VOKASI NEWS – 5 Important Skills in English and Tips for Improving Them.
Learning a language is not an easy thing, especially if the language is not familiar from childhood. When learning English, it is recommended to focus on 4 basic skills, those are listening, speaking, reading, and writing, because each of these 4 skills has an important role in learning the English language. Here are some important skills in English and tips for improving these skills easily.
Listening
When learning a language, it will be easier if you learn using your preferred media. Media usually plays an important role in training listening skills. For example, someone who likes songs will find it easier and more fun to learn by listening to songs, and so on.
If you listen to English words through media over and over, you will get used to and become familiar with English words, sentences, and idioms. To hone your listening skills, you can watch English movies without subtitles, listen to English songs, listen to English audiobooks, watch English vlogs, listen to English podcasts such as TED talks, etc.
Speaking
When practicing your speaking skills, you don’t actually have to converse with other people. On the first page, you can actually practice it alone. For example, speaking in front of a mirror by pretending to be being interviewed, being a commentator in a forum, and so on. Speaking can also be a medium to practice pronunciation, that is by recording while you are practicing speaking, then evaluating whether it is good or not. By watching movies, you can also practice speaking, that is by observing and imitating how the actor or actress speaks. Also if you want to learn speaking through direct interaction, you can also learn with native speakers via social media.
Reading
Sometimes, reading could be boring. But for some people, reading is fun. Therefore, media selection is important to increase reading interest. You can read English novels, or read news from English media, apart from honing your reading skills, it can also broaden your insight about the world.
For those who don’t like reading news, this can be done by adjusting the reading genre to suit their individual interests, for example by choosing reading books with illustrations such as comics, webtoons, or novels with their preferred favorite genres.
Writing
To hone your writing skills, you can try to start journaling or writing a diary in English, the topic doesn’t need to be complicated, just write down what you do in your daily life, how is your feeling that day, what your plans for tomorrow are like, and so on. You can also write your opinion or comment on something. For example, writing our opinion on the news you have read this morning, and so on.
Additionally, there is something that is no less important than the 4 basic skills in English above, that is:
Structure
“Practice makes perfect” is not just a jargon, structure skills can be trained by practice, because practice in answering the questions can make the brain familiar with the structure patterns.
Practice in answering the questions is also useful for evaluating what is wrong and what is correct, you can see various example sentences. By practicing we learn from mistakes. Practice questions can be done via the application or the web. Apart from practicing with questions, you can also play games related to structure. In this modern era, there are lots of websites and applications that offer free structure practice questions, and we can make good use of the internet.
Those are some tips for improving your English skills, don’t forget to be consistent in learning, because consistency is the most effective key in learning a language. And don’t forget to create a pleasant and comfortable learning atmosphere, so that you can always be enthusiastic in learning.
Author Name: Aprilia Larasati
Name of Supervisor : Angkita Wasito Kirana
Editor: Muhammad Duiqi Alfinsyah (Branding Team Faculty of Vocational Studies Airlangga University)
