How to improve your English
This is supposed to be some kind of scientific research on the topic. Maybe, not that scientific, or not scientific at all. However, I should try and find out what the most powerful techniques for improving one's skills in learning English are.
Essentially, as everyone knows, there are four basic language skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. So my experience involves things like:
- private teacher (online) = skyeng.ru;
- reading books / news / articles on your smartphone;
- use the dictionary on a smartphone;
- listen to teacher Luke's podcast / R'n'R English podcast;
- youtube education lessons: grammar, pronunciation, idioms/phrasal verbs, or different topics discussed;
- youtube videos with a review of cartoons/movies (like, for example, Learn English With TV Series or Learn English Through Story);
- ted.com videos/interviews with famous people;
- read out loud some texts (taken from books or from the Internet) - I mean, your mouth for you as a foreign English speaker is just like muscles for a bodybuilder, English language is not a purely mental discipline;
- shadowing technique (repeat after the native speakers what they say);
- https://forvo.com/ - to check the pronunciation of every word in doubt;
- https://context.reverso.net - the contextual dictionary. (Reverso Context uses millions of bilingual texts, processed by complex AI algorithms. The examples are extracted from real-life contexts; therefore, they cover a wide range of registers of speech and will sometimes contain slang, colloquialisms, rude terms.)
- https://www.multitran.com/ - the best online dictionary ever;
- start blog (diary) to practice writing skills;
- English Grammar Test Application;
- English Grammar in Use and Test Application;
- watching movies (with or without transcripts) - the last I've seen recently is the trilogy "Back to the future" (American science fiction film);
- listening to the radio (something like bbc.com);
- reading your favourite songs lyrics;
- using a monolingual dictionary;
- transcript collaboration for teacher Luke's podcast. Now more about teacher Luke and his podcast.
More tips from Luke:
Take responsibility for your own learning. Learning a language has to become part of who you are. Let the English flow through you.
Useful episodes on this topic are 167, 331, 401, 660, 669. See links below.
Here I will copy some essential things from teacher Luke's podcasts.
There are receptive skills like listening and reading (this is how language goes in), productive skills like speaking and writing (this is how language goes out).
Language has to go in before it comes out. Read and listen to things that are slightly above your level, so you can understand 60-80%. You need to be able to understand that much for your brain to work out the remaining 20-40% that you don’t know. Meaningful context is vital.
In both writing and speaking the first thing to remember is you need to engage in it as much as possible. Real writing and real speaking.
Here are some techniques for the motivated LEPster
(Luke English Podcaster, as I understand it) who wants to do more than just listen.
- Listen to episodes several times
It allows you to not only understand the content much better but will also allow you to notice specific phrases and then remember them over time. If you hear phrases or even grammatical structures and certain bits of pronunciation, again and again, they will really stick in your memory and become part of your English.
- Use the transcripts
Read transcripts while I’m talking – just listen and read at the same time. Reading the words while you hear them will allow you to do a number of things: it’ll help you to remember the words better because you’re not just getting an aural picture of the word, but a visual one too, and many of us have very visual memories.
Apparently, when we read we don’t just look at the individual letters and put them together, but we recognise the first and last letters and the rest is just a general shape.
Also, reading while listening may help you to notice particular high-frequency features such as collocations or grammatical structures.
- Take some of the words and keep them in word lists (copy+paste words into your own vocabulary lists) – then find ways of working on those lists in your free time, repeating words, testing yourself, putting them into sentences and so on. Just make sure that you’re applying some kind of process to your learning – don’t just mindlessly read through your word lists – you need to work with the words, and push them into your mind in various ways.
- Use flashcard apps to help you do this or just a notepad. Try to record and repeat words in sentences, not just on their own. Consider how the words interact with other words. Are there any particular collocations or grammatical features of these words?
- Try to practice producing your target words, not just recognising them. That means when you do some studying with your word lists, you should read out those words and sentences aloud, not just read them in silence.
- Try to avoid simply converting words from your language into English and back again. Try to do it all in English.
- Create your own worksheets using the transcripts. Import the text into Microsoft Word, then gap certain words (you can select certain words and gap them all automatically), or gap random words, then print the worksheet you’ve produced, and then go back to it later and try to add the words from memory. You could remove all the punctuation and put it back in later. You could remove all the verbs and then put them back in the correct form. You could remove all the prepositions and put them back in later. Be your own teacher, create your own tests and exercises. You can do that. It will help.
- Recording yourself reading transcripts
You could take a transcript and read it out loud. Try to sound exactly like me, or just try to read out the script in a natural way, as if you were talking to real people and you had to make it interesting. You could record yourself reading the script and then compare it to the original recording of me. See the difference, and try to copy my voice.
- Shadow the way I speak when you’re in the car
If you listen while driving – that’s the perfect time to do some speaking in private. You can use the privacy of the car to do some speaking. You could try shadowing me – that means repeating everything I’m saying while I’m saying it! Either you repeat it after I’ve said it, or you allow your mouth to vaguely follow what I’m saying as I’m saying it.
- Listen at different speeds – slower or faster
You might find that after fast listening you’re suddenly able to understand normal speaking much better. It’s a bit like training in the mountains – you let your body get used to running with less oxygen, and then when you run at a normal altitude your body is tuned and able to consume much more oxygen and by comparison, you’re much stronger and faster. If you get used to listening at a fast pace, you could become an amazing listener at normal speed. Alternatively, you could listen to an episode slowly to try and focus on specific things that you missed before.
- Pause the podcast to say something
Remember, you have a pause button. You can use it to pause the episode when you have a thought or idea and just say your response.
- Use episodes of LEP as the basis for discussions or activities with your speaking partner
Useful links:
https://teacherluke.co.uk/2016/02/22/331-hows-your-english-and-why-speaking-is-so-important/
https://teacherluke.co.uk/2020/06/18/669-how-to-learn-english/
https://www.youtube.com/c/LearnEnglishWithTVSeries
What do you need to know to learn a foreign language?
Paul Nation's recent book What you need to know to learn a foreign language available for free download: