What I am about to share with you will forever change your approach to learning a new language.
This is only my second post, but I just can’t keep this to myself. It’s time to let the cat out of the bag. What I am about to share with you is the hidden key to achieving proficiency in a second language. Your high school foreign language teacher didn’t tell you the secret because they likely didn’t know it. (I mean, how much did you really learn from your high school foreign language teacher anyway?) You won’t hear about this secret from Rosetta Stone or Duolingo or Babbel because they don’t want you to know it. This secret is the main reason why you will not learn a new language the same way a child does, and why these electronic learning platforms will not get you very far in your journey toward proficiency in a new language.
While young children have massive advantages by nature and nurture for learning new languages, you have access to a powerful language learning machine that children do not use well until adolescence. This machine is so powerful that once you learn how to leverage it for language learning, everything else will seem like a waste of time. I am speaking of your ability to read.
When my teenage son was just a toddler, we stopped one day at a construction site to watch the massive earth moving machines as the workers prepared the ground for a construction project. I watched in awe at the sheer amount of earth these machines were able to move. Yet off to the side, there were a few workers digging around with shovels. The contrast between the volume of earth moved by the machines versus the shovels made me ask myself, why would anyone ever want to use a shovel at all? Shovels will always be important tools on construction sites, but the volume of work is far too vast to accomplish without powerful machines. When it comes to learning a new language, most people are trying to level the ground for a skyscraper using nothing but a shovel.
Language learning apps and grammar books that focus on memorizing words and phrases out of context are the shovels of language learning. Don’t be fooled by the bells and whistles, a shovel is a shovel. Sure, there are shovels of different shapes and sizes, and some might move a little more dirt than others, but none of them compare to the massive amount of language learning you can experience when you get behind the wheel of the reading bulldozer!
Reading extensively in your target language is the most powerful thing you can do to progress toward proficiency. Extensive reading will help you improve by leaps and bounds in every domain of language including listening, speaking, and writing. If you are just beginning your journey, you may have to use a shovel until you are ready to fire up the bulldozer. But as you learn from my experience, you will see that everything you are doing as a novice language learner should be preparing you for the day when you can begin to read increasingly complex texts in your target language.
Those of you who come from a professional educator background may be questioning why I assert extensive reading rather than oral language is the key to acquiring a new language. Oral language is still very important for adults learning a second language, but short of moving to a foreign country, most of us must rely on extensive reading for a constant stream of comprehensible input. More on tools for developing oral language in a future post.
So what exactly is extensive reading, and why is it so powerful? I will explain that in my next post. In the meantime, whatever you do, please do not go out and buy a bunch of children’s books or leveled readers meant to teach early elementary students how to read. These books will not help you learn a second language as an adult. Wait for my next post, and I will teach you how to drive a bulldozer!
Prolingual 
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