I want to begin by thanking James and Emiy for the time they took for the corrections of my previous post, because I am pretty sure that the comment I left them got hidden between all the other corrections that were made.

As I said yesterday, this post is going to be about the paper that I have just read: “The Four Strands” by Paul Nation, published in 2007. In his article, Nation (2007) starts by stating:

the more time you spend doing something, the better you are likely to be at doing it.

Which is a conclusion that I am certain everyone here agrees. After that, the author establishes that learning a foreign language is a process that, according to his experience, should be focussed on four strands:

*Meaning-focused input.

*Meaning-focused output

*Language-focused learning

*Fluency development.

Ideally, you are supposed to spend the same quantity of hours in each one of them in order to enhance your general abilities in that language you want to be fluent in, but this does not apply in some scenarios (I will explain it later).

1. Meaning-focused input

This one involves learning by “listening and reading using language receptively” (Nation, 2007). According to the author, the person should get all his/her attention on accumulating knowledge and understanding; it suggests activities like “extensive reading, shared reading, listening to stories, watching TV or films, and being a listener in a conversation” as good options that may (🧐) help. Besides that, it is stated that certain conditions should exist:

The content that is being listened/read must contain familiar vocabulary.

The learners have to be interested.

A maximum of 5% of the total words can be unknown, where 2% is the ideal percentage recommended by the literature (Hu & Nation, 2000) in order to guess through context the meaning of words.

Suffice content is used.

It is advised that perhaps the most important condition is the last one, since few meetings with a certain word cannot guarantee a proper acquisition.

2. Meaning-focused output.

This strand covers speaking and writing and encloses activities like “talking in conversations, giving a speech or lecture, writing a letter, writing a note to someone, keeping a diary , telling a story and telling someone how to do something” (Nation, 2007). All the conditions that were enumerated in the first strand apply here too.

3. Language-focused learning.

Here every activity involved in language learning is incorporated: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Typical dynamics are: “pronunciation practice, using substitution tables and drills, learning vocabulary from word cards, intensive reading, translation, memorising dialogues and getting feedback about writing ” (Nation, 2007). Again, the same conditions apply.

4. Fluency development.

The purpose of this strand is to guarantee a useful way to assimilate everything you already know. Here, activities as “speed reading, skimming and scanning, repeated reading, 4/3/2, repeated retelling, ten-minute writing and listening to easy stories” are proposed (Nation, 2007). As it can be seen, this one has the most differences when compared to the other ones and just one more condition is suggested: encouragement to perform whatever you are doing as fast as possible.

As I mentioned in the beginning, the statement that each activity should have the same quantity of time is not universal. Nation (2007) alleges that perhaps it may be better if fluency development takes a greater proportion of the time during the last stages of language learning (higher proficiencies) and, on the contrary, language-focused learning prevails as the most important when your proficiency is not that good.

I wanted to end this post by telling you that those words that I underlined are activities that, according to this paper, can definitely enhance your skills in the foreign language you are currently studying or want to polish a little bit and you can develop here in this wonderful new platform: Journaly.

REFERENCES

Hu, M., & Nation, I. S. P. (2000). Vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13, 403–430.

Nation, Paul. "The four strands." International Journal of Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching 1.1 (2007): 2-13.