John’s EFL Cafe

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This post should have been placed here yesterday but I got a bad cold so I decided to keep my germs to myself and rest up for today[ Tuesday]. I still have my cold but we are better friends today - meaning we are cooperating in my life more.

I am hopeful [perhaps dellusionally] that many of you students are reading this bolg; at least during moments of boredom as a means of lifting your spirits and beginning to see the possible.

Let’s face it, language learning can be a grind. A long agonizing process of instilling new skills that were once learnt as a child and now weary your adult mind. I can sympathize. At the same time I know beyond doubt that your attitude about anything in your life is deeply influences your ability to learn as well as your willingness to learn does. Most people’s brains are tuned to the ‘radio station’ W.I.I.F.M’ . What you say ? That means What’s In It For Me . I understand that. So let’s put the two ideas together. Your attitude affects your ability to learn and your mind is focused on what benefits [W.I.I.F.M.] there are for you to learn English.

Well, here’s the thing. Only you can answer that question. I will do my best in the coming training sessions to make sure the materials are interesting, useful and focused on important topics. But, that being said, it’s up to you to shift your brain into English learning mode.

The English language team is in the process of organizing topics and materials for the next section of English classes. We would love to hear from you via e-mail or through your posts on this blog. Tell me [John] what types of subjects and or activities you prefer to take part in as a language learning process.

KEY POINT: the first thing most of you need to do in order to improve your English language skills is to stop translating English words you ‘don’t know’ into Chinese.     Why, you say ?     Because as soon as you translate something from English into Chinese you are THINKING and remembering in Chinese. And when you are thinking in Chinese you don’t understand or remember the meaning/concept/idea in English. By translating every word you think you don’t know into Chinese you have just gone back to what was familiar, which is your mother tongue,Chinese. The problem with this strategy is that EVERY TIME you come to that same word or idea AGAIN you will have to translate it AGAIN because you never learnt it in English the last time.

Stay tuned for more ideas that will help you improve your English. This is John, doing my best to make sense of English- for YOU.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 4:43 pm and is filed under My Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.