Making mistakes is part of learning a language but you don’t want to make mistakes all the time, you want to be as accurate as possible as often as possible. Here are three steps to help you improve your accuracy.
Fillers are frequently used by native speakers yet students tend to leave them out. In today’s post I’ll tell you why you should use them.
Whenever you write, it is advisable to vary your sentence structures in order to keep your readers’ interest. In this post, I’ll show you an easy way to do this using relative clauses.
I have written before about using your to-do list as a way to practise English but why not use your to-do list for more repetitive grammar study? You could use this system for present perfect tense, modals and contrasting the simple future, present continuous and simple past tenses. Present Perfect Tense Simply add the item … [Read more…]
So many of my students, mainly college students, keep reaching for dictionaries. Every time they see a word they don’t understand or get into a situation where they don’t know the perfect word in English like they do in their first language out comes their smartphone for the dictionary or their Casio Ex-Words. Every language … [Read more…]
One of the things a lot of students worry about is making English-speaking friends, or how to find them. It is much the same as finding friends that speak your own language. Don’t look to people just because they are native English speakers This is a big one. Nobody wants to feel used but this … [Read more…]
Chairing a meeting means that you have to be in charge of keeping the meeting on topic and on schedule so that important information can be given and decisions can be made. Here are some useful phrases. Starting the meeting You need to make sure that everybody knows it is time to start and it … [Read more…]
Usually I tell my students, “If you make a mistake, nobody dies.” For most people, English mistakes in a conversation don’t have significant effects and in business conversations you are probably fine. However, there are four kinds of mistakes that business people routinely make and may cost them money. Spelling Mistakes This should be easy … [Read more…]
Some students are patient and others are very impatient. Some students are diligent and others want to communicate as much as possible and as quickly as possible. The ones I see improve most quickly are the impatient ones. Why? Hungry for language Impatient students are hungry for language and they will try to soak up … [Read more…]
Today’s podcast is about managing conversations. It’s one of the most useful skills for any language learner, in my opinion. 20140401 Managing Conversations The podcast is also available in the iTunes Store by searching for Get Great English or clicking here.