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5 Tips To Improve Your Spoken English

If all English students of the word could give their opinion about what they think the area they are struggling the most, that would certainly be speaking. Often times, they are afraid of speaking to their teacher, not to mention to other people. They may think they don’t have the skills or experience to use spoken English, but without using it they will never gain those skills or experience. This can become in a vicious cycle and one you need to get out from fast if you want to see improvement. In my lessons I always allow students to use the language freely without pressuring them to produce perfect language. You need to know you WILL make mistakes in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, and the correction of those mistakes is what will make you grow. Once you understood that and have the correct attitude about it, you can use the following tools to practice your spoken English and improve it.

Recordings and Transcripts.

Recording yourself is one of the best ways you can check whether your pronunciation is right or not. If you have a private teacher, you can write down the words you don’t understand in class and then, with your phone, ask the teacher to record himself pronouncing those words. This is something I do a lot in my lessons and have seen tremendous improve in my students due to this. Another alternative for you to practice is taking an English video you like and writing words and phrases from that video; then, you record yourself with your phone pronouncing these same words and you compare your pronunciation with the video.

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5 Strategies to Improve Your English Reading Skills

Reading is your bridge to learn more about the English language and culture. In essence, it is perhaps the most essential skill for beginning language learners to develop. Let’s face it, in this post alone you will be reading over ______ of words. Given that, you can imagine you will be reading thousands every single day. Besides that, you will notice that by improving your reading comprehension skills, other skills such as speaking, listening and writing will start to develop as well, so it is fair to say improving your reading skills is a wise decision to make.

Now, in order to take advantage of all the possibilities available, it is not enough to be literate. In order to have academic and professional success, you need to learn how to read well. An essential skill for all English students is the ability to obtain the necessary information from a text in order to deliver a response. This response could be anything from ordering food, talking about an article in the newspaper, or something as critical as giving an answer in an exam. This is an essential reading skill, and in this article I will show you the strategies to achieve it.

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7 Reasons why you should learn English

It is widely known that English is a universal language and almost a requirement to success. Whether is to get the promotion you have always wanted, travel the world or expand your horizons, it is a powerful tool that will open new doors of opportunity for you. This is no secret to anyone as most students recognize the benefits of understanding English, but still, learning ANY a language is a challenge in itself. Teaching your brain to think in a whole different way (which you have to do if you want to become fluent) takes some serious effort and commitment, and it is normal to see students doubt about whether they should continue or not. When faced with such decision, use this list to remember yourself why you started learning in the first place and why it is worth it.

1. It is the language of the world

Over 50 countries list English as either their native mother tongue (the US for example) or as their official language. This makes English your way to communicate with the world. Think about a time where you were traveling abroad and you could not speak the local language. If you have done this before, you know how scary it can be. Maybe you need to find a bus stop or the nearest restroom, and you need to do it quickly. It is in these situations where having even a small knowledge of the language could do wonders for you. Although English is only the third most-spoken language by native speakers, the fact that over 1 billion people can communicate in English to some extent can make you quite confident you will be able to communicate in most circumstances.

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10 Great TV shows for English Language Learners

Learning from context is key to become fluent in English. This means to be exposed to the language as most as possible, and we all know how hard it is to balance this with our everyday lives. The most practical way of doing so is by combining English with an everyday activity. This way, we won’t feel we are studying but rather having a good time, and this is when TV comes into play.

Now, I am not pretending you to learn English by only watching TV, but I can assure you that by doing so you will have much more motivation to learn as you will be using English as a part of your life. You will also learn a lot more about the culture behind the language, since TV shows ordinary people using ordinary language in regular contexts such as school, at the gym, travelling, at the supermarket, etc.

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