Fluent Hero gives you all the skills you need to be able to use your new language. Speaking and listening (and reading and writing) are advanced, complex skills. They are depend on a set of more basic skills, each of which must be mastered to reach you full potential in a new language.
For example, speaking depends on you being able to form sequences of sounds correctly, and listening depends on you being able to hear the individual words in a continuous stream of speech (speech segmentation).
If just one of the necessary skills is missing, you will really struggle to be able to speak and understand the language even if your knowledge of grammar and vocabulary is good.
This is because knowledge of the language, and the skills needed to use it are not the same thing, and it is possible to develop one without the other.
When acquiring your native language, knowledge and skill development happened together, naturally. That’s because you learnt your native language through practice, not through study.
Most language teaching methods transmit knowledge about the language, but do not give the adult brain what it needs to develop these vital skills.
You possess all these skills in your native language, because you developed them as you were learning the language without even being aware of it. Now you need to develop these skills for your new language, in order to really master it.
They are all learnt skills – which means that with the right training and enough practice you can acquire them.
The Fluency Skills
1. Sound production
2. Auditory Processing
3. Working Memory
4. Speech Segmentation
5. Sound Sequencing
6. Pattern Recognition
7. Statistical Learning
8. Information Processing
The Fluency Skills all share certain key characteristics:
Essential
The complex skills of listening and speaking depend completely on the full set of sound and language processing skills being acquired. If just one of these skills in missing or at too low a level, a person cannot reach full fluency in a language. Most adult learners of a second language have a poor level of all of these skills, resulting in the familiar struggle to be able to speak and understand the language despite years of dedicated study, and often a high level of theoretical knowledge of the language. The fluency skills are essential for putting that knowledge into practice.
Language Specific
To really master a language and reach a high level of fluency you must develop each of the fluency skills to a sufficient level in that language. You can use your native language skills to some extent to try to use a new language, but this will hold you back from reaching your full potential
Trainable
The good news is that these skills can all be developed at any age. It is certainly not too late as an adult. The difference is that while children develop the necessary skills naturally through immersion, adults don’t. This is due to interference from the well-established native language. Adults need special training and dedicated practice. Studies have shown that adults improve these skills with as little as 20 minutes of dedicated practice.
Compound Gains
The great thing about building your fluency skills is that improvement in one area spills over into other areas, setting up a virtuous cycle of improvement.
Let’s see how that works with an example
As you master the skills of sound and speech segmentation your ear for the language will improve massively. Suddenly you will be able to understand spoken Spanish much more easily, without having gained any new knowledge of grammar or vocab. This is where things start to get really interesting – because you can know understand so much more of what you hear, you are suddenly getting a whole lot more comprehensible input – so your knowledge of the language in context will continue to grow without effort on your part – just by exposure to the language. Your learning will be so much more efficient
This works in every aspect of your language progress. As your speaking becomes more fluent and you pronunciation improves you will get more conversation practice as it will be much more enjoyable for people to talk to you – conversation will flow better.
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