If you’ve read our language tree post, you might be familiar with the concept of writing being the skill most needed when trying to develop your English skills and become an advanced speaker. This might seem odd, especially if you don’t care about reading and writing. As some of our English conversational students have put it, they’re not interested in writing, they’re interested in speaking and becoming conversationally fluent.
If you feel the same way, it might surprise you to discover its importance, especially for intermediate students and development of their internal monologue – a difficult language skill to master.
First of all, let me explain “internal monologue” to you –
Internal monologue is the voice most people hear inside their heads when they’re going about their daily activities. For most English beginner and intermediate English learners, this is done in the native language. Someone will speak to you in English, and you think about the answer in your native language before trying to translate it back into English. This is in direct contrast to advanced speakers, who transition their inner monologue to English when in a setting where it is needed, not having to translate in their head.
Having an inner monologue that can switch to English when needed is the most vital skill when trying to overcome the notorious “ehh…” or “uhh…” pauses that are associated with English inexperience. These pauses generally come from speakers trying to translate words from their native tongue to English, or from speakers who can’t remember the correct vocabulary or grammar to use. But if you can transition your internal monologue to be English, you drastically reduce this problem.
So, how does writing help us with this?
Writing is a skill that is heavily dependent on your internal monologue. You speak to yourself while working through which vocabulary and phrases to use. By doing this in English, you are actively pushing your mind to adopt an English internal monologue which can be used in settings other than just writing.
When you write in a language, you’re generally going through a four-step process:
By following these four steps, you create a paragraph. Whether you are writing in English, Spanish, or French, these same steps are needed. This process requires you to be fully immersed in the language so that you can correctly judge which words, phrases, sentences, etc. are needed to express your message. This is especially tough because you’re writing in a way so that anyone can understand your message, regardless of when they read it.
Not only are you forcing your mind to speak to itself in English, the target language – you are also forcing yourself to adopt correct grammar rules while giving yourself the opportunity to try out new vocabulary.
Imagine you are writing a short paragraph about a cow who wants to escape his farm:
First, you need to identify the tense that will be used. Are you writing this in the present continuous? Past simple? Perhaps a mixture of multiple tenses? Immediately, you have grammar practice, which is often overlooked by students.
After several minutes, you come up with the following –
The cow wants to escape his farm.
Not much, but it’s a start. But, this certainly isn’t enough information. What kind of cow is it? Why does he want to escape? Where does he want to go? (You’ll notice you start to think about these questions to yourself in English as you progress and develop your internal monologue)
The white and black cow wants to escape his farm because of the way his owners treat him. He is beaten every day for not behaving. He wants to escape to the large green fields in Iceland. He wants to be free.
Now, you have a bunch of isolated sentences, each of which are (hopefully) grammatically correct. You can implement some advanced grammar tenses here by adding conjunctions, conditionals, and so on. At this point, you can also add some new vocabulary to create some variety in your paragraph.
The white and black cow wants to escape his farm because of the way his owners abuse him. He is beaten every day for not behaving, so he wants to journey to the large green fields in Iceland where he can be free and unbothered.
Just from writing this short paragraph, we are doing three different exercises:
While a short exercise like this might take you twenty minutes, the results will certainly compound as you continue to practice. As such, writing in English is one of my personal favorite recommendations for students who seem stuck at a B2 / intermediate level.
So, how do you choose what to write about?
While you can always just think up a random topic to write about, I personally have discovered that many students react best to writing when it’s as a summary of a story they are reading. Whether you’re reading a full novel or a short story, this same strategy applies.
The method is simple – Read a page or two of a story that is moderately difficult for you (where you understand 80-90% of all vocabulary), and then take ten to twenty minutes to write a paragraph summary in which you try to implement some of the new vocabulary you learned. By practicing writing immediately after reading, you are improving both your writing language skill and reading language skill.
As you continue to do this, you’ll notice you begin to both read and write faster – The two skills are, of course, related. As your English internal monologue develops, and as you gain more and more experience formulating your thoughts by writing them down on a page, your overall English level will improve.
If this is a skill you’re hoping to improve on so that you can build your fluency and reach an advanced level, consider starting here by writing a paragraph or two summary of this article – Feel free to leave it as a comment if you do so! I hope this helps!
