Another major problem why people cannot start speaking English straightaway is a lack of confidence. There are several reasons for that.
The main reason is people laugh at mistakes. However small or insignificant, people tend to laugh at them. This makes the speaker feel small. The reason people laugh could be aplenty. We are not commenting on this habit of the people. But this is one of the reasons – nay, the main reason.
But there are other reasons as well.
The biggest of them is the way English is taught. People focus on grammar. Most of the English schools – the institutes train people in spoken English – start and end with teaching grammar. And, due to the low input costs, they end up charging absurdly low fees. Students fall prey to this trick and join them, only to realise their mistakes – often after a long time mostly 6 – 8 months. It is very essential that such nefarious gangs ought to be exposed by the students themselves.
However, we will focus on the reason why people cannot speak English confidently.
Let’s look at an extremely neglected fact:
When you learn a language for communication, you need to learn 3 things:
Albert Mehrabian discovered that an overwhelming 55% of our communication is Body Language, 38% is Voice Quality (pronunciation, &c), and just 7% is verbal, ie, grammar.
While Mehrabian’s statistics have been debated endlessly, the fact remains that the figures show the relative importance of the three components of the spoken word – in any language – that is, body language almost 8 times as important as grammar, and voice quality is over 5 ½ times.
So, isn’t it laughable to learn just 7% and demand that we know English perfectly well?
Let’s look at three skills briefly – why we need to focus on them to learn how to speak English fluently.