Intensive Listening, Extensive Reading

I've been thinking a lot recently about the interplay of reading and listening.   How should each be used when learning a language?  

After some experimenting, I've concluded that the combination of intensive listening and extensive reading is the best.   Intensive, in this case, means listening to a small amount of material many many times.  In my case, I'm listening to one Spanish language CD.  I listen to it almost every day-- which takes about an hour.  I try to listen actively-- in other words, I concentrate, listen carefully, and keep my mind focused on the material.   As I mentioned earlier, I stay interested in the material by using it in a variety of ways. 

Intensive listening in this way is probably the best way to develop an intuitive feel for the grammar, speech, and pronunciation of the language.  Of course, its also the best way to improve listening comprehension. 

But one weakness of this intensive approach is that it doesn't allow for a huge amount of vocabulary acquisition.   That's where extensive reading comes in.   In this case, extensive means "a lot"-- as in, a lot of pages and a lot of different books.    When reading extensively, its best to read something that seems fairly easy, but just a little challenging--  and its best to read a lot--  I'm talking about books.  I'm also talking about reading quickly-- without using a dictionary.   

As native speakers, extensive reading is where we get most of our new vocabulary.  Of course we get our basic conversational vocabulary from listening-- but beyond those first 2000-3000 words, most of it comes from reading.  

One thing that is important for both listening and reading is to choose authentic materials.  By this I mean, do NOT focus on textbooks.   I'm convinced that the single biggest problem most English learners have is that they spend 90% of their time (or more) focused on textbooks & "learner English".   A student may have studied English for 5 years-- but most have spent those 5 years doing nothing but textbooks, school exercises, and textbook tapes.  The average English learner, in fact, has had very little contact with interesting, authentic English. 

The best way to cure this problem is to choose 1 hour's worth of English (audio articles, audio books, movie scenes, speeches, etc) and listen to them every day until they become a part of you.   At the same time, buy an English language novel--  perhaps a novel for middle school children-- and read it everyday.  Don't "study" the language-- dance with it.  Enjoy it.  Join with it. 

If you do each of these things every day (1 hour of intensive listening,  30 minutes of reading novels)-- in 6 months  you will notice a big improvement in your English ability.