8 Tips to improve your writing

Writing Skill

Strong writing skills in English come from practice and determination. No one is born an excellent writer. Learning to be an excellent writer in English takes a lot of time and practice. Anyone can be a good writer if they are determined enough. Everyone has a different reason why they need to improve their writing. Maybe you need to improve your writing for work or for your English class at university. Or maybe you want to start a blog about learning English or you need to respond to emails in English for your business. Below are 8 Tips to Improve Your English Writing Skills:

 1. Keep All of your Writing in One Place Buy a notebook or journal or start an electronic journal. By keeping your writing all in the same place, you will be able to see how much you are improving and keep it organized.




2. Practice Writing in English Daily The importance of writing daily is that you start to create a new habit. Writing every day in English will soon become natural and something you look forward to. You will not see a significant improvement if you are not dedicated to becoming a better writer in English. You cannot create awesome stories and papers if you never try.




 3. Pick a Topic and WRITE! Don’t get stuck on figuring out what to write about. You can write about anything. You can write about what you do, things you hear or see, news, or make up a story. If you do get stuck, use some of English Tonight’s writing prompts to help you get started.




4. Write More than One Draft Draft means a preliminary version of piece of writing. Sometimes, your best writing becomes better after you take a break and work on a second or third draft. When you revise (or rewrite) your work you are often able to get your message across more clearly. You make think of things that you did not think to write in the first draft and you can add it in a later draft.




 5. Use Online Resources to Correct your Grammar Yes, grammar is a pain. You don’t need to know everything about English grammar. Use online resources, such as Grammarly, GrammarCheck or GrammarBook.com to help you answer a grammar question when it comes up. You could also switch the spell and grammar check on MS Word, your iPad or Google Doc to check your spelling and grammar in English.




6. Think Outside the Box (or Lines) Don’t write about the same thing every day or you will get bored. Try writing the same story from different perspectives or different tenses. If you are writing a story about a baby that won’t stop crying; first, it could be the mother telling the story; then from the perspective of the baby. Or you could write it in present moment…. ‘My baby hasn’t stopped crying in five days…’ and then write in the perspective of a pregnant woman that is thinking about having a baby that won’t stop crying. Don’t write about topics in the obvious way. Be creative!




7. Have a Friend Edit Your Writing Have a friend that knows English correct or edit your work. Having another person read your work helps generate more ideas to better your writing. You could have them edit everything or just a part that you are stuck on. Often having another set of eyes look at your writing helps find mistakes that you have overlooked.




8. Find the Best Place for You to Write You should try writing in different places or at different times of the day. Maybe you have writer’s block at night; try getting up 15 minutes earlier and writing in the morning. Maybe you have trouble writing where there is a lot of noise; try writing in a quiet and comfortable place. Experiment in finding the right (or write?) environment for you to write. Writing is a process; the more you work on your writing the better it (and you) will get.



listening skill

Listening steps

By developing their ability to listen well we develop our students' ability to become more independent learners, as by hearing accurately they are much more likely to be able to reproduce accurately, refine their understanding of grammar and develop their own vocabulary.
In this article I intend to outline a framework that can be used to design a listening lesson that will develop your students' listening skills and look at some of the issues involved.

• The basic framework

• Pre-listening

• While listening

• Post-listening

• Applying the framework to a song

• Some conclusions

The basic framework
The basic framework on which you can construct a listening lesson can be divided into three main stages.

• Pre-listening, during which we help our students prepare to listen.

• While listening, during which we help to focus their attention on the listening text and guide the development of their understanding of it.

• Post-listening, during which we help our students integrate what they have learnt from the text into their existing knowledge.

Pre-listening
There are certain goals that should be achieved before students attempt to listen to any text. These are motivation, contextualisation, and preparation.

• Motivation
  It is enormously important that before listening students are motivated to listen, so you should try to select a text that they will find interesting and then design tasks that will arouse your students' interest and curiosity.

• Contextualisation
  When we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its natural environment, and that environment gives us a huge amount of information about the linguistic content we are likely to hear. Listening to a tape recording in a classroom is a very unnatural process. The text has been taken from its original environment and we need to design tasks that will help students to contextualise the listening and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text.

• Preparation
  To do the task we set students while they listen there could be specific vocabulary or expressions that students will need. It's vital that we cover this before they start to listen as we want the challenge within the lesson to be an act of listening not of understanding what they have to do.

While listening
When we listen to something in our everyday lives we do so for a reason. Students too need a reason to listen that will focus their attention. For our students to really develop their listening skills they will need to listen a number of times - three or four usually works quite well - as I've found that the first time many students listen to a text they are nervous and have to tune in to accents and the speed at which the people are speaking.
Ideally the listening tasks we design for them should guide them through the text and should be graded so that the first listening task they do is quite easy and helps them to get a general understanding of the text. Sometimes a single question at this stage will be enough, not putting the students under too much pressure.
The second task for the second time students listen should demand a greater and more detailed understanding of the text. Make sure though that the task doesn't demand too much of a response. Writing long responses as they listen can be very demanding and is a separate skill in itself, so keep the tasks to single words, ticking or some sort of graphical response.
The third listening task could just be a matter of checking their own answers from the second task or could lead students towards some more subtle interpretations of the text.
Listening to a foreign language is a very intensive and demanding activity and for this reason I think it's very important that students should have 'breathing' or 'thinking' space between listenings. I usually get my students to compare their answers between listenings as this gives them the chance not only to have a break from the listening, but also to check their understanding with a peer and so reconsider before listening again.

Post-listening
There are two common forms that post-listening tasks can take. These are reactions to the content of the text, and analysis of the linguistic features used to express the content.

• Reaction to the text
  Of these two I find that tasks that focus students reaction to the content are most important. Again this is something that we naturally do in our everyday lives. Because we listen for a reason, there is generally a following reaction. This could be discussion as a response to what we've heard - do they agree or disagree or even believe what they have heard? - or it could be some kind of reuse of the information they have heard.

• Analysis of language
  The second of these two post-listening task types involves focusing students on linguistic features of the text. This is important in terms of developing their knowledge of language, but less so in terms of developing students' listening skills. It could take the form of an analysis of verb forms from a script of the listening text or vocabulary or collocation work. This is a good time to do form focused work as the students have already developed an understanding of the text and so will find dealing with the forms that express those meanings much easier.

Applying the framework to a song
Here is an example of how you could use this framework to exploit a song:

• Pre-listening
  • Students brainstorm kinds of songs
  • Students describe one of their favourite songs and what they like about it
  • Students predict some word or expressions that might be in a love song

• While listening
  • Students listen and decide if the song is happy or sad
  • Students listen again and order the lines or verses of the song
  • Students listen again to check their answers or read a summary of the song with errors in and correct them.

• Post-listening
  • Focus on content
    • Discuss what they liked / didn't like about the song
    • Decide whether they would buy it / who they would buy it for
    • Write a review of the song for a newspaper or website
    • Write another verse for the song
  • Focus on form
    • Students look at the lyrics from the song and identify the verb forms
    • Students find new words in the song and find out what they mean
    • Students make notes of common collocations within the song



Speaking fluently

4 Speaking Rules you need to know!

1. Don't study grammar too much

This rule might sound strange to many ESL students, but it is one of the most important rules. If you want to pass examinations, then study grammar. However, if you want to become fluent in English, then you should try to learn English without studying the grammar.

Studying grammar will only slow you down and confuse you. You will think about the rules when creating sentences instead of naturally saying a sentence like a native. Remember that only a small fraction of English speakers know more than 20% of all the grammar rules. Many ESL students know more grammar than native speakers. I can confidently say this with experience. I am a native English speaker, majored in English Literature, and have been teaching English for more than 10 years. However, many of my students know more details about English grammar than I do. I can easily look up the definition and apply it, but I don't know it off the top of my head.

I often ask my native English friends some grammar questions, and only a few of them know the correct answer. However, they are fluent in English and can read, speak, listen, and communicate effectively.

Do you want to be able to recite the definition of a causative verb, or do you want to be able to speak English fluently?

2. Learn and study phrases

Many students learn vocabulary and try to put many words together to create a proper sentence. It amazes me how many words some of my students know, but they cannot create a proper sentence. The reason is because they didn't study phrases. When children learn a language, they learn both words and phrases together. Likewise, you need to study and learn phrases.

If you know 1000 words, you might not be able to say one correct sentence. But if you know 1 phrase, you can make hundreds of correct sentences. If you know 100 phrases, you will be surprised at how many correct sentences you will be able to say. Finally, when you know only a 1000 phrases, you will be almost a fluent English speaker.

The English Speaking Basics section is a great example of making numerous sentences with a single phrase. So don't spend hours and hours learning many different words. Use that time to study phrases instead and you will be closer to English fluency.

Don't translate

When you want to create an English sentence, do not translate the words from your Mother tongue. The order of words is probably completely different and you will be both slow and incorrect by doing this. Instead, learn phrases and sentences so you don't have to think about the words you are saying. It should be automatic.

Another problem with translating is that you will be trying to incorporate grammar rules that you have learned. Translating and thinking about the grammar to create English sentences is incorrect and should be avoided.

3. Reading and Listening is NOT enough. Practice Speaking what you hear!

Reading, listening, and speaking are the most important aspects of any language. The same is true for English. However, speaking is the only requirement to be fluent. It is normal for babies and children to learn speaking first, become fluent, then start reading, then writing. So the natural order is listening, speaking, reading, then writing.

First Problem
Isn't it strange that schools across the world teach reading first, then writing, then listening, and finally speaking? Although it is different, the main reason is because when you learn a second language, you need to read material to understand and learn it. So even though the natural order is listening, speaking, reading, then writing, the order for ESL students is reading, listening, speaking, then writing.

Second Problem
The reason many people can read and listen is because that's all they practice. But in order to speak English fluently, you need to practice speaking. Don't stop at the listening portion, and when you study, don't just listen. Speak out loud the material you are listening to and practice what you hear. Practice speaking out loud until your mouth and brain can do it without any effort. By doing so, you will be able to speak English fluently.

4. Submerge yourself

Being able to speak a language is not related to how smart you are. Anyone can learn how to speak any language. This is a proven fact by everyone in the world. Everyone can speak at least one language. Whether you are intelligent, or lacking some brain power, you are able to speak one language.

This was achieved by being around that language at all times. In your country, you hear and speak your language constantly. You will notice that many people who are good English speakers are the ones who studied in an English speaking school. They can speak English not because they went to an English speaking school, but because they had an environment where they can be around English speaking people constantly.

There are also some people who study abroad and learn very little. That is because they went to an English speaking school, but found friends from their own country and didn't practice English.

  
   

Improve your English and learning skills

How to improve your English skills?

Our most important piece of advice is: "Do something (anything).
If you don't do anything, you won't get anywhere.
Make it your hobby, not a chore.
Above all have fun!
Oh, and don't be in too much of a hurry. You're setting off on a long journey and there will be delays and frustrations along the way. Sometimes you'll be in the fast lane and other times you'll be stuck in traffic, but there will also be lots of interesting things and interesting people along the way. Take your time to really enjoy the experience.
There are many ways to improve your level of English, but only you can find the right way for you. Here are a few tips that might help:-

Improve your Learning Skills

Learning is a skill and it can be improved.
Your path to learning effectively is through knowing

• yourself
• your capacity to learn
• processes you have successfully used in the past
• your interest, and knowledge of what you wish to learn

Motivate yourself

If you are not motivated to learn English you will become frustrated and give up. Ask yourself the following questions, and be honest:-

• Why do you need to learn/improve English?
• Where will you need to use English?
• What skills do you need to learn/improve? (Reading/Writing/Listening/Speaking)
• How soon do you need to see results?
• How much time can you afford to devote to learning English.
• How much money can you afford to devote to learning English.
• Do you have a plan or learning strategy?

Set yourself achievable goals

You know how much time you can dedicate to learning English, but a short time each day will produce better, longer-term results than a full day on the weekend and then nothing for two weeks.
Joining a short intensive course could produce better results than joining a course that takes place once a week for six months.
Here are some goals you could set yourself:-

• Join an English course - a virtual one or a real one (and attend regularly).
• Do your homework.
• Read a book or a comic every month.
• Learn a new word every day.
• Visit an English speaking forum every day.
• Read a news article on the net every day.
• Do 10 minutes listening practice every day.
• Watch an English film at least once a month.
• Follow a soap, comedy or radio or TV drama.

A good way to meet your goals is to establish a system of rewards and punishments.
Decide on a reward you will give yourself for fulfilling your goals for a month.

• A bottle of your favourite drink
• A meal out / or a nice meal at home
• A new outfit
• A manicure or massage

Understanding how you learn best may also help you.

There are different ways to learn. Find out what kind of learner you are in order to better understand how to learn more effectively..

The visual learner

Do you need to see your teacher during lessons in order to fully understand the content of a lesson?
Do you prefer to sit at the front of the classroom to avoid visual obstructions (e.g. people's heads)?
Do you think in pictures and learn best from visual displays including: diagrams, illustrated text books, overhead transparencies, videos, flashcards, flipcharts and hand-outs? 
During a lecture or classroom discussion, do you prefer to take detailed notes to absorb the information?
!Learning Tip - you may benefit from taking part in traditional English lessons, but maybe private lessons would be better.

The auditory learner

Do you learn best through verbal lectures, discussions, talking things through and listening to what others have to say?
Do you interpret the underlying meanings of speech through listening to tone of voice, pitch, speed and other nuances?
Does written information have little meaning until you hear it?
!Learning Tip - you may benefit from listening to the radio or listening to text as you read it. You could try reading text aloud and using a tape recorder to play it back to yourself.

The Tactile/Kinesthetic learner

Do you learn best through a hands-on approach, actively exploring the physical world around you?
Do you find it hard to sit still for long periods?
Do you become distracted easily?

Types of reading

Here are four different kinds of reading.

• Skimming - running the eyes over quickly, to get the gist
• Scanning - looking for a particular piece of information
• Extensive reading - longer texts for pleasure and needing global understanding
• Intensive reading - shorter texts, extracting specific information, accurate reading for detail.

Exercise

Using these descriptions, how would you read the following? Match the different types of reading with the categories below. Decide which one requires you to skim or to scan the text. Which one needs detailed Intensive reading? What type of text do you read Extensively - for pleasure?

The ‘What’s On’ section of the local paper:

• Skimming
• Scanning
• Extensive
• Intensive

The correct answer is: Scanning

A novel:

• Skimming
• Scanning
• Extensive
• Intensive

The correct answer is: Extensive (or Intensive for revision, perhaps)

A newspaper:

• Skimming
• Scanning
• Extensive
• Intensive

The correct answer is: Skimming, Scanning for specific information, Intensive if we find it.

A text in class:

• Skimming
• Scanning
• Extensive
• Intensive

The correct answer is: Intensive

A poem:

• Skimming
• Scanning
• Extensive
• Intensive

The correct answer is: Extensive

The telephone directory:

• Skimming
• Scanning
• Extensive
• Intensive

The correct answer is: Scanning

A postcard:

• Skimming
• Scanning
• Extensive
• Intensive

The correct answer is: Intensive

A train timetable:

• Skimming
• Scanning
• Extensive
• Intensive

The correct answer is: Scanning

A recipe:

• Skimming
• Scanning
• Extensive
• Intensive

The correct answer is:Intensive

A travel brochure:

• Skimming
• Scanning
• Extensive
• Intensive

Think and answer in comments