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Comment by resonious | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, do you know of any research (or even just anecdotes) showing that speaking practice is bad? I've heard the claim before but never seen any evidence for it.

In my own experience, it feels like speaking helps improve my speaking a lot. Sure it doesn't help me pick up new phrases or grammar at all, but the first time I say something always comes out horrible, before getting progressively better as I say it more. And there's the skill of utilizing a limited vocabulary to communicate complex ideas. That's another thing that I feel has gotten better as I exercise it through speech.

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I'll try to dig up the original study I found months ago, talking about correlation between speaking practice and language acquisition in Japanese students learning English. When controlling for method of study, the researchers noted that students who tended to speak more ended up doing _worse_ on final exams. This could potentially be explained by the tendency for early speakers to way over-focus on correctness, which slows the whole process.

In the meantime, this book by Krashen may be of interest! He touches on some of the same ideas, roughly. Notably, around page 100 or so, he starts to define what he would consider his ideal learning environment: http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/sl_acquisition_and_le...

> the researchers noted that students who tended to speak more ended up doing _worse_ on final exams

Surely those exams focus on literary analysis or advanced grammar structures.

Who is the better speaker of a language? The person who can carry simple (daily life topics) conversations fluently or the person who knows pedantic language constructs but can only utter them with significant delays and only speak in chunks of a few sentences?

Knowing a language and being able to speak it are different things. I agree you have to know it (understand grammar and vocabulary) before it makes sense to practice speaking it. Until you are forced to quickly think on your feet in another language your speaking ability won't progress much.

> students who tended to speak more ended up doing _worse_ on final exams.

It is possible that this simply tells us that the final exam was only or primarily a written one. I know it is not directly comparable but my children learnt Norwegian starting at age 3 1/2 (after they already spoke English) without any formal instruction at all, just by speaking with other children and the staff at the kindergarten.

Living in Japan, I can verify that there are two major types of English students here.

Group one learns to speak casually, and often.

Group two can be handed a Shakespeare text and answer any question about it.

Group one will have a completely natural and fluent conversation with any English speaker. They can write casually and be completely understood.

Group two will be able to identify grammatical mistakes on a test. Many are incapable of even rudimentary conversation. These people did well on college exams and are responsible for the horrible, worse-than-machine translations you see on signs and government reports in this country.

I'm also in Japan. While I don't have any formal English school experience, my experience with casually meeting people pretty closely matches this.

Though, I've actually met some group one folks who can't write very well, despite being extremely proficient in conversation!

I have a Japanese friend in a third group. He learned English to a fairly high level almost entirely by reading English on the internet and watching English shows/movies. He's very fluent at speaking as well, but according to his account, his speaking fluency took a lot of practice (obviously), but didn't come until after he could already almost fully understand and enjoy those things.

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