Chen Qian, Class 13, Senior 1, Shenzhen Xin’an Middle School Instructed by Tang Ying

Everyone has a dream of learning English well, but many students’ English is poor. Many of them have worked very hard to learn English, but they can’t improve their English. How can we learn English effectively and efficiently to achieve maximum results with minimum effort? Here are some strategies that can help us to solve problems in English learning.

First of all, we should believe we can be top English learners. My English teacher told us a few very inspiring and motivational stories about her former students, which encouraged me to believe that everyone can learn English well.

Take He Sisi for example: her English was very poor with her scores in the exams of just over 60 out of 100. After attending training on English learning strategies, she took part in the IBT TOEFL when she was a senior 3 student and received 101 out of 120. She was admitted into the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an undergraduate student in the honor’s program. After getting her double degrees in chemistry and bio-chemistry, she was admitted to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a full scholarship to work on her Ph.D. This year, she received her doctor’s degree. Now she is working as a scientist in a company in San Francisco in the U.S. that produces medicine.

Secondly, in English class, we must respect the teacher and listen carefully when the teacher is teaching. In addition, we must respect our classmates and listen carefully when anyone is answering a question, sharing ideas or giving a presentation to cultivate our good manners. The most important thing is that we must be active in participating in class activities to enjoy lessons, enjoy learning English and enjoy the pleasure of success in the process of learning! That is so practical!

What impressed me most is that my English teacher analyzes why the students’ English is so poor. She points out the greatest problem in learning English is that we often learn separate words from the word list. As a result, in our brain our vocabulary is stored word by word and there is no connection between the words. As a result, when we want to express ourselves in English or write an English article, we can’t think of the English words. My teacher tells us that the best way to learn words is to learn them by topics and in language chunks. She advises us to improve our English by learning a few sentences every day to enlarge our vocabulary and have a discussion on a topic every day to learn to think and speak in English like a native speaker.