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Improve your English conversation, be a HIG!

November 19th, 2011 | Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

How good are you at chatting? Not in English, just in general.

Are you a chatty person who always becomes the life of the party or are you a quiet person who prefers to think than speak?

Improve English conversation

Learn to mingle well to improve your English conversation

In linguistics (the study of languages) there is a term for people who are chatty and like to engage in conversation and as a result, get lots of listening and speaking practice.  They are called High Input Generators (HIGs).  A HIG is a person who can get people to spend time chatting with them, someone who is outgoing and sociable.

Are you a HIG?

Trying to learn how to have great conversations in English may just be more difficult than it should be if you don’t have the skill to have great conversations in your own language.

The good news is that when you learn a new language, you are actually creating a new identity for yourself, an English-speaking identity.  This means that you can have conversations in English in a completely different way to your first language if you decide to be more chatty or outgoing in English, you can be.

Tips to improve your conversation in English

  1. Actively listen.  Have you ever had someone tell you a story and you suddenly realize that you are not listening and you don’t know how this story began?  This means that you have entered the passive listening mode where it easy to just switch off sometimes. To avoid this, make sure you keep eye contact and expect questions on everything the other person says.  Stay involved in the conversation by asking questions and don’t use passive responses like ah-huh, I see or yeah.  Repeat content back to the person to show that you are listening.
  2. Find the topics that they want to speak about.  If you can engage someone in a conversation about their passions, they will enjoy talking with you.
  3. Honestly see things from others perspective.  If you are always trying to force your opinion on others, you will often find people who disagree with you.  Rather than finding ways to conflict your opinions, accept that there can be two differing opinions.
  4. Use people’s names and make them feel important.  By using a person’s name, you can make them feel like they are worthy of your respect.  The more details you remember about them, the more important they will feel.
  5. Smile.  Do you like to talk to grumpy people?
Being a High Input Generator will help you to improve your English conversation by giving you more listening and speaking practice.

High Input Generators was first coined by H. Selinger and M. Long in Classroom oriented research in second language acquistion. Rowley, MA: Newbury House

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Do ya get what I’m saying?

November 1st, 2011 | Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

How good is your English?  How do you measure your skill?  Do you talk about how well you speak, how well you can write a letter?  How well you understand what other people are saying?  Learning a language is made of many different skills including listening, speaking, reading and writing but also grammatical structure, vocabulary and general communication skill.  Dividing these into the productive and the receptive skills helps us to understand what we can do in order to really take our English to the next level.

Listening is the key

The receptive skills are the skills that people don’t usually work on intentionally but spend most of their time using.  They say that 45% of the communication that we experience is listening (compared with 30% speaking) and 16% of our communication is reading (compared with 9% writing).  So, the receptive skills are, at least on average, more common than their productive counterparts.

Improve your English listening skills to learn speaking faster

Improve your English listening skills to learn speaking faster

But how much time do you spend drilling your listening?  Yet we need to listen at the speed of thought to keep up in conversation.

Think about it this way, when you were a child, how did you learn to speak your first language?  Did you read a grammar book?  Did someone train you to speak in a classroom?  Chances are, you learned your first language by listening to your parents.  Listening and understanding are the key to fluent production.

So, how do we improve our listening?

First we need to decide what to listen to.  The material that we learn the most from is close to where our level is now.  If you are a beginner, listening to the BBC World News is probably not going to very helpful.  Choose something that is near your level but still includes words, phrases and structures that are new to you to ensure that you will learn from it.

Listen to something that you can repeat again and again.  DVDs with subtitles, music (get the lyrics from the Internet), videos on YouTube are all useful as they can be repeated a couple of times.  When you get stuck, you can check the written version to help you.  It is important that you do not develop a dependency on hearing everything repeatedly so be sure to keep in mind that the goal is to be able to understand the input at natural speed the first time you hear it.

To improve your listening, try some of these activities:

  • Listen and repeat.  Listen line by line and repeat back what the characters say.  Try to imitate the intonation when you do this.
  • Play the role of one of the characters.  You need to listen to the speaker and respond, then compare your response with the real responses.
  • Dictation.  Listen to the conversation and write down what they say.  Then check it against the subtitles or find the script/lyrics on the Internet.
  • Catching the gist.  Listen to a YouTube video and explain what the article was about and then listen again and add more detail to your explanation.

 

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It’s like writing but fun

October 22nd, 2011 | Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

Here is a very easy way to make your writing immediately more interesting.

In English, we start most sentences with a subject.  This is usually a person or a thing.  But sometimes, we want to talk about an activity.  The easiest way to make your sentences more interesting is to add some variety to the way that you make them.

Mix up the short and the long

If you create a mixture of short sentences and long sentences, you will quickly make your writing unpredictable.  It’s that simple.  This means that you should not use connectors to make every sentence a compound sentence.  Just some.  But be careful not to use sentence fragments in your formal writing.

A variety of subjects

Using simple nouns for subjects all the time can become dull.  To use a variety of subject types is to make your writing more interesting.  You can use the following to start a sentence:

Pronouns

I am having a party.

She is definitely coming.

Other simple nouns (or more precisely noun phrases if they have an article or adjective with them)

The party is at my house.

My house is near the police station.

Modified nouns, which are nouns that have a clause to modify them

The party that my friend went to is over now.

Improving your writing skills

The house where the party was held is badly damaged.

Infinitives

To go to that party would be a mistake.

To drink and drive is illegal.

Gerunds

Going to parties is just something that I don’t enjoy doing.

Cleaning up afterwards is something I hate even more.

Empty subjects- there and it

It is great to be able to have a party at my house.

There will be another party next week.

Noun clauses

Who is at the party is a surprise.

Whoever is left at the end of the night can help me clean up.

So, when you next find yourself with a pen in your hand, try to keep these in mind for the benefit of those who will read your words.  Variety is the spice of life.

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Taking your English to the next level

October 2nd, 2011 | Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)
Learning Plateau

Take it higher!

When learning a language, people  tend to progress in bursts.  This means that there will be times that you feel like you are really learning fast and other times when you seem to plateau.  The reason for this plateau is not quite clear although I would like to suggest a couple of theories and ways to combat this and take your English level higher.

Loss of motivation

Motivation will come and go and if you want to keep it longer, you have to find ways to motivate yourself.  Motivation is usually a combination of your emotional state, your feelings toward the teacher or class, your stress from studying and other activities, pressure from family and friends and the goals that you set yourself and how you feel about them.

The easiest way to break out of a motivational slump is to set yourself a few short, easy goals.  A couple of easy wins will help you to feel confident and willing again.

If that doesn’t work, try finding the source.  If you are losing motivation because of stress or your relationship with a family member or your teacher, then that is the challenge you need to face to get your motivation back.

You need time to absorb

Sometimes, if you study at a quick pace, you need to just step back a little and spend some time practicing what you have already learnt.  A lot of times, students study the grammar to an advanced level but they have not spent the time practicing the language that they have learnt.  So they feel that they are not progressing.

In this case, the best thing to do is to start with the basics and practice.  Remember, the stronger you build the foundation, the taller you can build the tower.  This is especially true of English.  Practice and work grammars that you have already studied into your regular vocabulary and you will be ready to take your English to the next level.

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A great way to practice your writing in English

September 20th, 2011 | Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

Most people understand that the best way to improve a skill is to practice.  How to practice a skill when it comes to learning languages is not always so obvious.  I would like to suggest a novel way to practice your writing in English.

It is fun, it is modern and it is great practice. It is called blogging.

These days, anyone with an email address can quickly and easily start their own blog with the help of sites like WordPress.com and Blogger.com.  You can keep them private so that they can be your own little diary which is good if you are not confident to share your writing yet or they can be accessible to the world.

There are many advantages to running a blog for writing practice and so that you can make an informed decision, I have also included some possible disadvantages.

The advantages of blogging over a diary

The blog will spell check as you go, just like a word processor.  This is good for immediate feedback on your spelling.  People can also read the blog and make comments and corrections.  Your friends can help you to improve your English, especially good if you have native English-speaking friends.
You can add tags to your posts.  This is a great way to remember vocabulary.  If you create tags, you can click on the word and it will show you all posts that include that word.  Use this feature for new vocabulary and you can see how you have used this vocabulary in all of your posts.
If it is more fun and sociable, you will do it more often.  Get your friends involved and start blogs together.  Meet and share your blog with other people who are studying English and the Internet will become your classroom.  Just don’t forget to go outside and meet some real people too so that you can practice your speaking from time to time.

The possible disadvantages:

You don’t practice speaking and you don’t practice handwriting. And be careful not to become dependent on spell-check.
You should be careful of what information you put on the Internet.  This means that you should get into the habit of not mentioning names or otherwise identifying people when you talk about real events.
You might get so addicted to it that you get carpal tunnel syndrome!
Well, whichever you choose to go, the flash new shiny blog or the trusty old written diary, just remember that the most important thing is regular practice. This is what will get your writing from the level it is now to the level that you want it to be.


As a complement to this, Live-English.net has developed an online English writing course to help you improve your writing skills in English.

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Improving your pronunciation

September 12th, 2011 | Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

Improving your English pronunciation is all about practice.  Most people practice by taking individual sounds that they have trouble with and practicing them in isolation (alone).  If you do this though, it is important to then practice them in real words and sentences.  Do not just do isolation practice or it will not help you to change your habit to the correct way of saying it.

Steps to improving your pronunciation in English

First , you need to find the sounds that give you problems.  Here is a list of the consonant sounds:

b (bad), d (done), f (find), g (give), h (hello), y (yellow), k (cat), l (little), m (man), n (no), ng (sing), p (pen), r (red), s (sun), sh (she), t (tea), ch (check), th (think), th (this), v (voice), w (wet), z (zoo), z (pleasure), j (jug)

Most errors in pronunciation just come from sounds that are different to your first language so the sounds that you have trouble with are probably the sounds that don’t exist in or are different in your mother tongue.If you are unsure about any of these sounds, get your teacher to go through them with you.  Pronunciation is best done with a teacher first.

If you are having trouble distinguishing between two sounds, we usually use what we call minimal pairs to practice the difference.  This is where you take two words and the only difference between the two words is the sound you want to practice.  So if you are having trouble with L and R for example, you would practice saying LIGHT and RIGHT.

Putting the sounds into words

Now that you have the individual sounds right, it is time to practice the words.  You can do this through listening.  Listening is the key to pronunciation but almost as important is practicing making the sounds for yourself.  So listen and note down words that you hear that are different to how you say them.  Take that list to your teacher each week and spend a couple of minutes practicing.  If you do this on a regular basis, you will improve very quickly.

Where’s the stress?

The last thing to note is intonation.  This is where you put the stress in a word.  Every word has one stress (sometimes they have a secondary but it is not as pronounced).  Listen to each word and try to get the stress in the right place but be careful because it often changes.  Look at these words and say them out loud:

  • Photograph
  • Photography
  • Photographer

The first word has the stress on the first syllable – PHO to graph.  The longer words have their stress on the second syllable – pho TOG rapher, pho TOG raphy.  It changes as the word length changes.

Listening for intonation in the word will help you to get that stress in the right place.

Remember, listening is the key, practice is important and the person who has the experience to help you to find the fastest way to change your habits is your native-English teacher.

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Your English writing course

August 25th, 2011 | Posted by admin in Improving your English - (0 Comments)
We all know how it feels like at the end of August. It’s time to think of a new routine, new activities, new goals.
Starting on September 5th, 2011, you will have a unique opportunity to improve your writing skills in English. We’ve designed a program especially for you.
You will get an assignment to complete each week.
To help you with this task, you will get a weekly document that will gives you tips on how to handle the subject.
And most importantly, one of our native-English teacher will correct these assignments and will give you a personal feedback.
For only 99€, you will go through various writing topics. On top of that, if you register before August 31st, you will get 900 loyalty points to turn into free Skype lessons!
The program will be closed soon. So book your spot now and improve your writing skills in English.
Please contact the office if you need any more details before registering for this course.

How to remember English vocabulary

August 20th, 2011 | Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

One of the most common questions that I get from students who have been studying English for a while is what is the easiest way to memorize vocabulary?  Understanding how our memories work is important.  Once you know how the job is done, there are some steps that you can take to make it easier.

Your brain is not a cup.  It does not hold 100ml of information and no more.  Think of it more like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.  But that comparison does not show how complicated and fascinating the brain really is.  The brain is a maze of connections that pass electricity from one node to another and each connection is a new way of thinking or piece of information.  This means that if you want your brain to know that something is important enough to remember, you need to make lots of connections to it.

To remember English vocabulary

Don’t learn vocabulary in isolation.  If you want to remember the word ice cream, learn that word and all of the ingredients together with freezer, container, cone, and other related words.  Learning relevant words together will help to create a network instead of an isolated “island in your mind” which is easily forgotten.

Connect it with the other senses.  Connecting the word with the different senses will help you to ensure that you are making many varied connections.  So when you learn ice cream, think about the smell, the taste and the feel of ice cream on your tongue.  Think about the chill that you feel when you open the freezer.  Connecting the memories of these senses will utilize more of your brain and mark that information as important.

Do not translate.  Remember that by translating, you are connecting the word to first language words not English words.  To help you to recall the words faster, connect them to English words, concepts and memories.  Instead of translating try using simple English words or a picture; you don’t need definitions just a memory trigger will remind you.

Make sentences.  This means that you connect the vocabulary to situations and sentences that you are likely to use them in.  It is also good practice in using the grammar of the word.  For example if you learn the word rely, do we say rely on someone or rely in someone?  This is the grammar of the word and it is important if you look up a word in the dictionary to see what prepositions and other words are commonly used with it.

Remember that the brain is likely to hold about 8 new pieces of information at a time and you can trick it to learn a group as one piece.  I used to teach kids three different forms of verbs at one time eat-ate-eaten and drink-drank-drunk.  Surprisingly, the kids remembered these easier than if you try to get them to remember the individual words.  But don’t try to remember a long list of vocabulary in one sitting, or look up 50 words as you are reading and expect to remember them all.  A little vocabulary each day is the best way to go.

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Improving your speaking fluency in English

August 13th, 2011 | Posted by glenn in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

For a lot of people, the most important thing about studying a language is improving their fluency.  It is nice to have a good understanding of grammar but it is better to be able to show it off by speaking really well.  So, let’s have a look at what it takes to speak well.

Fluency means having a smooth conversation.  We do this by reducing the number of communication breakdowns in the conversation.  Communication breakdowns can come from speaking and listening but let’s look at four ways to reduce speaking breakdowns: correct grammar, natural speaking speed, correct vocabulary and clear pronunciation .

Step one: Making correct sentences.

Often, we feel more comfortable using grammar that we are familiar with.  When you are out with friends, this is the grammar that gets the most practice because you can use it quickly and easily.  However, it is the grammar that you have learnt but don’t practice much that gives you the most opportunity for improvement.  Practice this grammar and expand the circle of grammars that you use often.

Step two: Making them at natural speed.

This means practice, practice, practice.  Practice making sentences in a variety of ways.  This means making negatives, questions and passive sentences.  Change the tense to make past, present and future sentences.

Then, when you are comfortable making sentences in different ways, make them faster.  Speed work helps you to feel more confident in making sentences easily at the speed that English speakers expect to hear them.

Step three: Choose the correct words.

Be careful when you use a dictionary because often a word has feeling as well as meaning.  The words cool and cold for example have similar meanings but if I say that the weather is cool, I like it.  If I say it is cold, I don’t.

Step four: Listen and correct the sounds.

Conversation goes a lot smoother if you can reduce the number of breakdowns that happen when the listener doesn’t understand your speech.  You can reduce these by listening to how native English speakers say these words.  Listen carefully though.  Listen for the sounds that are different to your language, listen to which part of the sentence the speaker says with emphasis and which part they say with no emphasis (or don’t say at all), listen to the rhythm of the sentences.

If you can mimic these things, you will sound more natural and be easier to understand.

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Taking it to the next !

June 13th, 2010 | Posted by admin in Improving your English - (0 Comments)

The question I get from every student at some point is how they can really improve their level. Obviously, we are talking about students who already have a solid basis, but are ambitious to get better. In addition to a couple of private speaking lessons per week with a native speaker I tell them what I’ve learned from the study habits of my best students. Now I’m going to tell you!

An important point to make is that as a students character and personalty varies so will the method appropriate for them. I think the secret to good learning is do something consistently and in the easiest most enjoyable way possible.

Google translation exercise – The way this works is that you take an interesting text in your mother tongue and you get Google to translate the text into English. You now have all the words already typed, the exercise now is to be Google’s teacher and correct all the, mostly grammatical, mistakes.

(E) books – The advantage of the ebook over the traditional book, if you are happy to read a lot of text from an LCD style screen, is the quick definition possibility you have with difficult words (provided you’ve already installed a dictionary). My advice here is to select a book you really, really want to read. Make sure the language / writing style of the author is very straight forward. Then even if you can get quick translations avoid doing it for every word you don’t know. Try to immerse yourself in the story as much as possible only translating words that are essential for understanding or words that keep coming up over and over again.

Watching TV / movies / news – One of the big problems for learning English in European countries is that many still dub foreign language movies and TV programs into the native language. A convenient opportunity to hear ‘normal’ spoken English is therefore lost (if you needa spoken English course online, you know where to find us!). I put normal in ‘apostrophes’ because it is often very difficult to understand the language of the news as the language used is of a more formal, higher level. The language in movies in particular can be very hard to follow for different reasons. In a lot of modern movies the scenes change very quickly or don’t appear in a logical way. A lot of different characters get introduced quickly without time to get used to the way they speak and very often the language used is altered to give the movie more style.

For all of the above reasons this method while it would seem to be the most enjoyable can be the most frustrating. My advice is to find good kids movies with adult appeal where the language is a little easier, but even here I’ve noticed things have become more difficult, so first go for classic old Walt Disney movies. It is also going to be easier if you can watch a version with English subtitles, then you can watch, listen and read at the same time.

Grammar books / word lists – It sounds like hard work to me but for some it definitely produces results. There are software programs that can randomly test word knowledge on lists of problematic words entered by the student. If you have the discipline you can really improve your vocabulary. The best thing about this technique is that it only requires a few minutes a day. I’ve had other students who love studying grammar books. This works well when the student tries to understand a point by themselves and then reinforces and practices it later with a teacher. It’s particularly good if you need to prepare for an English exam.

Internet sites – There are 100′s of websites with different kinds of learn English exercises and tips. In particular if there is a grammar issue you want to practice or sample questions for different international tests there is a lot of help available. I personally like the sites that prepare audio files of conversations backed up with comprehension style questions.

I hope this has given you some ideas. Until next time keep learning English!