6 Key Questions For Success with English - Part 4: What?

You have the motivation to make a start with your ‘Why?’, you know ‘Who?’ you want to communicate with and you now know ‘When?’ and how much time you have to prepare. Now, ‘What’ do you want to say?

It never ceases to amaze me how much time is lost and wasted trying to learn grammar rules and phrases which have no relationship with the life of the learner. Even in school as children we are taught ‘the basics’ of languages very often without any connection to the lives of the children. I was lucky as a child because I was interested in how other people lived in other countries and I enjoyed learning their languages. Times have changed. I am...

6 Key Questions For Success with English - Part 3: When?

In parts one and two we looked at the question ‘Why?’ in order to find the necessary motivation for learning and then the question ‘Who?’ in order to give us a little more direction. Now it is time to reach for your diary because the next question is ‘When?’

When do you need to communicate in English? This may seem like a strange question at first but. everybody has a different situation. For example, do you need English for a special event at sometime in the future, such as a presentation, speech, job interview, trade fair or another kind of meeting. If there is a specific event and we have the date and time, we know how long we have in...

6 Key Questions For Success with English - Part 2: Who?

Once we have the big ‘Why?’ question answered we're probably already part way to answering the second big question ‘Who?’ Who do you want to communicate with in English? You may have already identified that you need to communicate with suppliers, clients or international colleagues but it is a good idea to look a little more deeply and see what useful information you have about these people. Again, a mind mapping process is a useful way of recording your thoughts on paper. For example, for some people all three categories of supplier, client and colleague may apply giving three main branches to the mind map. There may be other categories too.

Once you have your main categories, see if you can...

6 Key Questions For Success with English - Part 1: Why?

Recent statistics published in Spain state that the main motive Spanish people have for studying another language is that they believe they need it for their work. I suspect that this is true in many other countries although the statistics probably vary. However, when we look at the amount of time and energy needed to learn another language, perhaps we need some stronger motivation if we are to achieve the results that we really want. So many times when people say ‘I need to improve my English’ nothing actually happens. I wrote another blog post about this topic a few years ago but I think it Is worth looking at again.
One of the reasons nothing happens is because the...