Lynn's Tips on improving English

Including writing, reading, listening, and speaking!! You may download a WORD file here. 

You are so welcome to have a talk over the tips with Lynn!!

Writing

Apart from Professor Hsieh’s guidelines, here are some other suggestions:

l   Try to do a plan with the main points first to avoid repetition and ask yourself if what you are writing adds value to your paper

l   When defining terms in the introduction, choose a definition that is relevant to your topic

l   After stating your main point in the topic sentence, it is important to use conjunction words to relate the following supporting sentences

l   Try to use transition words to emphasize certain key points or to compare and contrast

l   Keep the terms or sentence patterns consistent when making a list or describing a series of steps

l   Use a thesaurus to avoid repeated words but don’t use words you don’t know just to make it sound better

l   Use a collocations dictionary or corpus to find out which words collate together i.e. which nouns go together with which verbs like ‘commit a crime’, ‘perform an operation’

l   Read and learn from model articles but avoid copying as they might not always be applicable

l   Read up on expressing different levels of certainty, especially for the discussion part

http://unilearning.uow.edu.au/academic/4aiii_2.html

Reading

l   Try to skim read the first time to get the general gist, you can look up any vocabulary the second time

l   Pay attention to the use of conjunction words in order to understand the relationship between key words

l   You do not need to read aloud when reading for information. It will slow you down

l   Reading aloud can be helpful for a presentation or related listening tasks so that you can pick up on the words when you hear them

l   After reading an article, practice writing a brief summary. This is to see if you can catch the key points. You can do this in pairs for peer evaluation and compare your work to see if you got the same key information.

Listening

l   Try to listen to different types of OT/PT podcasts e.g. interviews, seminar presentations, debates etc. This will help you to follow less structured or more spontaneous speech.

l   Apart from OPT podcasts, try to listen to speeches in other areas such as world news, business, entertainment etc. to get a feel of how language is used in different contexts.

l   Try to let go of certain words you don’t understand and listen to the speech as a whole. The key points will often be repeated or emphasized in the speaker’s tone of voice.

l   If you are unfamiliar with the topic, read some reference articles beforehand to help you become familiar with the terms.

l   If you get lost in the middle, try to use your logic and speculate what they might be talking about and its relation to the topic, then go back and listen to it again and check.

l   Listen to a range of different accents and don’t assume that you won’t be able to understand. After the first 5 minutes, you will get more used to it.

l   When asked to recall the information and you can’t remember or there is too much, try to summarize and paraphrase. Remember you don’t need to repeat exactly what the speaker said.

Speaking

l   Don’t get stuck on certain words you can’t think of. Try using a different way to express your thoughts. Eg. It is very efficient à It can save a lot of time.

l   Grammar is not that important in speaking but pay attention to the tense of verbs (past, present, future)

l   Avoid too many fillers (um, ah) or laughing, and going around in circles when you can’t think of what to say

l   Try to write down certain phrases or expressions that you find useful rather than single vocabulary words, or practice using the new words to make your own sentences and have a native speaker check.

l   Make sure you use coherent sentences when speaking, don’t just say single words or fragments, your speech still has to make sense. You can record yourself and listen back to it to see how to make it better.