Why you can read English but freeze when someone asks a question

A student came in last month who had studied English for nine years at school. She could fill in a gap exercise faster than I could. Asked what she did at the weekend, she went quiet for eleven seconds and then said three words.

Nothing is wrong with her. She has a large passive vocabulary and almost no active one. Those are two different stores, and school in this region fills the first and barely touches the second. You recognise a word when you see it, which is passive. You produce it under time pressure while someone waits, which is active. Reading builds one. Only speaking builds the other.

The eleven seconds are the interesting part. She was not searching for vocabulary; she knew every word she needed. She was assembling a full sentence in her head before letting any of it out, because school taught her that a wrong sentence is a mistake to be marked. So she checked it first, and by the time it was ready the moment had passed.

해결책은 문법을 더 하는 것이 아닙니다. 틀리는 비용을 낮춰서 검사하는 단계가 스스로 사라지게 하는 것입니다. 여덟 명 반에서는 이것이 금방 일어납니다. 처음 십 분 안에 모두가 소리 내어 틀리고, 그러면 두려워할 이유가 없어지기 때문입니다. 스무 명 반에서는 결코 일어나지 않습니다. 자신 있는 두 사람이 말하고, 나머지 열여덟은 듣기를 연습하는데, 그것은 이미 잘하던 일이기 때문입니다.

This is why corrections here come at the end of a turn and not in the middle. Stopping someone mid sentence to fix a preposition teaches them the sentence was a risk. Letting them finish, then handing back three fixes, teaches them the sentence was worth making.

If you have studied for years and still freeze, you do not need to start again from the beginning. You need the hours you never got: hours where you talk, badly at first, in front of people who are also talking badly. That is most of what a trial lesson here is.