To master the foreign language we need, we have to understand clearly what exactly you want to learn and what for. How is the language different from speech? What is the principal difference in teaching methods? How do the methods of CLP Center allow to acquire speech habits?
Language and speech are related notions, but they are not identical. Speech is a practical means of communication, the activity of communication. Language is a complicated multi-level system of knowledge that includes the structure of speech. Speech is the language in action. There are different kinds of speech: sound speech, gestures, oral and written speech, inner and outer speech. The modern speech with the help of which we communicate with people around us every day, is mostly oral, sound and outer. This is speech-conversation in the conditions of direct contact with the surrounding people, colloquial speech. The written speech, in its turn, is not just translation of oral speech into written characters, it has a different composition and is more a language than speech. The oral colloquial speech is situational and it serves for communication with the interlocutor in the conditions of direct contact and mostly to communicate something related to things immediately experienced. Written speech is contextual, it requires special thought, planning, consciousness, grammatical skills, that is, structure.
Thus it is correct to speak about “knowledge” of the language and speech “skills”. Speech is a skill, like walking or running, the skill which each of us acquires perfectly in an early childhood. Skills are components of conscious activity, performed automatically as a result of exercising or training. Automatic skill use means that separate components of conscious actions are performed without conscious control. We speak a native language and think only about the meaning of our speech, not its structure. Very complicated Russian grammar is not a problem for its native speaker. The speech of both a child and an adult is as correct as it is accepted in their surrounding as the speech is a social and cultural product.
As a result, a student has no difficulties with pronunciation and correct use of words, that is, literacy, in the future. The passive block creates an artificial language environment, adapted to the attendee’s native language and his psychological (informational) peculiarities. Unlike natural language environment, it is not a stress factor (by the way, also as a result of aggressive, stressful influence of a strange language environment, some people fail to master a foreign language while living in the country where it is spoken). Skill and active blocks require student’s conscious work and allow to form articulation, develop organs of speech, activate vocabulary.
About once a month, each attendee has an interview with the teacher. This interview includes testing of acquired knowledge and the consultation which helps to correct the individual program of learning. The students of CLP Center can attend groups of communication in a foreign language. Individual classes are also possible to acquire special skills (for example, keeping documentation in a foreign language).
Learning a foreign language should go from skill to knowledge: first acquire the speech, then its structure. In a number of cases, the two processes can go side by side, but it is only in some exceptional and individual cases that we should go from knowledge to skill. By the way, Europe has recently come to understand it: development of ties within the Community requires speaking several foreign languages. The audio-lingual theory of skills becomes popular again.