The aim of this blog is to help any foreign language learner to become operational in the shortest possible time. It is designed to tackle difficulties and barriers as they arise and offer solutions to boost performance wherever and whenever needed.

 How can this set of competences benefit you?

 

Each article – posted over time – provides key solutions to specific resistances experienced by students. Each page addresses key points, skills and issues any foreign language learner needs to understand and grasp in order to build competences very quickly and efficiently.  Each blog contains extracts of chapters of the book The Language Talent to be published soon.

 

The material is aimed at all levels of language learning. Some pages may hence prove more relevant to you than others. To find your topic, you can simply refer to the list on the blog content page and click on the most pertinent pages for you at the time of your reading.

 Every subject relates logically to the whole and is organised as part of a coherent sequence of explanations, recommendations and exercises. Pages are designed to address separate competences as stand-alone and may be digested on a need-to-know basis.

 

This material is divided into three main parts and will be composed of over twenty articles.

 

Part 1: What you were probably never told but need to know   

 

This part looks at the journey you are about to embark on. The success rate of languages learners is low. In the UK, only 10% of the active population achieve effective fluency in a foreign language.  If you blame yourself, your lack of motivation or skills for failing to progress you are not alone. There are very good reasons for this generic failure, collective defeat and virtual impossibility, but most are inbuilt. They are not your fault and the solution is at hand. 

 

Blog 1.1 lists some of the mind’s inner barriers and roadblocks which part 2 and 3 help you to eliminate. Blog 1.2 to 1.8 signpost the road to fluency, flag fast track lanes as well as dangerously slippery by-ways or swamps, introduces underpinning principles and points to new language learning habits. 

 

Part 2: What you were never told but need to prepare for

 

This is the preparation stage; part 2 puts in place the pillars of the language talent. In this section you’ll discover how to build and fine tune learning engines as well as create and nurture environments for progress. Each blog addresses an important competence for you to implement and foster. Some – usually considered as a given or an excuse for not being able to learn – are addressed head on. Blog 2.3 and 2.4, on attitude and self-confidence respectively, treat these issues as competences which can be understood, sequenced into steps and practised. The same applies to the next sections on ear power, accent and memory. The following two subparts concentrate on means to enhance vocabulary and boost writing abilities. The last one is dedicated to designing an environment for growth. 

 

Part 3: What you need to do

 

This is the ‘in-action’ section. Part 3 focuses on what you need to do in order to optimise your conversations with native speakers. Each chapter is dedicated to the reality of engaging, communicating and learning from every exchange.  As in the previous parts, many activities require conscious attention to be acted out. Your listening and speaking skills are predominantly influenced, controlled and ruled by habits and expectations linked to your fluid native language. Here, you learn to adapt and re-engineer some routines, fend off counterproductive habits and create new ones. You’ll train your self-confidence, tune-up your go-for-it attitude, enhance your own non-verbal skills, nurture foreign body language reading, boost your mimicking competences, design your environment to sustain progress and much more.

 

About the author of this blog

 

The author – Patrice Leriche – started off with a passion for and frustration with how languages were taught and built the expertise and techniques obsessively over the following three decades. He spent over thirty years researching related discoveries emanating from psychology, neuroscience or Neuro-Linguistic-Programming, as well as tested and refined them through training individuals in several languages.  He now operates in and teaches five languages as well as specialising in the highly related field of cross-culture (i.e. how different cultures interact).

 

Communicate with the author

 

This material is designed and planned as a conversation with language students.  The objective is to understand further the blog readers’ learning frustrations, barriers and requirements. A new page addressing a specific topic will be loaded at regular intervals. If you come across material that you would like the author to comment on or if you have a question or request related to this material please contact patrice@ilfb.co.uk.