ESL Blogs

"fluency: noun

VERB + FLUENCY

achieve, acquire Some

young children achieve great fluency in their reading.

PREP. ~ in

Fluency in spoken English is essential"

Everyone has a desire to be fluent in English, we all like to express our ideas easily and accurately when speaking and writing, but most of them wish that they can be fluent in English like their own mother tongue, few of them determine to be fluent in English and acquire the wish of the majority, while majority is dreaming about it.

WISH is weak, takes a lot of time and uncertain, on the other hand DETERMINATION is powerful, gives results within a reasonable time and it's certain. You're the person who's going to decide, whether you should wish or determine, I'm just a friend with an opinion.

We can divide the four skills into two main categories, and those are, comprehension skills(receptive skills) and production  skills(expressive skills). We can put listening and reading into comprehension skills group where as speaking and writing into production skills group. Which one is the best group? take your time and think. In the mean time let me ask you a similar question, "Which eye is the best?" yes, we need both eyes to see things clearly. Same goes with comprehension and production skills. If you have only one category of skills, it is like blind in one eye. In fact, everybody knows the problem, about 60% knows what causes the problem, about 40% knows how to resolve the problem but about 20% get rid of the problem, before that problem get rid of them in real life.

According to my point of view, the real problem is "How to develop and continue an interest in learning English?"

There are several learning styles:

visual- looking

auditory- listening

kinaesthetic- touching, feeling and experiencing by doing something

olfactory- smelling

gustatory- tasting

First of all you should understand, what is your favorite learning style. At British Council they gave us a form to rate questions to determine our favorite learning style and then, they altered their teaching pattern to fit the class. Unfortunately I don't have that form with me, but I've just found a good web application that tells you, what is your favorite learning style. Please go to this website and click on the question marks(?) that you like, but don't look at the bottom of the page at once, just answer sequentially and be 100% honest about your answers if you really want to know your real favorite learning style. It'll take 2 minutes and will definitely give you something worth for a life time. After knowing your favorite learning style come back and read the rest...  

Click here to know your favorite learning style

Use the following URL in case link doesn't work.. :)

(http://www.brainboxx.co.uk/a3_aspects/pages/vak_quest.htm)

Congratulations mate! Now you know your favorite learning style, Mine is 'Kinaesthetic' I love to learn by doing. When I learn something new I like to get on with it. How about you? So now you can prioritize the ways that you learn English.. now on give the highest priority to your favorite learning style, that way you'll be able to consolidate your English without a hassle and getting bored.

I have some friends around the world as you all do, I'm really glad that I'm a member of this great EnglishClub. I've seen some people chat with short words than using full words, I've never shorten my words. I know those people doing that to shorten their response time, but they're forgetting something... we are here to learn while having fun. So if you can type full words, that will improve your vocabulary with correct spelling. Either way chatting is very important. But think about taking the best out of your investment(time & effort), they all can wait few more seconds, you think about improving your vocabulary.

We all have our own specialties.. that's why we can help each other.. I usually send two emails(formal letter format) per week to my pen pals. Even though I'm busy with Software Projects I still somehow find time to type letters to them. They reply to me as well. Those are long, interesting, funny emails. I add jokes, images, URLs etc. I'm suggesting you to do the same, find a pen pal. Don't try to send too many emails per week that will reduce the overall quality of your emails, it's like hugging a pile of Oranges you won't be able to hold a single orange! Send 2 or 3 descriptive emails per week, and make sure those are well written(according to your knowledge) and well presented. That will improve your letter writing and presenting skills. I'm sending emails to 2 girls (more than enough) in *($##@# and ^$#@!+_$ (he hee) that way I won't get bored :) they feel the same way about it. We've exchanged so many emails and now we are very good friends. You know same kind of birds always stay together!

Please be polite, but don't be quick to give them photos, videos or any sensitive data about you, that might make you regret one day. Give it sometime, get to know each other first. Don't be fooled by the number of gifts they got, some people get gifts for doing nothing... but there are some great members who have lots of gifts for their contribution. Don't measure people by the number of friends they got as well, Having lot of friends is a good thing, but it doesn't matter how many friends you got, what matters is how many good friends you have. Someone with 1 active friend is better than someone with 1000 inactive friends, wouldn't you agree?

Try to speak as much as possible, it doesn't matter you make mistakes, everybody makes mistakes even native speakers make mistakes, simply think about your mother tongue, haven't you done any mistakes? Just start a conversation, introduce your self, tell about your country and culture, talk about a common interest or a well known situation, sports, watched movies etc. even you can sing to each other, last night I had a discussion with a Chinese friend that I've just met and we've scheduled our discussion according to GMT(Abbreviation for 'greenwich mean time' wwp.greenwichmeantime.com) so we were able to start the discussion on time. When we were chatting several hours before the discussion, we've agreed to discuss about our respective cultures, that was the topic of our conversation, we had enough time to prepare ourselves for the conversation and I thought it'll be over within 15 minutes, but guess what? We've talked for 2 hours and 10 minutes. See, If both parties prepare for a certain conversation with details, you can have a very good conversation. That life experience will help you to have another discussion on the same topic without prior preparation. Now you might thinking of "how to find this kind of people around here?" well all you got to do is "Ask someone politely".

If I'm lucky, I might able to talk with you. There's a reason for that saying... You've read this far, an average person might read first 2 paragraphs and since this is a long article, they will feel bore and go away. But you've felt the importance, that's because you really want to improve your English.

Collaboration and sharing can go further than greed and selfishness, One candle can light up 100 other candles without dimming it's light. With that being said, I'd like to point out something scarce in here. It's fluent English speakers, specially native speakers. Well, lot of people seeking help to improve their elocution. Yes, I know without native speakers it's hard to achieve their accent and pronunciation, we might get stuck in the non native speakers level, to go beyond that level we need some help. But even though it is hard to achieve native English speakers level we can still be fluent in English. So don't worry about native English speakers accent. It can be achieved by staying in a English speaking county like UK, USA etc. Watching movies, listening to English music, and specially native English speakers use contractions and collocations when they speak. Collocations means 'Common allocations' so called 'word partners' or 'common partners', If you want to use a word naturally, you need to learn other words that often go with it. If you have a very good understanding in collocations, you'll be able to shorten sentences and express your ideas faster. At British Council we use "Oxford Collocations Dictionary" That's what they've recommended us.

Amazon link to Oxford Collocations Dictionary

At home I'm using 2 web applications for that, you can use either one.

http://oxforddictionary.so8848.com/ and http://www.ozdic.com/

At the top of the article you will find collocations for the noun "fluency", What did you think of that? You've probably thought I've done a mistake at the beginning. No, I put it there on purpose, so you at least try to guess "What the heck is this?" he hee...

If you can't find someone to talk with you, stop worrying and talk with yourself. I often talk to myself when I'm along(Else others might think I've gone nuts) and start thinking in English. Go to main chat room, and when some one submit a line of text, read it and answer it vocally, When I'm traveling by bus I'm always listening to others' conversations and provide answers to the questions. As an example let's say 'person A' is talking with 'person B' using a mobile phone and I'm sitting next to 'person A', then I'm answering 'person A's questions in my mind like I'm the 'person B'. I do the same thing when I'm walking with others as well. Someone might think it's weird, But believe me it works, and it's really funny, because we can think(answer) whatever we want. See, all the English and Non English speakers were helping you all that time, but you couldn't understand that. Think differently, real world possibilities are endless...

If you know your English level, then you can easily find a graded reader to match your level in English and try to identify grammar rules, punctuations and quotations while you're reading it. When you get use to it, you'll see grammar rules without an effort. If you're trying so hard to improve your English then you will definitely see English grammar in your dreams, even you'll argue in English within your dreams. Believe me that is a fact, the things that we always do and think will appear in our dreams. Usually we see this type of dreams when we are about to wake up. When you writing sentences based on grammar rules make sure you personalize your sentences, What I meant by that is make sentences about you, about someone or something that you know well and take your own life experience to write sentences than just making sentences about something or someone you don't know. That way you can easily remember grammar rules.

You can improve your listening by listening to BBC word radio channel and by listening to music.. Back in the days I've used to listen to Hip Hop music but now I'm in to Pop music... I've listened to Hip Hop music for ages, I couldn't understand each and every word, but I've loved Hip Hip, Now I'm listening to Pop Music and I can easily understand the meanings of the songs. I'm going to leave 2 of my favorite songs for you as a reward. Watch them and think about facts that you've just learned by reading this long article... Thank you very much!

Kosala Siribaddana

Enjoy your rewards... regards!