Modern educators generally agree on there being more than one form of intelligence. Some believe there may be up to nine different kinds whereas others believe there are fewer. For today’s Tuesday Tip, I want to look at four different styles of learning and help you use them to improve your English.
Which of these styles describes you best?
1. Visual learners – This kind of learner prefers to see pictures and diagrams in order to learn new things.
Suggested learning activities: flashcards with pictures of objects on (vocabulary), timelines (tense forms),
2. Auditory learners – These learners prefer to hear new things in order to understand them.
Suggested learning activities: listening to the radio in English (comprehension), live classes (all areas of English), recording yourself speaking and analysing it (speaking and comprehension), listening to music in English (comprehension)
3. Kinaesthetic learners – These people like to actually try doing for themselves something in order to learn it.
Suggested learning activities: live discussions (fluency), role-play activities (fluency and practising new sentence structures)
4. Reading / Writing preference learners – This kind of learner tends to prefer to study alone and likes to gather information and read about a subject in order to understand it.
Suggested activities: reading the news in English and guessing new vocabulary from context (sentence structure and vocabulary), keeping a journal or blog (writing skills)
Whilst we all have a preference for one of these areas, developing our skills in the others is important, too. Here’s your homework for today:
Choose your strongest area and practice one of the activities listed there. Think about how it feels when you do this activity.
Now try an activity from one of the other areas. Feels different, doesn’t it?
Every time you sit down to start learning English, try to think about something that reminds you of the first feeling you had here. That’s the state where you are most likely to learn well. If you can learn to feel this way when you want to speak, you will be surprised at how quickly your skills progress.
When I want to get ready to learn, I imagine a picture of myself running through a garden at sunset. It makes me feel relaxed and inspired. I guess that makes me either a kinaesthetic or visual learner. I know other people who find that tapping their foot or listening to their favourite song helps them get ready.
What helps you get ready to speak English?
This is part of my ‘Tuesday Tips‘ series. Every Tuesday, I share a simple tip on how to improve your language skills. Some of these are techniques I use with students in class and others are things I’ve found work well when learning languages myself. If you decide to try them out, let me know how they went by leaving a comment below the article. Click here to see some more tips on how to improve your English.