English is a second language to me. So when I watched the film ‘the King’s Speech’, besides appreciating the story (including the music, the setting, the acting and the production), I learned something new on speaking a second language.

I used to read aloud to keep my mind focusing on the language itself and train on speaking fluency. After watching what Lionel did to Bertie in the scene on the first therapy session, I realized something different: reading aloud does not involve much capacity on one’s mastery of speaking. That’s probably because human has two different neural systems in control of reading and speaking. However, does it mean that reading aloud will not help one on learning how to speak a language at all? There was another session when Lionel showed Bertie a slow pace of reading loudly with many breaks: that helped Bertie deliver his speech successfully. It seems that reading, in a certain manner does help on speaking…and how? About this, yet, I’m to find out more. What an unexpected reward from watching the film! J