onversation practice, and watch your grammatical accuracy improve without your even focusing on it. I will later suggest ways that you can focus on grammar, as well, but that will be more with a view to mopping up persistent problem areas.
When I was in High School, a language learning method came into vogue which was based on the belief that from the very outset students should speak the language perfectly. My high school French teacher responded to a student's complaint with the comment “I didn't write the textbook, but if I had I'd be a millionairess.” Such was the enthusiasm of many teachers for the new method. That enthusiasm was followed by disappointment, when it turned out that few students developed much ability to use the language extemporaneously for real communication.
Have you ever observed a real person learning English as his or her second language? If you have observed such a person over an extended period, you will have noticed that s/he began by speaking English very poorly, and gradually improved until, hopefully, s/he came to speak English well. It always works like that in real life. Granted some people do better than others both during the early weeks, and in terms of their overall rate of progress, and ultimate attainment, but nobody starts out speaking perfectly. Developing good speaking ability is always a gradual process. I can't understand why my high school French teacher and others like her hadn't noticed that.
When you are first learning a new language, your personal version of the language is very different from the version used by the native speakers. Let's suppose you are learning Chukchee, and your native language is English. The new “language” that you speak, say, after a couple of months, is sure not English. But is it Chukchee? It doesn't appear to be Chukchee in the strictest sense. However, it is obviously derived from Chukchee, and not from English. Six months later you will be speaking another “language”, which is much more like Chukchee in the strictest sense than the “language” you speak after two months. After a couple of years, the language you speak may be enough like that of native speakers that you can justifiably call it Chukchee. However the “language” you spoke after two months, and the one you spoke after six months, were quite different from Chukchee in the strictest sense. What were those “languages”? Chukchee speakers could understand you when you spoke to them, and you could understand a lot of what they said when they spoke Chukchee. What you spoke was a real language (despite all of my scare quotes). More precisely, it was a series of languages, each one more like real Chukchee than the last. You invented these languages as you went along, on the basis of the Chukchee you heard. I have to say you invented these languages, because they were unique to you. You didn't hear anyone else talking like that, so you can't really say that you learned them. No. You invented them, using as your source of building blocks all of the comprehensible input you were exposed to.
You may prefer to think that you didn't invent anything. Rather, you may say, you only learned something. You learned Chukchee, only you learned it poorly at first. But if we may return to the example of someone learning English we'll see that there is quite a bit of inventing going on. Wode (1981) examined the forms of negative sentences used by people learning English. Learners first learned to use the word “no” in response to questions or statements. Then they started adding it to sentences, so that if they wished to say that someone had not finished doing something, they might say “No finish.” Later they would use the word “no” in slightly fuller sentences, as in “That's no good”, meaning what you would mean by “That's not good.” Later they would learn to add a form of the helping verb “do”, and say something like “You didn't can throw it” (all of these examples are cited in Cook, 1991, p. 19 ). I think it is fair to say that sentences like “No finish,” and “You didn't can throw it,” come from an invente