When you speak English, one of the things you must think about is relationships. Who are you talking to? How well do you know them? What is the situation?
It is useful, especially in business situations, to be formal. In most native-English speaking cultures, business relationships start formal then become more informal as the relationship develops.
Recently I have taught a lot of new students. The same as I usually do, I talked to them about their study habits. Their reactions have left me a bit confused.
I went to a conference about teaching English a couple of weeks ago and saw a presentation by Paul Raine, the owner of a great website Apps4EFL.com. It’s a free website for students and teachers.
When you are giving a list of options for others to choose from or explaining options to people, try to sequence the options so you sound natural.
An example of this could be transport options.
You can get the train, the bus or walk to my house.
This is OK but you can show that while walking might not be popular it is possible.
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If you have problems in understanding what people say in your listening, either in face-to-face conversations or when listening to recorded material, why not try using word stresses to help you.
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The adverbs ‘still’ and ‘yet’ are similar in some cases but also very different. For Japanese learners of English they can translate to the same word, and this can cause difficulty. You’re still here? You haven’t given up yet? Read on.
What is Extensive Reading? It’s the kind of reading you do where you choose the things you read, not your teacher, and you decide how quickly to move on.
Here are a collection of sites for Extensive Reading:
Sometimes you need to use English for a problem. A lot of the time the problems you need to deal with are small. Unfortunately, sometimes they are large problems.
When your problems are so large that you want to do something to solve them, you might need to use English. It is, for better or worse, the main international language. It is the language that most multinational companies and organisations use.
Maybe a company is doing something you do not like and you want to persuade them to stop. Maybe a foreign government is doing something you don’t like and you want them to stop. Perhaps you want to show solidarity with other activists.
You can:
Opposition to the Osprey aircraft used by the U.S. military in Japan.
Raising awareness of Coca Cola in Colombia and its links to paramilitary death squads.