Mike O’Neill is an expert on English language teaching. He believes that instead of being afraid of committing errors when speaking another language, we should see mistakes as a positive opportunity to discover new things or remember something we might have forgotten.
This adventurous spirit is reflected in his own life: originally from Liverpool in the north of England, after graduating and doing a Postgraduate Certificate in Education, he began teaching in a state secondary school in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. He then went abroad, where he worked as a travel courier in Greece and Spain before joining the British Council in Barcelona, where he has worked for many years as a teacher, teacher trainer and ICT coordinator.
As many Speak Up readers contact us with language questions, we thought we would ask Mike, who has over twenty-five years’ experience in the classroom, to give us some general advice! He began by reflecting on which aspects of English are hardest for learners.
Mike O’Neill (mild Liverpool accent): The use of the definite article, when to use it, when not to use it. Forming certain tenses: the conditional tense… and differences between the present perfect and simple past tense, for instance. And then prepositions, and, the big horror - phrasal verbs. Because I tell my students, I say, ‘Look, English grammar, basic English grammar is very, very easy compared to Italian grammar or German grammar… and Spanish or Catalan grammar. Much simpler.’ And they... more or less they accept that grudgingly. But then they say: ‘What about prepositions? What about phrasal verbs? And pronunciation?’ These are the three areas where I say: ‘OK you’ve got a point there.’ They’re not easy at all.
Facing up to phrasal verbs
Phrasal verbs are notoriously tricky, but they are essential to master if you want your English to sound natural. So what approach does Mike suggest for learning phrasal verbs?
Mike O’Neill: Students often ask me, ‘Can you give us a list of a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred phrasal verbs to study and learn?’ And I say, ‘No! It’s not that I can’t give you one, but I’m not going to.’ And they seem put out by that. And I say, ‘Because I don’t think there’s any way you can possibly learn them like that, by rote learning. You can only learn them one by one, when they appear; when you hear a native speaker use them, or when you see them in a written text. And you acquire them by that process and it takes some time. But it starts very, very slowly.’
Be adventurous
Having taught hundreds of students over the years, Mike offers expert advice on what makes for a successful language learning experience.
Mike O’Neill: To be adventurous, is one thing, be adventurous. Don’t worry about making mistakes because I think that holds backan awful lot of students. And they’re so nervous and they don’t want to sound ridiculous and they want to get it right. Sometimes we have people who might be brilliant in their own careers, [and] their English is perhaps a little bit shaky and they’re very nervous about it. And they want to have everything a hundred per cent correct. And I tell them, ‘Well, that’s not going to happen in the first instance. But with practice you will definitely get better and you will iron out your mistakes and your English will be more fluent and more confident.’ But confidence is the key thing there. You know, don’t worry about getting things wrong. People are not going to laugh at you; they will try and help you. So be adventurous, don’t worry about making mistakes because everybody does.
Nobody’s perfect
And, he points out, we are not so self-critical when it comes to our own language, so why be so in another?
Mike O’Neill: In our own language we make mistakes and we start a sentence with one idea in our heads and half way through the sentencewe wonder where we were going with that sentence and we change it half way through. So, we get things wrong in our own language, even. So, they shouldn’t worry about that.
Listen up!
Mike says that he knows from experience just how useful audio-visual resources can be.
Mike O’Neill: Another thing I think is extremely important is to listen. To be able to speak well you have to listen well and carefully. And how do you listen? Listening to native speakers. Listening to English audio and video and written language. And to listen to people speaking, listen carefully. What are they saying? What [expressions] are they using? What intonation do they use? And if they [students] listen to that carefully and just imitate the model, then that’s a huge step towards making a significant improvement in their English.