From Passive to Active: How to Activate Your Language Knowledge

You used to learn a certain foreign language, but it's been a while since you haven't used it and now you notice that your level of knowledge is declining?

As languages are living entities, regular exposure and practice are key to maintaining and improving language skills. If you haven't used a certain foreign language in a while and have noticed a decline in your knowledge, in this text you can find strategies to reactivate your skills. The sooner you take action the better, because that will prevent further deterioration of your language abilities.

Practical tips for renewing language skills

Renewing language skills involves four key skills: reading, listening, writing, and speaking. These skills can be categorized into two groups:

1. Receptive skills: reading and listening
2. Productive skills: writing and speaking

These skills can be performed consciously or unconsciously. When trying to activate passive language knowledge, it's crucial to consciously focus on improving all four skills. This approach ensures a more comprehensive and effective process of knowledge activation.

Listening

When watching a movie, we tend to focus on the plot, making listening a passive activity while reading subtitles helps maintain the movie's content focus. However, unconscious listening is not particularly effective when trying to restore language skills.

To activate language knowledge, conscious and focused listening is necessary. By paying attention to vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar in context, and relating it to previous knowledge, listening becomes a conscious process.

In addition to movies, you can watch and listen to documentaries, podcasts, audiobooks, interviews, and other speech-oriented materials online. It's crucial to focus on language while engaging in these activities.

Reading

When it comes to reading skills, it's unnecessary to underline every unknown word. Instead, focus on recalling words you once knew. Every time you encounter a familiar word, it will refresh your memory.

Avoid overwhelming yourself with learning new vocabulary. Instead, concentrate on recognizing and recalling previously acquired knowledge. Renewing your language skills involves revisiting old material, not acquiring new knowledge.

Choose reading materials on topics you're already familiar with and interested in, such as books, magazines, and newspaper articles. The goal is to make the experience enjoyable rather than a chore.

Writing

To activate your writing skills, you can combine them with reading by writing about your impression of the text, the lessons you learned, and your overall thoughts about it. This allows you to apply the grammar and vocabulary knowledge you refreshed by reading.

Journaling, writing gratitude journal, setting goals, and creating to-do lists are other ways to practice writing skills while refreshing vocabulary and grammar in different contexts.

Speaking

When it comes to the skill of speaking, you can activate it by narrating the plot of movies, TV shows or anything you are watching. If you have someone to converse with, that's great, but if not, you can do it alone.

What is important is that you allow yourself to speak freely and let the words flow out of you. It doesn't matter if you make mistakes or can't remember the specific word you want to use. If you do get stuck, the best thing to do at that moment is to slow down and ask yourself questions such as "What do I want to say?" or "What's the point I'm trying to make?". You can imagine explaining it to a five-year-old child, using simple words.

When learning a foreign language, it's common to get lost in complicated sentence structures, but that's not the purpose of communication. The goal of language is to convey your message to the listener.

Therefore, when you're renewing your language skills, the most important thing is to speak as much as possible and let the words flow.

Be understanding and patient

During this process, it's important to avoid criticizing yourself and instead offer plenty of support and encouragement. Celebrate every time you recognize a word, idiom, or grammatical construction with a pat on the back and well-deserved praise.

You'll recognize these moments by the "aha" feeling when the light turns on and you remember a word from before. This approach will help rebuild your self-confidence and memories, and over time you'll find it easier to use the language again. Wishing you the best of luck!