Author: Mark
Text Reading Level: B2
Many of my students have set goals and clear deadlines for achieving them. If your aim is to pass an IELTS exam, there are certainly ways to focus your learning so that you can speed up your education. However, if your goal is true fluency and comfortable communication, you might need to begin thinking about how you learn English in a different way.
Rushing your education rarely ends well.
Vocabulary
As discussed in my blog post “Building your Vocabulary the Right Way”, it is easy to learn new words incorrectly and build bad habits when you try to learn new words too quickly without a good method for doing so. This can be a big problem for your learning as not only do you have to continue learning more words and more grammar, but you also have to unlearn the wrong meanings and word use that you learned in the past.
Learning a word, then unlearning it, then relearning it again is not an efficient way to study by any means. So spending a bit more time carefully learning words correctly the first time can end up saving you time and stress in the long term!
It can be intimidating for language students to think about all the words they might need to learn in order to truly become fluent, but it does not have to be this way! No native English speaker knows all of the words in the English language. We learn new words all the time too! We don’t try to study our own language, instead we discover new words when we are in a context that needs them. We hear or see a few examples of the word being used by other people and we copy those uses to communicate the same idea when we need to do so. The only difference between us and language learners is that we are already used to the grammatical rules of English, and naturally understand context.
With vocabulary learning, the best way to steadily build your vocabulary confidence is to do what your brain does best, solve problems! Problem solving and repetition help your brain to store new information far more effectively than just rote learning alone. The words you learn must have a use for you. If you learn a word and use a word when you need that word, then recall and revise it twice a week for 4 weeks or so, you will have a greater chance of retaining that knowledge than if you picked a random word to learn from a word list simply because you wanted to build your general vocabulary. Learn the natural way!
Accidental Emphasis and Hesitation
If you are trying to improve your general fluency, the words you use in your speech must not scare you and they must not seem to you like a great achievement when you use them. Words and grammar are just tools that we use to solve the problem of miscommunication. If you use words that you are not confident with, you are likely to accidentally give the word too great an emphasis when you are speaking, or heistate too much before you use it. Even if you are using the correct word, in the correct context with the correct sentence structure and pronunciation, your intonation can still be affected. While this is not at all a problem when you are practicing, it can be a big problem in tests and exams. Practice with friends, practice with fluent speakers, practice with anyone who will let you practice! Practice again and again until the words that scared you are boring to use! No B1 or B2 level learner is scared of using the word “chair” or “apple”. Why is that? What makes one word scarier or harder than another? Anything that affects how ‘hard’ a word is to learn can be eliminated with practice until every word you know is as simple and boring to use as “chair” or “apple”.
