Can writing improve your speaking and grammar?

I’ve found that writing is actually a really valuable method to better my language skills. Not just as a method of bettering my writing but of bettering my speaking and possibly more. For a long time I was a believer in very ‘skill specific’ practice. If you want to better your speaking then speak! Writing is for those people who will need it professionally or students as a part of a course where writing is an unavoidable graded component. However recently I’ve come to realize that writing offers a number of advantages and hidden benefits to your overall language ability.

Now I’m a learner of Mandarin, but what I’m not talking about here is the ability to hand write characters. Although I do believe that being able to hand write characters gives you an additional psychological depth of processing of the physical form of characters that simple reading and flash card use cannot give you. I have always found that being able to write a character by hand (from memory) will guarantee you to be able to recognize the character on sight. However, I’m not convinced that the time spent maintaining your ability to write characters from memory is well spent. This is unless you have a need to write characters by hand, for your job or university course etc. Although writing by hand does give some gains to your character recognition, I don’t believe the time spent doing this couldn’t be better spent on reading more and gaining recognition ability that way.

What I’m talking about is the greater depth of understanding of any language that putting your thoughts into writing brings. This greater depth of understanding comes from two sources, but both relate to the extra cognitive processing time that the written word allows. Firstly, putting any thought into writing, whether in your first or your second language, forces you to think about what you are trying to express in a deeper manner. When speaking if you constantly back track and revise what you have said previously, whether to keep your argument cohesive or to correct mistakes in grammar or vocabulary usage, you will be considered a poor speaker and someone who has no conviction in what he or she says. However if you write something in any kind of medium, people generally expect a coherent (even if not agreeable) argument as well as decent grammatical and lexical finesse with the language. Such finesse at the very least demands a writer who considers their word and phrasing choice, in more than in a passing manner, and rewrites parts of the ‘article’ in order to fit the logical development of the whole.

This kind of careful consideration and planning allows the writer a deeper level of cognitive processing of the structures and lexis involved than only speaking can do. Furthermore, I myself as an English teacher find it difficult to correct the spoken English of my students except in the case of the most glaring grammatical and lexical errors. Although usually, if carefully analyzed, mistakes abound in every single sentence, I find it difficult to consider the grammatical or lexical appropriateness made by a speaker while I am also trying to understand my conversational partner’s message and respond with my own message. This extra cognitive burden detracts from my ability to analyze my conversational partner’s language to a sufficient degree. However, if I read a non-native English speaker’s written work, I am usually able to detect incorrect grammar or word choice far more easily. This isn’t because the written work is of a lesser standard than a student’s spoken ability, in fact usually the opposite. But because written work allows the reader a lot of extra processing time that can be used to consider grammatical and lexical choices in terms of appropriateness and cohesiveness with the whole.

Basically you get more detailed feedback on your written work than you would do speaking. If someone corrects your work then you can come to a deeper understanding of the grammatical structures and nuanced meaning of the vocabulary you have used that simple speaking cannot afford.

I have found that simply understanding your poor choice of words or structures is not usually enough. But that in order to truly absorb the correction you should attempt to memorize your article after it has been thoroughly corrected. If you are at the stage where your corrected output can serve as input then this input will have extra saliency that simple input written by others will not have. Opinions and ideas originating from your own mind will always be more personally relevant, and thus more memorable, than the thoughts of others.

So don’t just write because you want to improve your writing, no matter who you are, you should make writing a part of your language learning program. My personal recommendation is that you write in a way that allows you to recycle the input you use in your learning. For example, at the moment I’m using a text book called Chinese Master 5. When I finish learning the dialogue, through back and forth translation, shadowing the audio and some memorizing techniques, I will then try to create some discussion questions, sticking closely to the theme of the material or at least a question that will allow me to use a lot of the vocabulary and structures. The answers don’t have to be overly long, just a paragraph or so. At the moment I seem to be producing roughly a page of writing for every page of text book dialogue I learn, although this certainly isn't a rule, just a rough guide to how much I do.

After I have written my answers I usually pass it on to my language exchange partner and he will go through and correct all the errors that he sees. I usually like to get real time feedback over Skype as my partner is correcting my language. This is so that as he makes corrections I can ask for clarification about the nuances of the language. Often he will make corrections and I can then ask, what was wrong with what I wrote? Often I’m told that I have used a word incorrectly or that my meaning is unclear and I can get a lengthy grammatical explanation from my partner. Once my article has been thoroughly corrected I treat it as another form of input. I rehearse the article paying particular attention to the corrections so that if someone asked me the question orally I could give them the corrected written answer off of the top of my head. I find this way helps me to really take the corrections on board and to notice the subtleties inherent in vocabulary and grammar choice.

So in short, read, write about what you read, get a native speaker to correct it while you ask a lot about the nuances of the language, finally try to read and revise your corrected writing so that the correct language sinks in. Make this a usual part of your routine and you are sure to notice your accuracy and ability to express deeper thoughts in your speaking increase. 

On Extensive Input

Following after the fashions of some of the well-known language learning blogs and the theories of Stephen Krashen I became a devotee of extensive comprehensible input. what is extensive comprehensible input?Essentially the theory goes that we learn languages by exposing ourselves to messages in that language that are understandable. Enough exposure to comprehensible input (messages) and the brain will naturally acquire the language. By extensive it is meant that you expose yourself to large quantities of language but without repeating or analyzing the language too much. The theory is that by seeing so much input overtime you will see many words and phrases repeated in different contexts that allow you to acquire the language without intentionally learning it. Just read things that interest you and listen to content (radio, TV, music, movies) constantly and eventually your vocabulary and understanding of the language will grow. This is somewhat similar to the way we learn our first language. As a native speaker of English I have (as a rough estimate) a vocabulary of about 15,000-20,000 words. I learned most of these words not with my head buried in a dictionary or with a teacher demonstrating words to me and then making me repeat them until they stuck, but by encountering these words in the environment as they were relevant, such as when the people around me spoke them, when I heard them on television or when I read them in a book as I got older.

This was an enticing theory initially, as it meant I could read things that interested me in Chinese or veg out on the couch watching TV for hours and it would improve my language skills as a result. Now this is true to an extent but I’m afraid that if you were to make extensive input the entirety of your study method as I did your language growth will stall in some areas.

For example, I read quite a few novels in Chinese as a part of my method at one point in time. As a result of this I think I greatly improved my reading ability and reading became easier as time went on. Although my reading ability is to an extent very genre specific, I’m much better at reading novels than things like newspapers or even complicated Facebook status updates. I found that although I was exposing myself to huge amounts of Chinese structures and vocabulary, I was very rarely able to turn this into output. The words that I learnt through reading would be able to be recalled the next time I saw them in a novel; however they would not necessarily be available for conversation when I needed them. I had a good passive recognition of vocabulary but often found myself unable to find the words I needed when speaking. I also found that learning new vocabulary through extensive reading sounds good in theory but doesn't really work out that way. Firstly, in order to get to the point where you can guess words from context, so that you can understand most of the input without needing a dictionary you need to know 95% of the other words in the text. As those in the language acquisition game know, once you get to the final 5% those final words become less and less common, to the point where many new words I read in novels when I initially started reading I have yet to see again, dozens of novels and over a year later.

The passing interaction you have with new vocabulary in this method isn't enough to learn them and turn them into words you can use in your everyday speech. So I find that if you want to improve your output you need to be much more active in acquiring new vocabulary with regards to intentional review and practice. However extensive input does have a good influence on strengthening the structures and vocabulary that you have already learned. It’s immensely beneficial to see vocabulary and sentence patterns that you already understand in different contexts; it broadens and deepens your understanding of them. However I find that it can be difficult to rely on extensive input for your initial learning of these words, especially if you want to convert your learning into output and active vocabulary.

Recently I've been much more focused on intensive input followed by deliberate practice and output through writing and speaking. I find that this is helping me convert my input into output and making what I’m learning a part of my everyday language that extensive novel reading and TV watching did not. 

So you can supplement your learning with some extensive listening and reading practice, it's an enjoyable and  relatively relaxed way to study that will help you to reinforce what you already know, but I don’t recommend making it the backbone of your study regime as it might not improve your ability to speak as much as you hope.