Once a year, South Korea—my adopted homeland—grounds its planes.
No aircraft takes off or lands anywhere in the country during the 35-minute English listening section of the Suneung, the college entrance exam that decides the fate of the senior cohort of the student body. Students running late to their exam halls get a police escort.
Before my first university appointment here, I taught in public schools and at a cram academy. My students had studied English since preschool. They knew the grammar rules better than me (teacher, isn't it 'better than I'? 🤔). But ask one of them a simple question in English and you didn’t get an answer. You got a look of silent terror.
In the EFL biz, that's known as: High knowledge, low fluency.
To fix this problem, I ran an exercise called 4/3/2. It works like this:
A student talks to a partner for 4 minutes without stopping. During this time they can say anything. Anything. They can repeat themselves. They can rehearse canned lines. “I don’t know what to say” is fair game.
But if they stop talking for 5 seconds, the 4-minute timer starts over.
Then 3 minutes to a new partner, then 2.
Somewhere around minute 2, they hit a wall. They get self-conscious, stuck in their heads. They don’t want to start the timer all over. So they push through.
When they push through the wall, I discovered, they usually don't repeat themselves; instead, they say something new. Something surprising, unrehearsed, fresh. Something with energy.
I always thought of this activity as a classroom tool.
But recently, a coaching client opened our first call with a problem that sounded all too familiar. He told me he saw all his ideas at once. So when it was time to write, he didn’t know where to start. He was an expert on the topic; he just couldn't write about it.
So we ran 4/3/2, typed.
