A&S - B2.1 - LEARNING LANGUAGE? SPEAK IR LIKE YOURE PLAYING A VIDEO GAME

People's attitude towards English has a lot to do with how well they speak the language.

Malaysians, in particular, often have a negative attitude towards English and feel like they are always making mistakes.

One day, I realized that this attitude is not based on their English level, but on their attitude towards the language.

When Faizal or someone like him enters an English conversation, they are focused on the person they are speaking to and not worried about making mistakes.

Malaysians who speak English well have a different attitude towards the language than those who do not. They are not focused on their mistakes and instead are focused on the conversation.

English is not only a language but also a tool that is used to communicate with others.

The difference between the two types of English speakers is that the high-level English speaker is focused on themselves and their language skills, while the low-level English speaker is focused on the person they are speaking to and getting a result.

The importance of this distinction is that it shows the difference between the language spoken by the majority of the world's people today and the language that will be spoken in the future. English will continue to be used by non-native speakers in most conversations, while native speakers will make up only 4% of all conversations.

The challenge for schools is that they are teaching English as an art rather than a tool, which is why the majority of English conversations are conducted in non-native English.

In school, students are judged more on correctness than on clarity.

Some of you might remember the old comprehension exam in school.

Does everybody remember in school when you'd get a question about a text that you read, you'd have to read through some text, right?

And then answer a question to show that you understood the text?

And this may have happened to you that you showed you understood the text, but you got a big X because you made a little grammar mistake.

Like this student.

This student clearly understood paragraph four.

But no, not correct!

Because he left the letter N off the word "environment."

But in the real world, what would matter?

In the real world, what would matter is did you understand the email, or did you understand your customer so that you can go ahead and take action?

Now, the problem that I see here, over and over, is that people take the attitude they developed about English in school, and they bring it into their adult life and into their work.

And if you're in a stressful situation, and you're having a conversation, and you're trying to give a result to someone and say it correctly, your brain multi-tasks, it cannot do two things at once.

And what I see is the brain just shutting down.

And you may recognize these three symptoms of the brain shutting down.

The first one is that your listening goes.

Someone is talking to you, and you're so busy thinking about how you're going to respond and express yourself correctly, you don't actually hear what the other person said.

The second thing to go is your speaking.

Your mind sort of shuts down, and that vocabulary you do know just disappears, and the words don't come out.

The third thing to go is your confidence.

The worst thing about this is you may only be [un]confident because you cannot express yourself clearly, but to the person talking to you, they may misunderstand this as a lack of confidence in your ability to do the job, to perform.

So if you want to speak English like Faizal with that great confidence, here's the one thing that you can do.

When you speak, don't focus on yourself.

Focus on the other person and the result you want to achieve.

Imagine a next generation of Malaysians, all with that wonderful confidence in communication that Faizal has, at any level of English.

Because let's remember that English today is not an art to be mastered, it's just a tool to use to get a result.

In conclusion, English is a tool that you