Hi there Steve Kaufmann here.
Today I want to talk about language learning and a very famous, successful book – a self-help book – by Stephen Covey called “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. I read this and I will tell you why I read it. It is because I found an audio book of this "xxxxxxxxxxxxx" (Russian title) when I was in Riga, so I bought the book and I bought the audio book and I listened to it and so on and so forth.
It has applications for language learning and basically the seven habits that Covey talks about are:
1. to become independent, this is extremely important for language learning and it consists of being proactive, you have to take charge of your language learning, I have discussed this before.
2. Start with the end goal in mind, so if you are starting to learn a language make sure you know exactly what you want to achieve i.e. you want to learn it to a specific degree of fluency, in fact visualize yourself reaching that goal (in my opinion).
3. He talks about doing first things first, and to me that means; if you are going to study a language and if you intend to achieve this end goal that you have in mind, do it every day and make sure you do it every day and as I have talked about before have your MP3 Player with you and have your text with you and whenever you have an opportunity: DO IT. So that gets you independent. The other thing he talks about is becoming interdependent with other people – now he talks about management and working with people and of course we’re talking about language learning and so to the extent that we’re communicating with other people and of course being interdependent is important.
So to get to this interdependence the 4th thing he says is to think in terms of win-win. Alright, if you are negotiating with someone then of course win-win is important, but where I see this applying to language learning is, no matter what you do, consider it a win. You are struggling with a text, you really didn’t understand it well, it was somehow frustrating, and you don’t think you are making any progress, but you spend half an hour to an hour listening, reading, to whatever extent you understood it, it’s a win because you expose yourself to the language – it’s a win. So everything is a win, when you are studying a language.
Then the 5th thing he talks about is: Try to understand and THEN worry about being understood, so if you are a Manager of course, you want to first understand your people before you can expect them to understand what you want from them. To me this is extremely important in language learning. I stress this all the time, it is more important to understand than speak. If you can have that confidence, that you understand what you hear, understand what you read, you understand the language, you have the vocabulary – the speaking will come. It’ll come through speaking, but if you don’t understand it is very difficult to have meaningful conversations.
The 6th thing was: Synergy. And I think that synergy also applies to language learning because all of our activities, all of the different learning activities; reading, listening, speaking, writing – they are all synergistic, because everything we do increases our ability to notice. So there is obvious synergy in all of our learning activities. We are doing this number 6 of Steven Covey.
And, the 7th thing he talks about is what he calls sharpening the saw, which means constantly developing your skills and I think building up your passive vocabulary, building up your familiarity with the language – all of this is making you potentially a better speaker of the language, so you are in fact sharpening the saw. Now in subsequent videos I’ll get into more detail on some of these “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, but you can Google for it and I think look at how this applies to language learning and I look forward to your comments.
Thank you for listening.
http://www.change-management-coach.co...
Информация по комментариям в разработке