SCALES

I chose “scales” as the title for this post for a very simple reason. Anybody that has ever learnt to play a musical instrument properly knows how necessary it is to practice scales. It’s no secret that the workout regimen of ballet dancers involves performing repetitive movements for several hours a day. For obvious reasons the same can be said about martial arts practitioners. Yes. In order to integrate automatic moves one must (of necessity) resort to good old repetition. Now… I don’t know if excellence in any field requires 10,000 hours as Malcolm Gladwell suggests in his famous book Outliers but there is no denying that the key to success lies in the intensive practice of specific tasks: in the case of a guitarist or a pianist scales.

In the case of language instruction repetition has a name: drilling. It fell from grace when the "communicative language approach" took the world by storm in the 1970s. As I have often pointed out, this method has recently been called into question. I personally believe that it's been totally and completely debunked but let's not get into that. My point is that, regardless of its bad reputation, repetition is effective. That's how children learn to speak, by the way... So I decided to blog about this. I didn't know how, though.

I thought of the old wax-on-wax-off scene from the 80s classic Karate Kid but I believe some of you may consider it to be an archaeological relic so I decided to go in a different direction...

Below you can find a relatively recent BBC clip (uploaded in 2017) which offers some tips to English teachers willing to use drilling techniques. As you will see, the hosts have this infectious happy-go-lucky attitude that is so common among primary school teachers but don't panic their advice is sound and can be extremely useful for you. Notice how they casually mention the concept of “connected speech”, which is the holy grail of a genuine advanced speaker. Okay. I recommend that you try and repeat simple sentences, stock phrases or lexical chunks until they simply flow out of you. You can start with I can’t imagine what it must be like. Repeat it over and over again. Eventually you won’t know even what you’re saying. It works. Trust me.