English is now considered the most important language around the world. There are some reasons for that. English is used as mother tongue in many big countries such as United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia. It is also used as the most important second language in some countries, such as Netherlands. Furthermore, most of references in many disciplines of sciences and technology are available in English. Hence, if we want to learn those disciplines well, we have to master English.
Similar to any other language, English has some aspects to learn. To be precise, they are four: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Reading and writing are parts of written English, whereas listening and speaking are parts of spoken English. Basically, if you want to master the four aspects mentioned, you have to be good in grammar and vocabularies. Perhaps you need much shorter time to master grammar. However, you need much longer time to master vocabularies. You even need to learn vocabularies all time in your life, because vocabularies always expand from time to time.
To improve your reading skill, it’s good for you to begin reading children books and stories. After you are good enough at that level, you can gradually read more difficult materials. You can read newspapers, magazines, books, online articles, stories, academic journals, and so on. Everytime you get a new vocabulary, you can find out its meaning in a dictionary.
You need to read materials from many different topics and disciplines. The reason is so simple: because every topic or discipline has its own terminologies. For instance, terminologies in economics can be much different to terminologies in natural science. By reading in many different topics and disciplines, you expand your vocabularies well.
To improve your writing skill, you need two most important things: grammar and vocabularies. You need to master grammar in order to make good sentences. You also need adequate number of vocabularies in order to easily express whatever you want on your paper.
At least, there are two things you can do to practise your writing skill. First, you can join some chatrooms in which you can write to your chatmates interactively. Secondly, blogging in English has to be one of your hobbies. If you have a blog using English, it will promote you to frequently write articles in English.
To improve your listening proficiency, you can listen to some news, such as BBC News for British English, and Radio America for American English. Now they are also available in radio streaming you can find using your internet connection. It is also good for you to listen to any spoken materials, such as recorded stories, recorded lectures, etc, as well as any live broadcast. In addition, watching some movies which use English is certainly useful. However, you should choose appropriate movies. Action movies are usually less useful because they contain too much gun shots or duels, instead of conversation. Drama movies can be more useful because you can find more conversation there. Movies for kids can even be better to watch by beginners for their using clearer English.
Finally, to improve your speaking proficiency, firstly you need to perfect your pronunciation, including syllable stress and accent. Next, you need to master grammar in order to easily make good sentences. And at last, you need to practise.
You can read some written materials and record it to digital files. And then you can listen to them any other time, in order to evaluate how well you pronounce words. Moreover, you can join any live talk in which you can practise speaking. You can do this using your voice-chat software as well as any live talk service available on the internet.
So now, they key is in your hand. How well you will make progress depends on yourselves. Just keep practise and practise, because practise makes perfect. Good luck!
