about what my own research tells us

about good English learning materials.

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Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from DoingEnglish.com,

here today to talk to you once again

a little bit about good English learning materials.

There's this idea,

kind of a silly one, really, when you think about it,

but a pervasive one,

this idea that you learnt English at school.

Therefore, all you've got to do now is activate it

by practise, practise, practising .

Yeah, it makes sense, kind of.

And it is true

that you do have to use your English,

whether practising or just doing it in the real world

to activate it and make it into a habit,

that is, an automated skill that just happens

without you having to think about it.

Yes, this is correct.

And yes, it is correct that first,

you have to learn the English

that you are going to automate

via this doing of the English.

That much is correct.

Where you go wrong, however,

is in thinking that you learned English at school.

Newsflash, you almost definitely didn't.

These things change,

differ from country to country to country.

My own research, my own experience,

is mostly with the Asian countries,

so I am really talking

from that perspective here in this video.

However, I would imagine the same is true

for pretty much everywhere.

The English you learned at school wasn't really English.

It was supposed to be.

It was supposed to be something representative

of day-to-day, basic, general English,

but it almost definitely wasn't.

It was actually something else,

an approximation of English,

something that uses English words and English grammar,

but was actually something fundamentally different.

One of my own research projects published in a top journal,

I will add reference and link in the description,

found that Japanese secondary school English textbooks

used completely different phrases and expressions

and chunks of English in their,

quote, unquote, conversational dialogues to real English,

to the extent where the only conclusion

that we could come to

was that the textbooks were representative

not of general English conversation,

but of nothing other than themselves.

Or to put it more simply,

the expressions, phrases, and dialogues

contained in the textbooks were all but useless

in the real world.

This is a problem.

I did a second research project

that I will add is now published

in the number one journal in my field,

also referenced and linked in the description.

In this study, I measured Japanese secondary school

student's fluency using a special kind

of psychometric testing

to measure how they process the chunks of language

taken from the textbooks that they used.

I found that they were highly fluent in this language,

which would have been a really, really good thing

if the language tested

was in any way useful in the real world,

which my original study had already shown was not the case.

So, as you can see,

the idea that you learned English in school

and all you've got to do is activate it via practise

actually doesn't really make much sense

because the students that I studied,

they were already pretty damn good

at the English they had learned.

They just didn't realise it

because it was not the English they needed, the real world.

So, just practising , practising , practising

would do nothing for them because the stuff that they need,

not in here.

The materials that you use and study matter a lot.

They are, after all, the samples of English

that you put into your head.

And just like building a house

with poor quality building materials

will only result in a shitty house,

learning from poor quality English learning materials

will only result in shitty English

being spoken by you.

Now, if you're not too sure

what the best kind of English learning materials are

or simply want me to cut away the hassle

and give you everything that you need,

you're going to wanna consider joining

my prestigious English Mastery group,

the Extraordinary English Speakers.

Among other benefits, each and every week,

you are going to get a brand new lesson from me to study

that's gonna give you samples of English to use

in any situation you want,

whether you'll use English in business context,

in social situations,

or you live in an English-speaking country,

we've got you covered with everything that you need

to get out there and speak English,

confident that you are sounding natural

and fluent when you do it.

Of course, the design

of the Extraordinary English Speakers lessons

is based on my own research,

years of testing and tweaking have gone

into the design and writing of the lessons,

to, again, ensure that you can get out there

and just get on with speaking the English language

with less hassle, less stress, and fewer headaches.

The place to go is DoingEnglish.com/EES,

link in the description.

And because it is just so much easier

to demonstrate how the lessons work

than it is to explain it,

what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you

the very first lesson for free, lesson zero,

which talks about the method that we use

alongside actually doing one of the lessons.

So, just head over to DoingEnglish.com/EES

and grab your free lesson.

Now, I will see you on the other side.

With that, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

this is me Julian Northbrook,

signing out from another video.

Thanks for watching.

If you found this useful, give it a nice, big old thumbs-up.

If you hated it, give it a thumbs-up anyway.

And I'll see you, my friend, in the next one.

Goodbye.

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