If English is not your first language

Academic English

Don’t be panic if English is not your mother tongue. I know so many people fight with IELST for that 0.5 point. But there is another choice for improving your English – Pre-Sessional English course, because the education system is different in each country. This course provides the chance to teach you and get used to the UK’s academic study style. The course main mission is teaching you how to write an essay, how to do the research, and how to do a presentation. After getting to know these, you wouldn’t be nervous about writing an academic essay and be confidence standing on the stage.

Uni also provides English for Academic Purposes (EAP) 1-2-1 tutorial, so the tutors can help you in a wide range of study skills. Therefore, don’t be afraid if your English is not good.

Normal conversation

There are so many ways you can improve your English, try to talk with people, reading books, listening music, radio and watching films, news, and TV. Don’t worry if your grammar is right or wrong, speak as much as you can, then you can learn from native speakers how they use the word or how is the way they speak in the sentences. For me, the most effective way is talking to people and watching TV. Prepare a small notebook with you and write the new vocabularies down when you heard it from people. Also, try to find something which you are interested in. For example, If you like cooking or backing, you can search the recipes on BBC good food and you can learn lots of vocabularies about food or watch The Great British Back off to train your listening.

For watching TV and films, in the beginning, try to find the video with English subtitle, and re-watch it again without subtitle so you can know how much you can understand and how many words you haven’t recognised. Moreover, you can mimic how they talk. Follow the tone and record your voice. It is not accent training, is pronunciation and tones training.

Hope these tips you find useful! See you next time 😊