Chapter 7: Case Study 1: Jane

Assalamualaikum wr. wb.

As of today, I will share another chapter from the ebook "I Still Can't Speak English". IN this chapter, Jason West will do some research to Jane about why she can't fluently speaks english.

"I found Jane, an adult Chinese English learner (27), on EnglishClub.com. She was recruited via an offer I made in an online forum. I offered to give free help to two learners who were frustrated and wanted to improve their English speaking skills. The offer was for free course materials and online speaking practice in return for agreement to allow me to record and publish everything we did together."

Jane downloaded the MP3 recordings of her conversations and put them on her iPod before listening again a few times. This process of storing the recordings online meant that they were secure yet accessible. It was really like building Jane’s own highly personal audio-lingual English course, with her as the star!

"All I did on the calls was respond to Jane’s questions and have a pleasant conversation as a fluent English speaker would. I did not teach her in the conventional sense and correction only occurred as part of a natural desire to establish mutual understanding. I would spell words sometimes and help Jane with her pronunciation when it interfered with understanding. We worked blind, using audio only; so I never saw Jane’s face."

"After the sixth lesson I decided to edit together clips from the first and sixth conversations to compare Jane’s speaking performance. This created the ‘before and after’ podcast that shows how much she improved in that short period of time."

Results

These can be found on Jason podcast page at:http://languagesoutthere.podomatic.com/entry/2010-04-29T10_09_39-07_00

Please listen to the recording. It is the recording of Jane ‘before and after’ her six lessons. The notes with the podcast explain Jane’s background and how I worked with her. Here are some of Jane’s comments that I think are worthy of being highlighted:

“Well, after several regular communications online with professor Jason including lots of exercises in the plans, they made me not only enrich my vocabulary, but also made English speaking become kind of a habit for me.” And,“I downloaded every recording when Jason posted them online. And I put them on my iPod, and listened to them when I was free. It’s very interesting to listen to my conversations with Jason because through it, I can discover what I need to improve again. On the whole, studying English in this new way made me not just improve my English level (especially speaking), but made me many friends all around the world. ”Jane successfully became an autonomous English learner. You can do this too, if you work the way Jane did.

Thank you for reading my blog.

Wassalamualaikum wr. wb.