Let’s revisit Mariam’s case. She earned a 21 in TOEFL Speaking and stayed stuck there for nearly a year. After consulting with me, getting some guidance, and practicing with the Speaker Habit, she earned her dream score in less than four months. We all love a happy ending, but analyzing the journey that leads to it can be instructive. How was she practicing? Why did she keep getting a similar score? What did she need to change to finally improve? To answer these questions, we first must understand the hamster. Yes, the hamster.
A hamster is an adorable little rodent kids often keep as pets so their parents don’t have to get a dog. Most hamsters are kept in cages equipped with a wheel, its main source of exercise. The hamster will run, the wheel will spin, and both will go nowhere. Many English language learners practice speaking like hamsters on a wheel, working hard but never improving. Hamster work, I call it. Mariam had spent most of the year neck-deep in it.
“Tell me a bit about how you prepare for the TOEFL Speaking,” I asked during our first meeting.
“I used to practice every day, but not much anymore,” Mariam confessed.
“That’s okay. I just want to know what you know about the test. There is no need for me to repeat anything you have already learned. You mentioned books and courses, so you know the TOEFL tips and tricks already, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“So, after the tips and tricks, how did you prepare for the TOEFL Speaking?”
“I would do one TOEFL Speaking test a day.”
“So you’d practice answering TOEFL Speaking questions one through four every day?”
“Well, almost every day.”
“Okay. Before each practice, did you have any specific goal in mind? Like improving your pronunciation or trying to use new vocabulary?”
“No, not really.”
“Got it. And when you answered the questions, did you record your voice?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And what did you do after you recorded your voice?”
“If there were sample answers, I would look at them.”
“But what about your recordings? Did you listen back to them?”
“Oh, um, no.”
“Why not?”
“Because I hate the sound of my own voice.”
“So, I just want to make sure I understand your process for practicing speaking. You would find a TOEFL Speaking test, answer the four questions without a goal in mind – besides doing your best, of course – and you would record your answers. After you recorded your voice, you didn’t listen back to your answers and just moved on to the next question. Is that right?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” Mariam admitted, her words soaked in guilt.
No goal. No measurement. No reflection. Mariam was doing loads of practice, believing that the sheer volume of work would translate into improvement – textbook hamster work.
Let me be clear: I respect Mariam. She speaks and understands English at a far higher level than I’ll ever reach in Japanese. Her study methods have worked up to this point. She’s thriving in a culture she was not born into and raising a family in a second language. There’s much to admire in Mariam. The problem was never her work ethic, but the assumptions she studied under. She had received bad advice from past teachers, including me.
The Limits of Immersion
Before developing the Speaker Habit, I taught English in the classroom. When we practiced speaking, volunteers would read scripted dialogues and answer short questions. Later, students broke off into groups for discussions where they would often switch between English and their native language. There were about fifteen students in class, and everyone had the opportunity to speak. At the lower levels, most were satisfied with their progress. Advanced classes were different. No matter how many speaking exercises we did, improvement hardly followed. Students desperate to escape the intermediate plateau would slink to my desk after class, asking for advice. My response was almost always the same, “You need more exposure to English. Watch movies, read books, even switch your phone to English. Immerse yourself as much as possible and be patient. Over time, your English will improve.”
Have you ever heard the just immerse yourself in English advice before? How did it make you feel? Probably deeply unsatisfied. I felt the same way every time I said it. I knew plenty of people who had been living in America for years, immersed in English, yet could still hardly string a sentence together. Immersion was missing something, though at the time I didn’t know what.
The idea that immersion leads to fluency is grounded in research. Since the 1980s, experts in SLA have largely agreed that language is best acquired through input, not drills. In other words, the more immersive the experience, the more likely you are to acquire the language. It is best to find a community - family, work, neighborhood - where you’re forced to use English. Progress is much slower if you crack open a textbook and drill words, which is how languages were taught in the 1970s. Stephen Krashen’s work dismantled the behaviorist approach to language learning, proposing instead that acquisition is mostly subconscious and driven by comprehensible input. Now we know that if you want to learn to speak another language, comprehensible input is key.
But immersion becomes far less effective at the intermediate plateau. This is what I have learned after working with thousands of disheartened English learners. To understand why, we must venture beyond SLA research and into the field of Cognitive Science. I know venturing into the field of Cognitive Science sounds super boring, but you picked up this book because you want to know how to finally reach native-level fluency. To uncover the answers, Dear Speaker, we’ll need ideas from outside the traditional classroom.
The Missing Ingredient: Purposeful Practice
K. Anders Ericsson was a psychologist who worked at Florida State University. In 2016, he published the book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise with the modest goal of dispelling the idea that some people are born gifted. His hypothesis was that anyone could achieve greatness through the right kind of practice. In his book, Ericsson beautifully breaks the fantasy of divinely inherited greatness. Yo-Yo Ma wasn’t born with an innate talent for music, but has been studying the cello and practicing relentlessly since the age of three. Tiger Woods’ golf education began in infancy, copying his father’s swing as a toddler, later practicing for hours each and every day throughout childhood, and investing thousands of dollars in private coaching to perfect his game. We tend to shrug at incredible achievement and mutter, Some are just born gifted. No. No, they are not. Think of achievement as an iceberg.* We see the tip of the iceberg and stand awed by it, while beneath the water line lies layer upon layer of unseen work, built up over days, weeks, months, years. What separates experts from novices is not natural talent, according to Ericsson, but engagement in consistent, purposeful practice.
Most practitioners don’t practice purposefully. What I call hamster work, Ericsson refers to as naive practice – something done over and over again in the belief that the practice itself will lead to improvement. Think of a kid on a baseball field who tosses a ball in the air and mindlessly swings over and over and over again, waiting for home runs to come. Or picture an English language learner reading sentences aloud to no one, waiting for native-level fluency to follow. There is no purpose behind their practice, only a belief that time spent automatically leads to improvement. Sadly, most are still running like hamsters on a wheel, under the false belief that energy leads to accomplishment.
Throughout this book, you’ll learn different ways to improve your speaking practice. But one quick fix to get you out of hamster work and into purposeful practice is to record and review your speaking. Great achievers rely on recordings to improve their performance. Tiger Woods does not just go to the driving range and whack away at a few balls. He has goals and targets for each practice. In the past, he worked with coaches who specialized in golf swing mechanics. They filmed his play from multiple angles, pinpointing places where Tiger could improve on his positioning, his timing, and even his grip. All these details – impossible to catch in the moment – were brought into the harsh light of recorded evidence. No longer hidden and impossible to ignore. Yo-Yo Ma also records and analyzes his practice sessions. He has even consulted with sound engineers to fine-tune the authenticity and intent in his play. Both Tiger Woods and Yo-Yo Ma practice deliberately, setting small, specific goals for mindful practice sessions, while relying on recordings to judge whether or not they are improving.
Don’t get me wrong, general practice is necessary. Great practitioners devote mind-bending amounts of time to their craft. Tiger Woods takes more than 1000 swings a day. A day! But the volume is paired with purposeful practice.
Most of you have plenty of exposure to English. The Speaker Habit will be the missing piece of your English practice.
Purposeful practice is uncomfortable, which is why so many people prefer hamster work. For example, one part of the Speaker Habit is to record your voice and listen back to it. Most sane people would rather listen to a steel knife scratch a ceramic dish than their own recorded voice. Our recorded voice sounds alien, much tinier than expected. I used to think I had a deep, masculine voice. Ha. Not after listening to a recording. The reason our recorded voice sounds different is that when we speak, sound is partly conducted through bone. But a recording captures only air conduction – no bone gets in the way. So unfortunately, you may never like the sound of your own voice because it will always sound different from what you hear every day. I still find mine unsettling, but it’s necessary to confront if I want an accurate idea of how I sound to others.
Purposeful Practice Defined
Purposeful practice is rarely taught and hardly ever happens in classrooms. It’s a highly personal experience that requires one-on-one coaching. Even a small group class of five people doesn’t qualify. Purposeful practice is a personal process, necessary for anyone aiming at greatness. You may not be training for the English Olympics, but you must borrow the Olympian mindset to reach your goal of native-level fluency. It is the only way to break out from the intermediate plateau.
Olympians don’t download Duolingo and follow prepackaged lessons prescribed to millions. The Duolingo curriculum wasn’t designed for you and your ambitious goals. So, how does a purposeful practice model differ from popular apps and traditional classrooms? There’s no one-size-fits-all definition of purposeful practice, but there are a few key components.
Purposeful practice includes goals. And you must be specific with the goals you set. I want to fix my pronunciation of the American R sound isn’t specific enough. How would you even know if you achieved it? Do you really think you can ‘fix’ your pronunciation in one practice session? Goals are tricky to get right. We will delve deeper into setting goals and crafting good ones later (Part 2: Chapter 2). Until then, a heuristic to keep in mind is to set a goal you can accomplish – or at least make progress toward – by the end of a practice session. While you can’t fix your R sound in one session, you can check if speech-to-text software recognizes your pronunciation of the tongue twister Russian rock and roll.
Purposeful practice is mindful. Thoughts race in and out of consciousness at an uncontrollable pace. As I write these words, I am thinking about what to make for dinner, how to help my son practice soccer, and which emails to send before bed. Capturing the words you are reading now is a constant struggle against the ceaseless insistence of stray thoughts. It will be the same for you when you start the Speaker Habit. Your mind will want to wander. Thinking about a question, speaking about it for a minute, and then analyzing your own voice will be uncomfortable. You will want to think of more pleasant thoughts, but stay engaged. Come to practice sessions with at least one specific goal in mind. Think of that goal while you speak and use it to guide how you analyze your response. To reach native-level fluency, you must break stubborn habits, which requires complete attention. Remember the big picture to keep you motivated. And don’t worry, we will go over strategies for improving mindfulness later (Part 2: Chapter 2). Until then, another quick tip to stay focused is to make it short.
Purposeful practice is short. There’s a time and place for practicing English in volume. Binging the first season of Game of Thrones or listening to a popular podcaster are fine ways to saturate your brain with English. After all, the entertainment industry inspires many to learn English in the first place. Immersion only turns problematic when intensive practice is neglected. You must couple extensive exposure with intensive focus. You might watch a movie and follow the plot, but if I paused and replayed just 15 seconds of dialogue, and asked you to transcribe what you heard, it would be challenging. In immersive experiences, we gloss over details and focus on the story. But those very details are what separate intermediate from advanced English language learners. Consistent grammar mistakes or awkward vocabulary signal to listeners that there are gaps in your English, so you must address these details. But your intensive practice sessions do not have to be long, which is why it takes just 15 minutes a day to complete the Speaker Habit. If you decide to push it further, go for it, but I never recommend more than an hour of intensive speaking practice per day. Anything more leads to burnout.
Purposeful practice pushes your limits. Most of what you do in life will not require purposeful practice. Take cycling, for example. You probably know how to ride a bike. You learned when you were a kid. When you use a bicycle, the goal is simple: to go from one destination to another. If you are in a hurry, you know how to switch gears and pedal faster. If something breaks, you can visit the local repair shop. Fixes are cheap, so you see little reason to learn how to align a wheel or adjust a brake. Most everyday routines operate the same – you have learned enough to function.
Now imagine you needed the bicycle not just to function, but to survive. You had one too many cocktails the other night and agreed to join a group of extreme cyclists who are planning to traverse nearly 4,000 kilometers of desert across the Australian Outback, from Melbourne to Darwin. This south-to-north Australian crossing includes stretches of over 1,000 kilometers without a single store or water source. Your relationship to the bicycle has radically transformed from pleasant means of transportation to the difference between life and death. Crossing the Outback would require researching the route, setting goals, practicing with those goals in mind, and tracking your progress as you prepare for the grueling days of cycling over 75 kilometers in heat well over 40° Celsius.
Reaching native-level fluency will feel uncomfortable at times. It requires purposeful, deliberate practice on a daily basis. Much of the practice entails confronting weaknesses and pushing past your current level. You have lingered on the intermediate plateau long enough. Now is the time to stop running away from flaws and to turn them into strengths.
Purposeful practice is recorded. Recording the Speaker Habit is simple: press record and speak for about a minute. Almost every student I’ve taught complains at first. Most language learners eagerly avoid their own voice. Know this: hating the sound of your own voice is dreadfully unoriginal. Sorry if that sounds mean, but you must understand that most English language learners never reach native-level fluency because they never learned to let go of their ego. Your recorded voice contains the critical data you need to reach native-level fluency. If more students were taught to record and analyze their voices in school, this book wouldn’t be necessary. The words you read are based on the power of purposeful practice through analysis of recorded performance. Remember, your goal is simple: to be the best English speaker you can be. To do this, you must borrow from masters in other domains and record your practice. It’s not optional, it’s mandatory.
Purposeful practice is analyzed. When I meet a student for the first time, the most common tragedy is that they’ve never recorded their voice. When I meet a student for the second time, it’s never listening to their voice. I’ve heard the mantra I can’t stand the sound of my own voice a nauseating number of times. When I work with a student, they must agree to record and self-assess. If they won’t, we can’t work together. There’s no other path to improvement in spoken fluency. You must record and analyze your voice. If you don’t, native-level fluency isn’t in your future. Period.
Purposeful practice is measured. Speaking comes and goes. We have a conversation, ask and answer a couple of questions, and move on. When thinking back on past conversations, you may remember a mistake or a memorable phrase, but that’s about it. You must find ways to measure your speech. You may hear encouraging words from friends like, “Your English is getting better,” but if you ask them to elaborate, they’d shrug and say, “I don’t know, it just sounds better.” The lack of metrics is one of the most glaring problems with current speaking activities in the language learning classroom. Besides a number on a piece of paper and a few words from a teacher, how do you really know your speaking is getting better? Dieters can step on a scale and measure their weight, businesses can look at the books and calculate profit, but what can the language learner do to measure speaking? And how do you track progress over time to ensure you’re improving? We’ll dig into this in detail later, with metrics like word count, lexical complexity, and more in Part 2, Chapter 4.
Speaking Practice Problems
Think back to Mariam, my TOEFL student who failed the test nine times. When pressed on her speaking habit, she admitted the following:
“So, I just want to make sure I understand your process for practicing speaking. You would find a TOEFL Speaking test, answer the four questions without a goal in mind – besides doing your best, of course – and you would record your answers. After you recorded your voice, you didn’t listen back to your answers and just moved on to the next question. Is that right?” (p. 16)
Through the lens of purposeful practice, the cause of Mariam’s failure becomes painfully obvious. She was bound to fail – practicing without goals, without measurement, without tracking. Consider the millions of English language learners like Mariam, stuck on the intermediate plateau, knee-deep in hamster work, who see no path forward. A tragic waste of potential.
You might be one of them, Dear Speaker.
Know that the problem isn’t you, but the way you practice. This point is critical: the problem isn’t you, but the way you practice. With purposeful practice, improvement isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable. Anyone can break past their current limits and push forward, a truth echoed by Anders Ericsson in Peak,
Whenever you're trying to improve at something, you will run into such obstacles – points at which it seems impossible to progress, or at least where you have no idea what you should do in order to improve. This is natural. What is not natural is a true dead-stop obstacle, one that is impossible to get around, over, or through. In all of my years of research, I have found it is surprisingly rare to get clear evidence in any field that a person has reached some immutable limit on performance. Instead, I’ve found that people more often just give up and stop trying to improve. (p. 21)
There is no limit to your potential, Dear Speaker. You haven’t hit an impossible wall. There’s no genetic gift bestowed on others and missing in your makeup. This is one of the most inspiring lessons from Ericsson’s Peak, which is why I chose it as the epigraph to this very book. When you hit a wall, it isn’t a signal to stop, but a call to explore, test, and discover ways around it. Investigate your current speaking habits and you’ll uncover the source of your stagnation.
Popular approaches to practicing speaking often fail to follow the purposeful practice model we aim to emulate through the Speaker Habit. Think about how you currently practice speaking. Does it contain any of these five common problems for intermediate language learners?
Problem #1: Speaking is hard to measure.
Speaking practice starts at an immensely practical level. You learn to introduce yourself and speak about the past. You learn how to ask questions and change verb tenses. Eventually, you move beyond the classroom and into the real world, ordering at restaurants, giving directions to taxi drivers, and checking into hotels. Progress comes naturally. Chances to use the language abound. Those early successes inspire you to learn more, pushing you toward esoteric vocabulary that’s impractical for everyday conversation. As your speech grows more complex, you sense mistakes – mistakes friends and family don’t have the heart to correct. Teachers may say, ‘Your English is improving,’ but you’re not so sure. At this point, you need clear and meaningful speaking activities with metrics on your grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, prosody, and intonation. Vague words of encouragement from others will not do.
Problem #2: Speaking is hard to self-assess.
Words come and go. In real conversation, you don’t have time to stop and check if you correctly conjugated the verb or used the right article. You’re just trying to have a conversation – to understand and be understood. The message matters most. So how can you capture and assess your speech in that context?
Even if you’ve recorded your voice before, you’ve probably struggled with self-assessment. After you record and listen back, what then? You’re not a teacher. How do you know if you’re speaking too fast or too slow? If your pronunciation is correct or incorrect? And since your recorded voice sounds different to you than to others, how can you tell whether you have the right stress and intonation? One of the main goals of this book is to provide you with the tools to self-assess. We’ll cover this in great detail in Part 2, Chapter 4.
Problem #3: It is hard to use what you have learned.
Imagine studying law and coming across the word judicial. You like the word and decide to try it out at a local diner. The waitress approaches the table and asks, “Are you ready to order?” You smile and reply, “Sorry, I need another minute. I’m trying to be more judicial in my decisions.” A kind waitress would nod and walk away confused; an impolite waitress would ask if you recently had a concussion. You see, advanced vocabulary is often impractical in everyday life.
Another example. You hire a teacher to help you reach native-level fluency. She says that your subjects and verbs often don’t agree, and you need to work on this issue. But how do you practice? Are you going to stop mid-conversation to think about proper verb agreement? Prioritizing correctness over the message would turn you into a terrible conversation partner.
What you need is a space to work on your weaknesses and push your fluency further. A space where you can record, analyze, and measure your speech. Here we can borrow an idea from the coding world: the sandbox. Coders never inject fresh code on a live site. It’s too dangerous. New code is unpredictable. There’s no way to know how it will perform within an existing site architecture. You don’t want your website to crash, but you still need to update it. That’s why a safe space for experimentation is required. A coding sandbox is an isolated environment, separate from the website, where coders can work worry-free. Even if it breaks, live users never notice. Only after the code is thoroughly tested will it be added to the live site.
Think of the Speaker Habit as your English sandbox. This is not a class with test scores. This is not an office with critical colleagues. The Speaker Habit happens in a private space, with you alone, speaking without fear of repercussions, readying yourself for the real world.
Problem #4: It is hard to see progress.
Learning a language is simpler in school. The curriculum is set. You enter Beginner English as a first-year high school student and, if you pass, you move on to Intermediate English the next year, followed by Advanced English in your final year. You might not feel like an advanced English speaker, but you’ve met the requirements to move up the ladder. And it feels good. You even get to use some English when you travel abroad or when you watch an American movie. Studying English makes sense – it’s practical and improving – so you continue.
After high school, practice gets complicated. You download apps, hire tutors, and read short stories in English, but something changes. Without test scores and teacher nods, you feel stuck. Progress floats around, teasing out a new random word or phrase, but your English practice now lacks a narrative of progress. You decide to find a set curriculum, like the one you had in high school, and purchase a program guaranteed to deliver English fluency: 90 Days to Kick Ass English. The results are, inevitably, disappointing.
What’s missing from the guided curricula in school and online? They neglect to teach you, the language learner, how to measure and assess your own speaking. Every dieter knows how to step on a scale. Every runner knows how to start a stopwatch. How about you? What concrete metrics do you use to know whether or not you are progressing? You have an intuitive understanding of what good English sounds like, but when you practice, you have no tools to measure it. It’s not nearly as neat as tracking pounds or setting time splits. In Part 2, Chapter 4, we’ll talk about how to measure your speaking so progress is pulled out of the dark and shoved into the light of awareness.
Problem #5: It is hard to find an effective speaking habit.
Smart language learners who can afford a private tutor will hire one. They know private and direct instruction leads to far better results than a classroom of twenty students fighting for the attention of a single teacher. However, hiring a private instructor is far from a foolproof plan. Most private classes follow the same trajectory: you hire a teacher and agree to meet for an hour every day, focusing on having conversations that provide ample opportunity to speak in a comfortable environment. After six months, you both feel a lack of progress and agree to stop. You try again, thinking the problem was the instructor, but you still feel very much like a hamster, stuck on the same damn wheel.
Creating a lasting habit that actually improves performance is more nuanced than you’d expect. It’s not as simple as I want to learn English, so I will study every day until it happens. Anyone who has attempted to adopt a healthy but demanding habit, like regular exercise, knows that desire alone is not enough. Long-term commitment is often achieved by individuals who understand how habits form. Believe it or not, habit formation is a growing field of neuroscience. You can even hire a habit nerd* to tweak your lifestyle and build systems that keep you on track. The science of habit-building extends beyond the personal and into the business world, with companies like Duolingo investing heavily in understanding habit formation. Think about it. Duolingo’s entire business is based on keeping users engaged. It’s no accident that one of the best-selling nonfiction books of the last decade is James Clear’s Atomic Habits. Getting users hooked can be the difference between billions and bankruptcy.
In Part 3, Chapter 3, after we have gone over the Speaker Habit, we’ll discuss how habits form, and what you can do to build a speaking habit that lasts until you reach native-level fluency. But first, we still haven’t defined the Speaker Habit. Let’s finally learn what this thing is that I keep ranting about. Let’s learn the Speaker Habit.
