you know it's just kind of looking around and not looking at the person so I have been missing all of this information coming on not picking up on it when I went back to my level six class and did a lot of experiments every time one of my students said something wrong I just for two seconds I put
my I start the left a little bit confused and then looked back most of the students clearing jockey no change they either didn't notice are they sought and just didn't change what they were saying but there were one or two students in each class who did every time I did that they either stop they asked a question or they change their sentence these were the students
that we would have called the language geniuses students for the other students in this top class asked hard hard to get so good you've never lived abroad you're amazing you know what their response was %HESITATION just known naturally chatting I'm the one being disingenuous they were really being honest in this environment of eight or ten students with the nature of a teacher same signals coming on
at the same visual signal but only one or two are actually picking up on that on using it well that was the last year that I actually taught those types of out of classes I became more interested in using the the facial expressions and experimenting with it so I open my own little academy and use kids and then did some other work with other adults using
facial expressions to see how they respond and I just let to the final lady of the story marry I'd like to introduce you to marry this is Mary hi Mary Mary I am stunned here talk to audience okay yeah I am standing here talking to the audience okay alright so marries a it's anonymous avatar that uses facial expressions to give feedback to language learners on their
utterances and it's part of a bigger personalized E. learning platform that's designed to sift right between the early stages of playing with lego and then the final stage of talking and chatting with native speakers that's designed as a kinda semi social simulation word learners like myself and Jackie can go when practice talking a practice speaking and get actual feedback so these little mistakes we make don't
become huge problems in the future but also just something else possibly more important teaches language learners to look at the expressions and the listeners face to get that feedback so that when they enter the social sphere and begin talking they are aware and they are sensitive to the internal mental state of the listener so if they are causing some difficulty with what they say they can
adapt and improve and that way the more they talk the better they will get it's the way it's supposed to be recently I started to learn a new foreign language and I like the early stages of learning a language right now I'm very happy playing with my lego but it makes me feel happier to know that in the future the first person I'm going to talk
