Speaking and listening are complex skills which are the result of many more basic skills working together.
These vital fluency skills are:
Sound
Working Memory
Speech Segmentation
Pattern recognition
Chunking
Children naturally acquire all these skills in the early years of life as they are exposed to their native language
Once all the required fluency skills are in place the brain can soak up the language like a sponge
These skills are developed for a particular language – not for languages as a whole
They need to be developed for each language you want to speak
Knowledge of grammar and vocab does NOT replace the need for this
These skills need to be developed to a high enough level – otherwise you won’t be able to use the language you are learning
Speaking a particular language is the result of having all these skills developed to high enough level for that language, combined with a large enough mental database of that language.
A native English speaker can speak English because they have the all the required skills developed in English, resulting in the complex skill of speaking English – simply having knowledge of English without these skills is not enough.
Having knowledge of a language but not the skill to put it into practice is where too many adult language learners end up. This is because most methods teach knowledge without skill, because they treat a language as a subject to be memorized, not as a skill to be mastered through practice.
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