How can we keep ourselves motivated?

by Rina

hi robby,
I'm a foreigner who wishes to improve my English fluency. I find it rather difficult to express myself, find suitable vocab and my descriptions always includes simple vocabulary.

I'm going to have my oral communication skills tested in August. Do you think I can still improve? How can I keep myself motivated as from the few practices I had with my teacher, I found that I never improve, which makes me rather discouraged now.

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Feb 23, 2011
 Maintaining Motivation To Improve English Fluency
by: Robby Kukurs

Hi Rina,

It's very easy to lose motivation to improve upon something if you don't see results, it's understandable!

August is five months away, and you can definitely improve upon your fluency, there's no doubt about that!

Here are a few tips you can apply on your English improving routine that will make a difference:

* make it a habit to practice spoken English with yourself. You don't necessarily need a real person to communicate with, and in your case it's a problem because your teacher is the only person you can talk to, right?

So you can do all the following: narrate your actions, re-tell news articles and film plots, think aloud in English, make daily plans in English - in other words, do as much English speaking with yourself as possible! Here's a link to my latest video about this topic: http://englishharmony.com/spoken-english-practice/

Whenever you don't know how to say a particular thing in English - find out how to say it and memorize the new vocabulary by memorizing. Make sure you actually use all new vocabulary in your monologues so that it becomes part of your active vocabulary!

* memorize English phrases so that you can use them naturally in English conversations.

Whenever you learn a new English word/expression - learn it as a part of a collocation rather than just on its own (read more about collocations here http://englishharmony.com/use-english-collocations/ ) Repeat it a good number of times so that you can AUTOMATICALLY pronounce the phrase on a relevant occasion!

Try to learn at least 5 new phrases/word combinations every day and make sure they're relevant (ones that you'd actually use in daily conversations!) Everything new you hear on TV, on radio, or on the Web - learn it by memorizing! Just make sure not to translate it into your native language - use dictionary.com and thefreedictionary.com to look up meanings of new words/phrases/idioms.

If you follow these recommendations, you should see a considerable improvement to your English fluency!

Hope this helps,

Best Regards,

Robby

Robby Kukurs is the creator of www.englishharmony.com, a website he created in 2007 to help struggling foreign English speakers gain real English fluency.

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