Hi, I'm Georgiana, your English teacher.

Thanks for joining me for a new episode of the Speak English Now podcast.

If you want to help, please share the podcast on social media.

That would mean a lot. Thanks.

Before we start, visit my website, speakEnglishpodcast.com, and subscribe to my free mini-course. Okay, let's start. As a language student, the main activities to learn a new language are reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

This is what we naturally do in our mother tongue.

One key aspect to keep in mind is that we can categorize these activities as input and output.

As you may guess, listening and reading are input activities. And writing and speaking are output

activities. In other words, if you're listening or reading, you're being exposed to the language, and when

you're writing and speaking, you are producing the language. In other words, when you're listening

or reading, you're being exposed to the language, and when you're writing and speaking,

you are producing the language.

The traditional approach tells you that the more you write and speak, the better.

That's why language schools insist on writing a lot and practicing your speaking with other

students, sometimes in groups. It seems reasonable,

but it's not effective. There's a lot of research that points out the contrary. Basically,

to develop your English, you need to do input activities most of the time. Why is that? Because you can't

produce the language if you haven't previously learned it. And the only way to learn it is through

comprehensible input. As simple as that. But then, is speaking and writing a waste of time? No, I didn't say that.

When you speak in a conversation, you can see what areas of the language you need to improve.

Then, when you listen again, you will naturally pay more attention to those areas.

For example, if you're in a conversation and you have to describe something in the past tense,

...