In 2016, the English For Study website was brought into existence when the first articles were published in April/May.
Over the past 8 or so months, English For Study has grown, and I’m incredibly happy to be able to help so many English learners around the world to improve their English.
So, to celebrate the end of 2016, and to help you start 2017 with an English learning BANG, here are my top 5 English learning articles from this year:
#1 Improving Your Listening With a Simple Change
In this post, I show you the importance of ‘metacognitive strategies’. These are learning strategies that are not often used, but can have a profound impact on your English learning.
One of these strategies is ‘reflection’, and I show you how to use it to improve your English listening in this article.
#2 Overcoming Speaking Anxiety
Some people feel sick when they speak English. Others get very very nervous. If this is you, you might have speaking anxiety. It’s common, and it’s sometimes caused by a lack of confidence – especially if you’re not usually anxious.
In this article, I show you how to get over speaking anxiety in English.
Here’s what one English For Study reader said about the article:
Your articles are amazing, each subject you are writing about hits a nerve.Specially this one i was having the same feelings for last couple of weeks, as i am working with native speakers and i am the only one who’s not a native speaker. And this makes me anxious.I will definitely go with your five strategies.
#3 English Vocabulary Advice
In this mega-article, I asked a bunch of other English teachers to share their best vocabulary learning tip.
The result…?
…An English learning BOMB exploding with wisdom.
If you haven’t read it yet, you are definitely missing out… Seriously…
#4 The Presentation Checklist
This was an article that I wrote for English With A Twist – a website run by my friend Shanthi.
In the article, I shared some essential checks that you should do the day before you do presentation.
I’ve been teaching people how to give academic presentations for several years, so if you’re going to give a presentation soon, I think you’ll appreciate this value-packed article.
#5 Essay Opinion Phrases
Shayna, from Espresso English, asked me to write an article about academic writing. One of the areas that a lot of students struggle with is giving their opinion in an essay.
Unfortunately, the IELTS test (and most similar language tests) encourages you to give your opinion in an informal way. In academic papers, you can’t do this.
So, in this article, I give you some patterns that you can use in the formal academic papers that you’ll write at university or for research.
Special Mentions
I really wanted to just make this a short overview of some of my most popular articles, but as I started writing it, I found that there were really too many great ones to share!
So, here are a few more of my favourite articles…
Academic Tenses: Which tenses should you use in your essay? Which tenses are most popular? I wrote a simple reference guide to answer those questions.
Culture & English: Learning English isn’t just about the language; it’s also about the culture. I wrote a guide to some of the most popular cultural situations you’ll find yourself in if you visit the UK.
Learn English Faster: If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know I don’t believe in special tricks or 24 hours to fluent English. I do believe in systems and principles, however. In this popular article, I shared five ways for you to speed up your English learning.
Definitely, it was a year full of excellent articles from you. Some of them worked like the steps leading me out from the pitfall many learners fall in: I mean the dreadful feeling we’re not moving forward, not improving. Reading your predictions I couldn’t help but giggle, especially the 4th one. Funny thing, I can see a very similar picture. But you know what, I think most of these ‘pretty’ ones are pretty because they said so (or tried hard to convince the viewer to think so). All for the sake of improving their marketing. Some of them might even don’t like themselves for that, but “Business is business and business must go…”. I had no idea phrasal verbs were trendy this year; maybe because I rather follow my nose than trends, and I’m perfectly happy with that. I have a second thought about chunks, too. I will write about it the other day, my post is getting too long… Anyway, many thanks for all these wonderful articles. I’ll give them second and third reading to remember better the most valuable fragments.