Nowadays millions of people are learning English online. You could be one of them. All you need is a good headset and stable internet connection. Learn English anytime anywhere from the office or the comfort of your own home with a native British teacher. Regular feedback to help you monitor your progress.
How to get started
First of all, you need a good headset so that you can hear every consonant and vowel pronounced by your teacher. Likewise, the teacher needs to understand your pronunciation and correct you when necessary.
Choosing a good headset
It is important that you are in a quiet place with a stable internet connection. The most reliable platform is SKYPE and the headset which I use is designed for skype calls. I recommend this headset from Amazon.
You will get so much more out of the lesson if you can hear everything clearly. Some headsets today are able to cancel out any irritating background noise.
Working with a good course book
I usually use and recommend students to get a copy of Headway Oxford students book with audio cds and workbook. These come in different levels.
I partly use a course book as I like to design my own materials and most of my lessons are based on speaking.
We work a little with grammar, reading and listening as you can work on these skills alone, but it may be difficult to practise speaking for various reasons so the majority of the lesson is based on speaking and ONLY in ENGLISH.
I then assign grammar exercises for homework, but only those grammar structures which the student may have difficulty with or need extra practice.
I also assign reading from Pearson graded books and other resources such as BBC 6 mins. http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/english/features/6-minute-english
Headway Oxford is an excellent course book for the student as it does not give you lengthy grammar explanations, but it is concise and to the point. The workbook is useful for the exercises linked to the units.
Written English – register for your free grammar checker tool
There are many grammar books such as English grammar in use and Oxford which are useful for teaching the grammar rules. These are vital in any language. We cannot play a game if we do not know the rules. Writing is like wearing an outfit. You are judged on how you write.
Natives can also make mistakes. If you are writing to a Company and they see bad grammar, they will discard your application immediately. So, we need to be make sure our writing is flawless.
But how do we know if the grammar sentences we write are correct? Luckily, we can ask a language teacher or a native or we can use a powerful grammar tool which checks over 250 grammar rules. All you have to do is upload your document and grammarly will check it.
The mistakes are highlighted and replaced with the correct tenses or prepositions along with a grammar explanation. Spelling is also checked. You will learn better English this way and what’s more, it is completely free. All you have to do is sign up and get your free tool. Your writing will make a good impression. Dress to impress!
Online dictionaries
I suggest a monolingual dictionary and not to use a bilingual one. Nowadays, many of the online dictionaries provide you with sentence examples, so you will understand the meaning of that particular word.
I recommend Cambridge https://dictionary.cambridge.org and the free dictionary https://www.thefreedictionary.com
From this search, you will learn other new words as well as synonyms which are extremely important in language learning. You do not want to use the same words all the time.
They can get repetitive and boring for listeners and for yourself so try to vary your vocabulary. There are some resources which can help you learn only synonyms and idioms such as word hippo https://www.wordhippo.com or Reverso and last but not least, THINK IN ENGLISH.
Before your first lesson
You need to contact me on skype lisa5224 to arrange a suitable day and time for your assessment test. This will last only 10 minutes and is free of charge. This gives your teacher an opportunity to assess your spoken level of English. You will then be given a listening/grammar test. Based on the results and your level, the teacher will start preparing the lesson.
I will be sharing some of my resources, tips and grammar explanations so look out for new posts and have fun learning English.