Psychological barriers to fluency

How to overcome them

I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve been developing my own teaching method called Fast-Track to Fluency since late 2023. The goal is simple: reliably reduce the time required to reach fluency.

Over the past year and a bit, I’ve learned something interesting: a lack of knowledge or practice are not the biggest barriers to reaching fluency. The biggest barriers to reaching fluency are often psychological.

We’ve gotten pretty good at busting through psychological barriers. Today I’ll share strategies we use. For full transparency, we are still refining our approach, but early results are promising for anyone wanting to to quickly improve their:

• Conversation

• Pronunciation

• Spoken grammar

• Overall flow and fluency

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3 ways to overcome psychological barriers to fluency

• Boost confidence. We do this with:

  • Motivation using measurable progress. If you set a goal and make measurable progress toward it, you will feel excited. Progress toward a meaningful goal is inherently rewarding.

  • Success streaks. If you hold, for example, a 20-minute fluent conversation 10 times in a row, that will boost your confidence

  • Specific feedback on what you’re doing well and what can be improved

  • Lots of conversation. This is common sense

• Focus on fluency. Language learners generally do not focus on fluency. They focus instead on maintaining their streak on an app, doing worksheets, or grammar exercises. These strategies are slow ways to improve fluency. We focus more on conversation and strive to increase your words-per-minute. That is the most actionable and direct way to boost fluency

• Use a simplified approach to grammar instruction. Grammar causes people to overthink. Overthinking reduces fluency. Therefore, we do three things differently - they’re yielding positive results:

  • When speaking, have your tutor correct huge errors and frequent errors first

  • Follow the 2-sentence rule. All grammar questions must be answered in 2 sentences. This forces the tutor to give a simple, concise answer to your grammar question without getting bogged down with details

  • Sentences first, grammar second. Don’t learn grammar rules to make sentences. Memorize useful sentences and learn the most important grammar points that are present in those sentences

These tips have been game-changing at the Calgary Language Nerds.

Give them a try! Better yet, sign up for a free trial with a Calgary Language Nerds tutor trained in our Fast-Track to Fluency method. You’ll have an info call first followed by a free trial lesson.