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.

解決辦法不是加更多文法。是把說錯的代價降到檢查這一步自己消失。在八個人的班裡這很快就會發生，因為頭十分鐘裡每個人都當眾說錯過，害怕就不再值得了。在二十個人的班裡則永遠不會發生，因為說話的是自信的那兩個，另外十八個在練習聽，而聽他們本來就會。

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.