Learn from your mistakes. Don't run away from them.

In the community of practice, you will find the exercises to achieve native-like fluency in English and acquire better learning strategies.

You will fail. You will make mistakes. So what?

You will also receive feedback on all your work and find the best practice routine for yourself. If there's no practice routine, there is no consistent improvement.

"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently". Henry Ford.


Become a member and practice with me: https://community.nataliatokar.me/c/how-things-work-here/how-to-use-the-community-and-where-to-begin

Moving toward mastery is more about UNlearning the old patters, and not so much about LEARNING more new words


"A person who is learning to type by hunting and pecking on a keyboard further entrenches that method every time they use it. It won’t spontaneously evolve into touch typing, regardless of how much they practice. Similarly, pronunciation often “fossilizes” in language learning, likely because a “good enough” articulation of the language’s phonemes becomes ingrained through repetitive practice and becomes automatic. This makes you more fluent, but it means shaking off a bad accent is even harder than learning new words! In this account of the intermediate plateau, our lack of progress is due to getting ever-more proficient in mediocre methods. Progress requires interrupting this natural process, fine-tuning our performance, and then rebuilding automaticity on the parts...Essentially, we’re not trying to add to our knowledge so much as weed inefficiencies from our well-learned routines." Read the full article here https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2023/01/03/intermediate-plateau/

IN the street or ON the street? See the full post with examples and the links here https://community.nataliatokar.me/c/dailydose/on-the-street-or-in-the-street

Do this exercise with me to practice CLARITY

https://youtu.be/9kJOV3IpLEg

WHAT IS GOOD FEEDBACK AND WHY DO YOU NEED IT?

I'll be sending an email with a video example of what feedback can look like to help students learn better. It's the feedback that I gave to one of the students on her reading.

How do you SEE what you read? And what is sentenсe stress? I'm going to show you how I work with texts in this video.

I'll send it only to my email subscribers. It's not for social media. If you don't receive my emails, subscribe here https://nataliatokar.me/sign-up

The email will be sent tonight.

A new exercise in the community of practice. Let's take it step by step. It includes instructions, the link to the real-time video lesson, video feedback given to the student who inspired this exercise, and of course - feedback to everyone who does it https://community.nataliatokar.me/c/exercises/exercise-110

A TRUE STORY! How to summarize well if you find this exercise too difficult?

EXERCISE #111. HOW TO UNDERSTAND EVERY SINGLE WORD, EVEN IF THEY SPEAK WITH SOUTHERN ACCENTS?

Self-test your understanding: can you hear every word of what they say? Do you understand what's going on?

This is a "transformation exercise". This audio explains what it is.

The exercise will show you the steps you can take to go from "I don't understand anything" to "I hear and understand every single word that they say"

You can repeat this algorithm with any other video that confuses you. Teach yourself to learn. Already in the community https://community.nataliatokar.me/c/exercises/exercise-111

Exercise #111 includes a 3-min movie scene (with and without subtitles), detailed instructions, THE BOOK that inspired the movie, and individual feedback on your work.

You can teach yourself to understand anything and any accent. You just need to know what you're doing and in what order.

ADD THE FREE WORKSHOP TO YOUR CALENDAR!
Feb 14, 2023

Memorable presentations in English: a practice routine to help you craft ONE BIG IDEA

You can easily add events to your calendar once you click RSVP

https://community.nataliatokar.me/c/calendar/memorable-presentations

There is No Evidence Supporting Auditory and Visual Learning. It's always been more complicated than that...but people like easy explanations and quick solutions.

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/learning-styles-debunked-there-is-no-evidence-supporting-auditory-and-visual-learning-psychologists-say.html

TEASER. Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast app https://shows.acast.com/nativelikefluency/episodes/accent-or-poor-pronunciation

Effort Reinforces Learning

Our key finding, replicated across both experiments, was that greater effort increased learning rates following positive outcomes and decreased them following negative outcomes, which corresponded to a differential effect of effort in boosting positive RPEs and blunting negative RPEs. Interestingly, this effect was most pronounced in individuals who were more averse to effort in the first place, raising the possibility that the investment of effort may have an adaptive effect on learning in those less motivated to exert it. By integrating principles of reinforcement learning with neuroeconomic approaches to value-based decision-making, we show that the very act of investing effort modulates one's capacity to learn

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36096671/