to improve your English speaking?

(upbeat music)

Yo, yo, yo, I'm Julian Northbrook from doingenglish.com

here to help you the intermediate

to advanced English learner

master the English language

with less stress, less hassle and fewer

of those God damn headaches.

So, good question.

Can watching films and I guess TV as well

be a good way to improve your English speaking?

Now, I've got a short answer to this

and a slightly longer answer.

The short answer is really honestly,

just sitting back and passively watching the telly,

whether it be films or TV or indeed really any kind

of passive exposure to English

as an intermediate to advanced English learner

isn't gonna be particularly helpful

for your productive English skills,

that is your speaking.

Now, you might improve your comprehension a little bit

although the higher your level already is,

the less of that you'll do as well

simply because when you reach the intermediate stage

and the advanced stage,

you already know a lot of English,

you understand enough English

that you can watch and understand.

I mean, you're watching a video in English now

and I assume understanding.

Well, there are gonna be things

in the language

that you're being exposed to

that you don't know

but your brain does a pretty damn good job

of just filling in the gaps

with extra information.

It sees my facial expressions,

my wild, over-the-top gestures

and it fills in the gaps,

so even if you don't know half of the English

that I'm using,

well, it doesn't really matter

because your brain fills it all in

and again, you might know all the words

that you need as well,

you just don't really know

how to combine those words yourself.

Well, you are unlikely to simply just notice all of that

through passive listening.

Simply put, what you did as a beginner,

when you're a beginner,

everything was totally new,

so you notice a lot more

in the language stream coming at you

out of the film, out of the TV, whatever it is

and you're more likely to just pick stuff up

but what you did as a beginner

and what you need to do as an intermediate

to advanced English learner, completely different.

This of course is not to say

that films and TV can't be a good source of input,

a good source of language to study actively,

that is a good material to use.

On the contrary, films can be a great material

to use and to study to learn the language

that you need, put it in your head

so you can then practise it

and automate that.

Is it the most effective kind of material

that you can find?

Are films and TV as effective

as materials designed for the intermediate

to advanced English learner?

No, definitely not.

And check this video for a detailed discussion

on that where I compare real, authentic materials

i.e. films and TV

with materials that have been designed

and optimised for people just like you,

the language learner.

Certainly in terms of time and effectiveness,

materials designed for people just like you

as long as they're designed well

are gonna be much, much better

than films or TV which are not optimised at all

and are really designed for consumption

by well, native speakers.

Again, watch this video for a detailed discussion on that.

Now, for the slightly longer answer.

And without wishing to sound

like I'm completely contradicting myself here,

watching films and TV can be an excellent way

to improve your English speaking.

Yes, yes, yes, I know,

it sounds like I just told you

two completely different opposite things.

But what we are talking about here

is not the language or the learning

or the input of the language

that you need.

No, we're talking about something else

that you need for your English speaking.

The K of what I call the LKC triangle.

This idea that you need three things

to speak English really, really well.

You need the language, of course,

if you don't have the phrases and the expressions,

the chunks of language that you need

to express the things that you want to communicate,

you're not gonna get very far

but that in and of itself is not enough.

You also need the K of the LKC triangle

and this is really what we're gonna be talking about

in this video.

Knowledge, background knowledge

of the things you want to talk about.

Content, interesting stuff to talk about.

If you've got nothing to say,

well, having the words and expressions

that you need aren't gonna help you

because you've still got nothing interesting to say.

Many people are concerned because they sound boring

when they speak English and yes, the language part

is an important part of that,

there are interesting ways to construct

the sentences and the phrases and the expressions

that you're using,

that is important,

but it's not gonna save you

if you are boring, if you've got nothing to talk about.

You also need one more thing,

the C of the LKC triangle.

That is, culture.

And that is a topic for another day

but films and TV can be an excellent source

of interesting conversation topics

and yes, I know this might sound obvious

but bear with me

'cause we're gonna go a little deeper into this.

Let me use my business,

Doing English as an example here.

Several years ago when I first decided

to quit my job and make Doing English my full-time job

and become a freelancer,

that was several years ago now,

Doing English or rather I should say my company,

Northbrook Limited is now a full-blown company,

a corporation with employees,

staff, a production team

and things are a little bit different now

but several years ago

it was just me.

Completely by myself

sitting here while in this same

little home office working away

at my computer.

Years and years and years of corporate conditioning,

working for other people,

working for bosses who frankly,

didn't have a clue what they were doing

in various places, you know what it's like being employed

in a company

had conditioned me to believe

that I had to be super productive all the time

and productivity meant work, work, work, work, work, work,

so I'd always be there at my computer

typing away, doing this,

doing that and generally making myself quite, quite tired.

What I never did though because I believed this

was not something that should be a part

of the productive working day

was to just sit down and watch TV.

Watch films.

I mean, that's something that you do

in your leisure time, right?

Wrong, you see, I now know

that watching films is actually one

of the most productive things that I can do

on the job.

My most productive time

in the office working is actually not spent writing

or filming videos

or planning the EES lessons or whatever it is

that I'm doing that is more traditional work

but is actually spent sitting

on my sofa which you can't see

'cause it's below the camera

watching a film.

I make a habit of watching at least three films a week.

At one time, I made a habit of watching a film

every single day.

When I can do that, I still like to do it

but recently, I've gotta be honest,

despite it being my most productive thing

that I can do and I've had to prioritise other things

like my research

and running kids back and forth to basketball practise

and all that stuff in the evenings.

You know what it's like.

Business, work, parents,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Now, the point is and the reason I'm telling you this

and the reason that watching films is so productive

for me is because I am in the business

of teaching content essentially.

Whether it's one of these YouTube videos,

one of my daily emails,

one of the Extraordinary English Speakers' lessons,

one of my books, one of the other courses

that I make, Two Steps Speaking, for example,

I am in the business of taking

the core, key concepts

that you need to learn and understand

and delivering that to you

in a way that is interesting

because let's face it,

we learn better when we are interested,

when we're enjoying something,

when we're entertained, when we're having fun

but also, easy and concise to understand

and what is one of the best ways to explain

and deliver difficult abstract concepts?

And let's face it,

a lot of the things that I teach

are quite difficult, abstract concepts.

Well, story is one of the best ways to do that.

Interesting stories, anecdotes, metaphors, examples.

Take this month's issue of the EES Gazette, for example.

I don't have one here to show you

'cause it's at the printers and it hasn't come yet

but it's all about mindset,

the importance of mindset

and of losing a lot of the mental baggage

that we all get stuck with.

We pick up all this crap

and we dump it in our brains

and it holds us back.

Negative thoughts, opinions,

attitudes, false beliefs.

Well, at some point we've gotta throw

all of that away

and in this month's issue of the EES Gazette

I go through that process

but it's emotionally very, very difficult

and it's quite abstract

and it's quite hard stuff.

So, what did I do?

I took a scene from the film, The Martian,

brilliant film by the way,

and used that as a metaphor to explain the whole thing.

Result, we've got this very difficult,

emotionally hard, abstract concept explained

in a very concrete, very easy-to-understand

and entertaining way.

In my book, Master English Fast,

I use a scene from the film Captain America, Civil War

to explain how to learn and improve your grammar

as an intermediate to advanced English learner.

In one of my Kindle books,

Fearless Fluency, I use a scene

from Nancy Meyers' film, The Intern

to explain the concept of inner confidence,

something that is again,