The history of my folly

Preserve your mistakes for posterity. 

Perhaps you don’t regard making a mistake as actually bad. Perhaps you are quite resigned to the need to make mistakes in order to learn, and you need no convincing as to their value. 

But there might remain a sense of embarrassment.

It feels embarrassing to blunder. You feel a fool when you put your foot in your mouth. You feel like a dick when you trip, a klutz when you stutter (I could go on . . . )

And that’s not good, because any such inhibitions have the effect of slowing you down and making you do less. So here’s a strategy that you could use.

Write down your best bloopers. Start a collection of your goofs. Turn them into anecdotes that you tell at your own expense. Trot them out at parties, and be the loudest to laugh. 

In her book, Dr Kato Lomb refers often to “the history of my folly”. She is not too shy to recount a number of personally embarrassing incidents.  

That’s one way to reduce their potency, and take away the sting. That’s how you neutralize their poison, and remove their fangs. 

The only ‘disadvantage’ with this technique is that you are much less likely to repeat those entertaining mistakes.

Fancy a threesome?

This is not what you think, not at all. I'm just talking about chat here. Nothing more. Nothing to see here, people, move on please.

I've run conversation classes. As a teacher I matched students with volunteers. Gave them prompt sheets to give them something to talk about.

Usually there would be several English learners with one volunteer, or, if there were enough, we'd pair them up: one on one.

But these conversations would often turn into mini-lessons, mini-classes. Which isn't ideal.

And then I'd sit in and try to gently steer the activity towards regular conversation. That involved me responding to the volunteer in a manner in which I wanted the students to adopt, and also model for the volunteer how I'd like he or she to interact.

It struck me then that it is very valuable for students to see, and be a part of, a group that had native speakers speaking with one another.

They'd see the conventions we use. They'd be able to sit back and then join in when ready. This reduced any pressure that they might be under. And the language used would as a result approach more authentic English.

I've since read in Kato Lomb's book: Polyglot, How I Learn Languages that she encourages the same approach. 

Linguistic micro-climate

Another idea that I came up, and that may have been independently discovered, is what I call a Private XXX World (insert your target language).

Kato Lomb has previously written about "a personal linguistic micro-climate". I would need to read up to find out exactly what she means.

Anyway, what I mean is to set up situations in your environment that make it automatic that you are exposed to your target language throughout the day. 
That is, you normalize yourself to the idea of having it around. 

Pages pinned on the wall, DVDs in your language right next to the player, music in your chosen language that you choose to have loaded in your whatever device, your home page on the computer set up to easily link you up to various foreign language sites.

That’s the sort of thing I mean.

Autologue

There’s an idea that I tried out several times in the past. Then, I discovered that Kato Lomb suggested it too. She is a world-famous polyglot from Hungary.

What you do is to converse with yourself from time to time.

You do that, because it isn’t always easy to find someone to talk with. And then it often makes you nervous. And although you don’t actually learn anything new by doing it, (you are not a rusty machine that a drop of oil will free up) you DO develop your speaking muscles to some extent.

Anyway, Dr Lomb recommends it, so it’s probably worth trying.