If you’ve been working with me at any point of your life, you’ve probably heard me ranting about the importance of discipline in your learning of English. I usually invite my students to set up a daily routine of work in order to maximize the benefits of the classes they take with me. Students typically hate it, and will find all ways to escape the feared daily routine: they work too much, they’re too tired, they just had their third child. Now let’s be honest for a second; maximizing progress boils down to the kind of discipline you’re able to impose on yourself. Remember: motivation comes and goes, discipline stays.
I’d like to share with you a not-so-secret kind of secret: my most successful students are the ones who find the mental resources to discipline themselves. While it is difficult for me to actually quantify progress due to the multitude of backgrounds of my students, I have a fair share of anecdotal evidence that shows how the students who accept to practice daily progress at a faster pace than the ones who do not. While the actual class time spent with me will give you real-time feedback on your English and allow me to evaluate your current needs, the time spent studying on your own is invaluable.
I can’t make you a more disciplined person—the same way you can’t truly make someone want to learn, you can’t force them to discipline themselves. It has to come from within; it has to be a personal decision, the same way you can’t make somebody stop smoking or exercise daily.
What I can do is offer you ideas as to how you should organize your daily routine.
IT’S ABOUT ORGANIZATION AND EFFICIENCY: A ROUTINE WITH CLEAR OBJECTIVES
Many people come to me with the age-old question that has troubled learners of all kinds for centuries: “how can I practice efficiently?” That’s the reason why I always make sure I give my students a clear daily routine coupled to specific weekly objectives. Your routine should include tasks that are directly related to what you’re currently trying to learn. Are you struggling with pronunciation? You should probably practice the pronunciation of all the sounds of the IPA chart daily and strive for accuracy. Having issues with listening? I’d invite you to watch a subtitled youtube video every day and write down a short summary. Make sure that you have clear and achievable weekly objectives: “by the end of the week, I want to be able to accurately pronounce all the basic vowel sounds and memorize three words containing each sound,” or “by the end of the week, I want to be able to understand all the main ideas of any video of that specific youtube channel.” Now, ideally, you should then take a class with me in order to receive feedback on your progress!
DON’T OVERDO IT: 15 MINUTES A DAY SHOULD BE ENOUGH
Or 10. Or even 5. It doesn’t really matter. What really matters is for you to practice consistently—in your case, that means daily. As much as I’d like you to, you won’t study English an hour a day. How much can you accomplish in ten minutes of real, focused work? Probably way more than you can imagine. Because distractions are everywhere, we have forgotten the benefits of short, intense bursts of work. Let’s take a hypothetical situation: a student of mine needs to memorize her irregular verbs—with the right pronunciation, it goes without saying. Put your phone way, forget about your laptop, leave the children to your partner: how many verbs can you memorize in just five minutes of real concentration? If you’ve been making flashcards, organized the verbs by families and transcribed them using IPA symbols (something I teach my students in class), probably ten of them. Do it for a week and you’ll have memorized every single verb you’ll realistically need in your life.
What about 5 minutes of intense listening practice? Or a 5-minute writing exercise? Or both? Allow yourself ten to fifteen minutes a day of complete, totally focused practice and you’ll see the result on your English in no time.
KEEP IT FUN: PICK A VARIETY OF TASKS, MIX AND MATCH
It’s important to be in control of your routine. You might want to change it or at least adapt it to your current needs monthly. If you’re studying with me, I’ll typically let you know when I believe you should update your routine, but if you’re alone, try to see the signs: getting bored? Finding it too easy or repetitive? Losing interest? It might be the right time to ring the changes.
Here are a few ideas you might want to mix and match in your daily routine. All of them can be done in approximately five minutes, meaning that your routine could include two or three of them.
Pronunciation
– Practice of vowel sounds / consonant sounds / diphthongs using an IPA chart. Check your accuracy with a website that lets you listen to the pronunciation of each of them.
– Listen for sounds and vowel length. Watch a video daily but don’t focus on content, only on sounds. Pick some words that got your attention and transcribe them. Listen for accents and variations.
– Practice of sound differentiation. Pick minimal pairs of words with a different vowel sound and make sure they sound different when reading them, like the classic hat, hut, heart practice.
Listening
– Daily watching of a video or portion of a video from a youtube channel that offers subtitles. Watch it without and then with subtitles. Write down a short summary of the whole thing and a list of words you had issues understanding.
– Pick a podcast of your interest and challenge yourself—we know videos are easier to understand as the image offers us contextual clues!
– Try to watch/listen to something about a topic you’re not familiar with. That will allow you to pick up new vocabulary that you wouldn’t have discovered without getting out of your comfort zone!
Writing
– Journaling is a powerful tool: spend five minutes writing about everything you’ve done in the day, trying to be as precise as possible to challenge yourself. Boring day? Just turn it into creative writing and have fun inventing stuff.
– Descriptions. Pick a familiar setting: your desk, your car, your workplace. Try to name and write down every single object in those settings, or list all the actions that might be called for. Would you be able to name all the different parts your hands get in contact with when driving? What about all those things you do daily at work? You’ll be surprised by your own ignorance—just smile and get to work!
Reading
– Read the news—skip your native language. This one is very easy to implement if you’re like me and read the news first thing in the morning: simply do it in English. The amount of content available from quality English-language newspapers is unlimited.
– Practice skimming instead of scanning. Find short articles online and challenge yourself to read them as fast as possible: your aim is to get the essence and the main points, not the details. Train yourself to not stop every time you find an unknown word. Just accept it and keep going! Skimming efficiently will be a great asset in your life and will help you overcome learner’s frustration.
Now, when it comes to speaking—for that one I’ll have to invite you to work with me directly, as real-time feedback is essential when trying to improve speaking and fluency!