3. Learning the material

1. Work in groups of three. Discuss the learning strategies you use in learning English in:

* doing home exercises,

* learning new words,

* preparing retellings of the texts,

* writing a composition,

* working on grammar and pronunciation.

2. Inform the group-mates about your best learning strategies.

3. Read some pieces of advice about learning.

How to learn a new language

1. Keep it in mind that daily practice is very important, so practice English every day.

2. Do not worry about making mistakes. Nobody is perfect. The more mistakes you make the more you learn from them.

3. Feel confident. Finally, you’ll succeed.

When you come across an unfamiliar word in the text

don’t grab a dictionary to look it up. Before opening the dictionary, you should follow these steps:

1. Think carefully about the entire sentence in which the unfamiliar word appears. Ask yourself: How much of the sentence can I understand even without knowing that word?

2. Look carefully at the unknown word. What kind of word is it? A noun? A verb? An adjective?

3. Think of some possible meaning for that kind of word in that sentence. If the word is a noun, might it name some thing? Some person? Some idea? Does it probably represent something good? Something bad?

For instance, you don’t know the word reward in this sentence: “One of the rewards that space travellers receive is the beautiful view of the planet on which we live.”

Reward is a noun here, because it is used after the. The sentence tells you a reward is something that is received; and it must be something good, because the beautiful view is called a reward.

So, do you need to look up this word in the dictionary?

From Techniques in Teaching Vocabulary by Virginia French Allen, 1983.

How to remember new words

• When introduced to a new word write the word down.

• Keep a running list of these new words to look up and define them.

• Practicethe pronunciation of each new word.

• Practice saying the words aloudand try using it in a sentence. Remember that ‘practice makes perfect.’

• Associations can help you to remember new words.

How to choose an appropriate book to read

• Read the title of the book. Judging by the title, you can predict what this book is supposed to be about. Now read the back cover of the book to get people’s opinion about a book.Then open the first page. Read the first page without the aid of a dictionary. For a full understanding of the book you should understand at least 95 percent of the words in a text to gain reasonable comprehension and get pleasure fromreading.Thelanguage of the texts should be authentic or authentic-like if authentic language is too difficult for you.

• When you come acrossan unfamiliar word in the text, don’t look it up at once. Try to guess its meaning.

• While choosing the words to learn, pay attention to their frequency. As you already know, in theMacmillan on-line dictionary, for example, which you have, some words are printed in red with a star rating to show their frequency.

• For instance, hiss /his/ verb*

How to remember stories

• A great technique for remembering stories is the “sing” technique.

• ‘S’ is the first step. ’S’ stands for stop. Stop yourself when you finish reading something, such as chapter on a book or the end of a newspaper article. Stop for a second. Give yourself a moment of focus at what you’ve just read.

• ‘I’. The next step is to identify the main point of what you’ve read. Everything that is a story has a main point. Stories are hierarchical. Figure out what the main point is and focus on retaining that information.

• ‘N’ stands for ‘never mind the details’. Sometimes we get so caughtin the details that we overwhelmed ourselves with information to try to retain.

• ‘G’ stands for ‘get the gist’. The gist of the story is a kind like having the heart of the story in addition to the backbone.

• If you do that you’ll have completed the ‘sing’ technique and you’ll remember that story more effectively.

• Fromhttp://www.wisegeek.com/videos/517071190.htm