Tips & Stuff
English as a Foreign Language or English as a Second Language?
When you're studying English in an English-speaking country, you are learning English as a Second Language (ESL), and when you are studying English in a city where English is not the local mother tongue, you are learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL).
Some people believe that in order to become fluent in English, or in any other language for that matter, a person needs to live in a country in which there is exposure to the language 24/7.
This may be helpful, but it's not all true. I know excellent fluent speakers of English, for instance, who only had a chance to visit such countries after studying in language schools or on their own.
The secret lies on language awareness. Only by being exposed to a language is not enough to help an adult speak that language fluently.
So what is language awareness exactly?
It's when you have moments in which you understand how language works. In other words, it's not all based on a gut feeling, or if it sounds ok, or intuition.
I know quite a few people who have lived YEARS abroad and speak English "fluently wrong". They are not aware of what goes with what, they hear things on the streets, at work, in gatherings, and they try to construct sentences based on what sounds familiar, but they are not capable of transferring a ready-made sentence to different forms or adapt to different contexts. Their listening and pronunciation are usually pretty good, but, their speaking needs interpretation or leads to misunderstanding.