perfect. Now for writing English, that’s not as bad. When you write English,
you have time. You can think about things slowly and take your time. You
can erase your mistakes. It’s less of a problem. You don’t need to write fast.
But when it comes to speaking, there’s no time. You don’t have time to
think about the rules for the present perfect tense in English when you are
talking to people. If someone asks you a question, you have to answer it
immediately. You don’t have time to think about prepositions. You don’t
have time to think about verb tenses, possessives, phrasal verbs – all the
other linguistic terms you’ve learned. There’s no time.
A student of mine in Barcelona named Oscar once struggled with this very
issue. He wanted to improve his conversational skills, however, all he could
think of was grammar. Should I be using present perfect or another tense?
That kind of thing. He said he felt like he was chained up and the words just
wouldn’t come. So he stopped studying grammar. Over the next few months,
his speaking dramatically improved. “It just started flowing out instead of
me consciously thinking about it.”
Research supports this, which is why linguists like Stephen Krashen
recommend a more natural approach. Learning a language, Krashen notes,
“doesn’t require extensive use of conscious grammatical rules and does not
require tedious drill.”
In a meta-analysis of grammar instruction, researchers found that studies
over the last century have failed to find a significant effect for the teaching of
grammar directly. The research is clear: Learning grammar rules does not
improve your spoken grammar. You have seen this with your own speaking.
How many times have you made a grammar mistake when speaking, even
though you “knew” the correct rule?
For example, many students who do well on grammar tests have terrible
spoken grammar. They can tell you that the past tense version of “teach” is
“taught.” Yet, when speaking, they will say “last year he teach me.” They
know the rule intellectually, but this does not help their speaking.
Another common problem is slow and hesitant speech. While speaking, a
student will constantly be thinking of verb conjugations. All this analyzing
