Okay, welcome to Effortless English.

Okay, welcome to Effortless English.

Today's podcast is titled,

Meditation for Language Learning.

Let's get started.

We have a strong tendency as both language teachers and language

learners to focus on quantity. We stress about test score numbers. We stress about the number of words we know. We stress about the number of hours we

study each day. There's no doubt that quantity is important. To learn a

language well you have to put in a lot of hours. You need

hundreds, thousands of hours of listening. You need hundreds and thousands of hours of reading. You've got to listen to and read a lot of different material. But quantity is only half

the story. For all study hours are not equal. I see this a lot in my class. Many students do

to come to class each day. They attend four hours a day, four days a week, for a total of 16 hours.

But some learn a lot faster than others.

I found that the speed of their learning has less to do with natural talent

and more to do with the quality of their class time.

In other words, some students concentrate and participate during the entire four hours, while others barely pay attention. the latter group text message on their cell phones, stare out the window, chat with each

other in their native language, daydream, and do anything else but focus on the English

material we are working on. All the students in my class are getting the same quantity

of English hours, but some are getting much higher quality, in other words, much more efficiency

because they have the ability to focus and concentrate.

While many of the bad students are not motivated, some are.

What they lack is not so much the desire to learn English as the ability to focus for an extended period of time.

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