by Mark Browning

Created on: January 04, 2007   Last Updated: May 02, 2007

Me speaks English much good!
Okay, you know what that means, but we certainly wouldn't call it good English. Having taught English to college students for some twenty years, I've seen a lot of students, both non-native and native speakers of English, who needed significant improvement in their English. I'll tell you what I tell them: Read, Write, Talk, Listen.

I can always tell when a student does not read much. Whether you learned English growing up or in a classroom, your reading will have a huge impact on how fluently you communicate. Read newspapers, magazines, good-quality blogs, and the like. You don't really have to study these readings. Just read them. When you read, you'll pick up sentence patterns. You'll pick up idioms and vocabulary. The bonus is that you'll pick up a lot of interesting and useful knowledge along the way.
Besides reading, you should write. Keep a journal. Write brilliant little nuggets on Helium. Do you play a musical instrument? If so, then you know the value of practice. People who don't practice generally don't get better. Think of this sort of writing as playing your scales. Over time, you'll get better at it. If you're a non-native speaker, especially, have somebody warn you about the places where you give away that "you're not from around here."
Writing is good, but talking is the real crucible of language. Get into conversations with smart people, people who use language in the way that you want to use language. If you sit around and converse with a bunch of yahoos, then you'll wind up sounding like a yahoo. Sometimes I hear people in public talking in a nearly incomprehensible English. They understand each other, but they sound like idiots. If you want to get anywhere using English, talk to people who use it better than you.
Listen! I learned virtually perfect Standard English growing up because my parents had worked hard to develop that themselves. All I had to do was listen to them. Pay attention to what people say. If you don't know why they say something, then ask. Why do I live "on Hunter" but "in Kansas City"? That's hard to explain, but if you'll listen both to conversation and to explanation, you'll gradually start to speak like the best and most polished.
There's nothing wrong with speaking in a dialect, but to achieve great things in an English-speaking environment, you really have to learn Standard English. Hopefully by using these four techniques, you can advance in that effort.

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