Improving your English: 5 successful strategies for teens and adults

by Lil

My intermediate and advanced English students often ask me how they can improve their English. “I’m stuck!” they say. “My progress was so fast before, but I’m not improving any more.” They’re not always completely right about that – a lot of my students are much better at English than they think they are! – but it’s true that progress can feel slower after you pass B1 level in English.

So I help my students find strategies that will help them keep improving during the week, not just in class with me. I often begin with sharing some of the things that helped me go from an intermediate level (B1) to advanced (C1) in Italian:

Find time…even when you don’t have time!
Think about how long it took you to master your first language: all that patient encouragement from your parents and grandparents, followed by years of school. We don’t have that luxury when we’re learning a second language, but we do have to dedicate time to it. This doesn’t mean spending your whole weekend studying – even in a busy schedule, there will be moments during the day (on public transport, at the post office) when you can do things like reading or listening to a podcast in English. If you keep using those moments, that adds up to a good amount of time for English in your week.
Make English part of your everyday life
What do you enjoy doing? If you like cooking, try using recipes written in English. If it’s football you love, watch replays in English. If there’s a book you’d love to read again, find an English translation and take it to the beach this summer… So many of the things that you do every day – like watching the news or listening to music – can easily be done in English.
Find ways to write and speak English outside your English lessons
Forget exam tasks and start writing a diary in English – get into the habit of writing just a line or two a day, and that will lead to steady improvement over time. But how do you speak without a teacher or classmates to talk to? Like one translator of TED talks suggests, you could try live-narrating parts of your day to an imaginary foreign friend!
Make real friends in English
Getting to know someone in another language is one of the best ways to speed up your improvement in that language. I used a website called Conversation Exchange to find language partners (people who spoke English at the same level as my Italian). We started by meeting online or in person to talk for 30 minutes in English and 30 minutes in Italian, but we quickly became good friends. Another way to make friends in English is to join a group class. Using English to chat to classmates can seem strange at first, but you can form friendships that continue after the course ends and keep practising your English together (as some of my Globally Speaking students do!).
Find strategies that work for you
Those ideas worked for me, but the most successful strategies are the ones that make sense for you. To get you started, here are some ideas that helped professional translators and polyglots (who speak multiple languages) to become fluent:

Improving your English: 5 successful strategies for teens and adults

GLOBALLY SPEAKING

ORARI SEGRETERIA