Alan Palmer's Language Chat podcasts

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Hello everybody

Today I want to talk about attitude to language learning. Having a good attitude to learning language helps overcome barriers to learning. These barriers may be personal barriers, or physical barriers.

Examples of personal barriers

How we personally feel about our progress
Our ability to remember words, phrases, grammar points
Our feelings about how well we pronounce words
What other people tell us about how we learn
Teachers’ comments good or not so good
How much we feel we need to learn a language well
What we think language will give us and what we think it might make harder


Examples of physical barriers

Time or lack of it
Opportunities to speak with other speakers of the language (native speakers in particular)
The place we learn (class or home)
The things we have to provide us with language “input”: courses, books, DVD, MP3, Websites


All these things (and many more I am sure) affect us in how we learn. It may be a positive effect or not.

Some negative effects could be, if we have a bad teacher, this will affect us, if we don’t have enough good learning material, if we don’t have enough time.

Some positive effects could be having a good teacher, praise that makes us feel good, remembering more words that we expect, finding we can pronounce things well.

There are many more things that we can add to this list.

I think our attitude or perhaps a better way of saying it would be our “way of thinking” is very important and can also affect how we learn and perhaps more importantly, how we feel about learning and how much we can get from the language learning experience.

My opinion is that we should think about these things when we feel that we are not making much progress or when we are making good progress, and she what we think may be affecting us in a positive or negative way.

Making a list may help. Once we see something written down we can maybe think about it more and also we then have a record to look back on. Something that tells us how we felt about language at any particular time.

I have started to call myself a “language explorer” rather than a “language student” . To me, this feels more appropriate and right for me. Maybe you prefer the word “student”.

Everyone has to choose his or her own path, although those of you doing courses must follow the way the course is taught.

I like to find my own way whereever I can, however I do study language courses and I would always say that these are important, providing they are good courses and we can learn well from them.

To help us with our attitude to learning and way of thinking about learning, try saying this to yourself.

Instead of “I wish I could know more” say to yourself, “I am glad I have learned so much already”
Instead of “I could do better” say to yourself “Perhaps I can find some new ways to learn”

“Poor language skills” should be “can I improve language skills?”
“pronuciation problems” should be thought of as “what can I do if I am uncertain to best way to say it?”
“not enough time” should be “can I make us of the time I have?”
“no learning fast enough” should be “is there a way I can speed up?”


What I mean is, instead of making statements “my English is poor”, turn it into a question “what can I do to improve?”

This will focus our minds on what to do for the future not dwell on what has gone before

Take care

Be good, be happy