Talking point: Study habits

This week's talking point is study habits. Before getting together with the members of your conversation group, go over the questions below so that ideas come to mind more easily the day you get together with your friends and you can work out vocabulary problems beforehand.

Do you plan when you are going to study?
If so, how much time in advance do you plan?
Do you prefer to study late at night or early in the morning?
Do you usually find excuses to postpone starting to study? If so, which ones?
What places do you like studying in?
Do you like to be away from people or do you prefer to study with one or more friends?
Do you like studying with background music?
What sort of light do you like to study with?
Do you like studying in public places like a library?
Do you find it difficult to concentrate while studying?
If you are studying for a long period do you prefer: no breaks / several short breaks / one or two long breaks?
What do you do while you are taking breaks, have a chat, check your mobile, have a snack?
Do you quickly revise everything you have done during the study sessions when you are finishing studying?

34 experts offer their tips for English fluency

How to speak fluent English – 34 experts give their tips on Jason R Levine's Fluency MC.

A number of the world’s leading language learning experts like David Deubelbeiss, Larry Ferlazzo, Nik Peachey or Scott Thornbury give their opinion on how learners can become more fluent English speakers.

How to get the most out of studying

 Samford University in Birmingham Alabama has made a number of videos to help students, freshmen especially, develop good study skills.

Dr Chew guides in this series of mini-talks which can also be beneficial for all kinds of students, not just those at university.

The video uses graphs and headings that help us follow everything Dr Chew is saying, although you can find a full transcript for the first video below.



Video 2: What Students show know about how people learn

Video 3: Cognitive principles for optimizing learning

Video 4: Putting principles for learning into practice

Video 5: I blew the exam, now what?



Hi, I'm Doctor Steven Chew. I'm a professor of psychology here at Samford University in Birmingham Alabama. This is the first in a series of videos on how to study effectively in college.
Attending college is a huge transition and the academic challenge of college-level coursework is a big part of it. We made these videos to help students make their transition. The information will be helpful though to people in almost any learning situation. I'm a cognitive psychologist which means I study how people learn and think.
I'm going to be explaining to you the basic principles of people learn best. Now you can use those principles to increase the effectiveness of your study. I'm not peddling any quick fixes or magic products that's going to make you an A student overnight with little effort. Such things don't exist. The bottom line is this: if you use ineffective or inefficient strategies you can study long and hard and still fail but if you use effective learning strategies, you can get the most learning out of your study time.
In this first video will examine your believes the to see how accurate and understanding you are about how people learn.
All students based their study behavior on their beliefs about how they best learn: do I need to go to class? do I need to read the textbook? how much do I have to study material before I’ve mastered it? The more accurate the beliefs, the more effectively you learn.
Let’s start with some common misconceptions about how people learn that I call beliefs that make you stupid. If you hold these believes chances are you're undermining your learning.
Most first-year college students grossly underestimate the time required to complete assignments or study material effectively. I hear students say things like ‘Dr Chew, you’re going to be proud of me: I read 8 chapters last night’, and I think ‘No, you didn’t. You skimmed the chapters but you learnt virtually nothing’.
Truly comprehending material takes careful reading and more importantly review. Always plan for assignments to take longer than you think and always plan to have your reading finished for an exam well enough in advance to give yourself multiple days for review.
A hall mark of students who are struggling is that they study by trying to memorize isolated facts. Unfortunately many textbooks encourage this by putting key terms in bold print and listing definitions in the margins, so students get no cards right out the definitions and memorize them. The problem is a good teacher tests for comprehension, how well you understand the concept. You simply don't get that if you memorize isolated facts.
Many students believe that people are naturally good or bad at the subject and nothing can be done to change that, but academic success is much more a matter hard work than an inborn talent. Students say to me ‘doctor Chew, you don't understand, I'm really bad at math.’ I tell them ‘no, Tyler, you can do it, you just need to really work hard at math.’ You have to commit the time and hard work necessary to succeed. Now I recognize that people have jobs and family and other obligations, but you have to recognize that the time you have will limit your likelihood of success.
But time and hard work alone do not guarantee success. A lot of students believe they're good at multitasking because they do it all the time, so they study while texting, checking social networks, email and having other distractions. The problem is that these students never compare their performance while multitasking to the performance when they focus on one task without distraction. The research evidence is overwhelming that we are bad at multi-tasking. We’re bad especially if one of the tasks involves concentration and effort like studying. What we're good at is fooling ourselves into believing that we're good at multitasking because all those distractions are more fun than studying, but in order to succeed you need to reduce, or even better eliminate, all those distractions. For every distraction you have, you reduce the amount you learn, increase the time it takes to understand material and increase the chance for a bad grade. So those are the beliefs that can sabotage your learning. I want to introduce a new concept that can have a huge impact on your learning. It's called meta-cognition.
Meta-cognition refers to your awareness of how well you truly understand the concept. Accurate meta-cognition is one of the key differences between successful and struggling students. Weaker students are grossly overconfident on how well they understand the material. As a result, weaker students don't study as much as they need to truly understand the material. They take an exam, they're confident they've done well, then they're stunned when they find out they've done poorly. Let’s see how this works.
A few years ago in my general psychology class I did the following: at the end of the first exam I had students estimate what percentage of the questions they got right, from 0 to 100 percent. I then created this graph of everyone in the class, based on their actual exam performance and how they estimated they did. Each point represents a student. If students have an accurate view of how well they knew the material and how well they did on the exam, their estimate should match the actual performance and they should score on the diagonal. If they did better than expected on the exam, their point would fall above the diagonal. If, however, they were overconfident on how they did, their point would fall below the diagonal.
Look at the results. There are a few students who scored above the diagonal and did better than expected, but most students scored below the diagonal, showing they thought they scored better than they actually did. Now look at the upper right hand corner of the graph. These are the students who did best on the exam. Notice that most of the students are clustered around the diagonal. Now look at the middle of the graph. Here are the students who did poorly and most of their points are far below the diagonal. It was the weakest students who were the most overconfident. They had poor meta-cognition.
After the exam I had students who did poorly tell me ‘I felt so confident after exam’ or ‘I thought I really knew the material’. These are all signs of poor meta-cognition. These students were underprepared, overconfident, and completely unaware of those facts.
The problem for college freshmen is they spent years honing their sense of meta-cognition for high school. Now they come to college and their sense of meta-cognition is all wrong. A big transition in the freshman year is developing a more accurate sense of meta-cognition. The problem of poor meta-cognition is that it may indicate your poor study strategies. The hall mark of the poor study strategy is that builds overconfidence without increasing actual learning, so therefore you have poor meta-cognition. In order to improve your study effectiveness you need to improve your studies skills. That will be the topic of the next video.

Why do I have difficulties in understanding natural speech?

In late December 2013 World Teacher published a short summary of a webinar hosted by Cambridge University Press and presented by Johanna Stirling under the title The Spelling Thief.

The webinar is still available for registered members of the Cambridge English Teacher community, but you will have to sign up if you want to have full access to everything Johanna said.

However, in the short summary made by Andrea Noginsk in World Teacher we can begin to understand the reasons why we usually have difficulties in understanding English.

Here are the reasons Johanna talked about and Andrea included on her post:

Why don’t students understand natural speech?
It’s too fast for them to process.
The words aren’t spoken clearly.
They aren’t listening properly.
They don’t know all the words.
They panic.

The first two are probably the main reasons for non-comprehension.

From here Johanna moved on to deal with the way the listening skills is taught today through prediction activities, listening for gist (the main idea), listening for specific information and inferring .

But it doesn't seem to be enough. Pronunciation, which is very often neglected in the classroom, plays an important role in developing the listening skills. Johanna mentioned 5 main types of 'receptive pronunciation' which are closely associated with listening:

1 Ellipsis (incomplete sentences)
2 Weak forms (many syllables are squashed)
3 Elision (some sounds are lost when we speak)
4 Word linking (words join together in fast speech)
5 Assimilation (some sounds change when they are near other sounds)

If you want to find out a little bit more about receptive pronunciation and see some examples of the main five types Johanna mentioned , drop by World Teacher and read Andrea's post.

You can also make a point of dropping by Johanna Stirling's excellent The Spelling Blog, which we have commented on in this blog several times.

The perfect English student

In early September St George International devised the poster below to encourage good study habits among its students.

Read the poster carefully, which you can enlarge by double-clicking on it, and do the easy comprehension check that St George International designed around it as part of a competition. But most importantly, follow the advice on the poster to make progress with English.

What do good candidates do in speaking tests?

In this video three examiners give their advice and tips for the oral paper of the Cambridge English exams. You'll find it useful, no matter which exam you intend to sit.



Read the tasks carefully, and listen to your partners.
React to what your partners are saying to keep the conversation going.
Interact with your partner and the examiner.
Move forward the conversation.
Use eye contact.
Use body language to encourage your partner.
Show that you are resourceful in your language (extend the conversation, don’t get stuck, paraphrase).
Balance fluency and accuracy.
Ask questions if you don’t understand.
Help your partner.
Prepare before the exam (the more prepared you are, the more relaxed you will be in the test).
Control your nerves.
Practise sufficiently beforehand to know how to be in control of time.
Maintain the flow of the conversation to know how long the answers should roughly be and do not stop too early.
Don’t be put off if the examiner interrupts you.
Preparation is key.

4 Ways to understand more English

Everybody is going to rub their hands with this video from EnglishVid, a site where a group of native English  teachers regularly post video lessons on grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, study skills and more. They have published upwards of 400 videos so far, and counting. In my opinion, EnglishVid is one of the best sites for English learners on the net.

In late February teacher James published the promising 4 Ways to understand more English, which is aimed at advanced students, I must say. This is the way he presented the lesson:

"Learn how to understand almost everything you hear right now in 4 easy steps! If you are an advanced English student, and you already know grammar and can understand what you read, but have trouble understanding when people speak in movies and in real life, watch this lesson to find out HOW to listen and UNDERSTAND!"

The video lesson is quite lengthy, around 13 minutes, which if anything will give us good listening practice. In addition, we can activate the YouTube automatic subtitles, which must have been cleaned up, because they are an accurate description of what James says. As an extra bonus, EnglishVid offers a quiz on their site so that we can check how much of the lesson we understood and make sure we got the gist of everything James said.

Volunteering at university

One of my favourite all-time sites for English learners is English for University, written by Patrick McMahon, a lecturer in the UK teaching on a variety of Academic English courses and teacher training courses at Plymouth University. English for University is meant for international students who want to improve their English while studying in the UK.

The site is packed with learning resources, although the bulkiest part of it is oriented towards the development of the writing skills.

It seems that a very common question students ask their teachers all over the world is "How can I improve my oral English?". In a great post in mid-September, Volunteering at University, Patrick dealt with this question. The video below is part of his post. Please drop by English for University and read Volunteering at University, it will only take you a few minutes.

If pressed for time, just watch this short video and answer the questions below about it. It is suitable for (strong) intermediate students.



1 What does Charlie study at Plymouth University?

2 What year is he in?
3 Charlie is in charge of logistics in the VIP Moor Trees project. What does he organise?
4 How many people are involved in his project?
5 What is Moor Trees dedicated to?
6 Why did Charlie first start in the project?
7 What sorts of students volunteer for the Moor Trees Project?
8 What benefits does volunteering bring to people?
9 Why is Charlie pleased that he came to Plymouth and he became a volunteer?

You can check your answers by reading the transcript here.

How to learn English

I came across this inforgraphic from Kaplan International through Blendedmec.

Kaplan International asked hundreds of people what helped them learn English. Read their infographic to learn some interesting facts about what has helped people learn the English language.

How do these results reflect your English learning habits?
Do you find any of these ideas appealing for you to put into practise?

How to learn English via Kaplan Blog

Find an English-speaking friend

I know it's an overgeneralization, but I can't be far wrong in saying that speaking is the ultimate goal for most language learners.

One of the most common problems students have is that they have nobody to speak to outside the class, as we all live in Spain. That is why it should be a priority for students to find a speaking partner and get together on a regular basis to speak in English. This is even more important for distance students, who only have an hour's tuition a week.

In addition to developing our oral skill, an English-speaking partner may help us with queries, with our written work and in some of the listening activities on this blog.

But what about if our availability to get together with a classmate is limited? Can a student develop the oral skill on their own?

Dominic Cole suggests a very interesting technique in this respect. He lists some advantages: it helps build your confidence and you learn to think in English. He also gives some suggestions on how you should implement the technique: talk about personal things and things that interests you. That way, he points out, you will also improve your vocabulary, a key element for fluency.

He puts forward two activities:

• Time yourself when speaking.
• Record yourself.

Visit Dominic Cole's webpage and find out a few more details about this technique. Dominic's webpage is one of the most interesting sites for intermediate English learners.

How to learn English vocabulary

How to learn English vocabulary is a slideshow compiled by Karenne Joy Sylvester, who hosts the wonderful Kalinago English blog.

Vocabulary learning is a key issue in language learning. Students' worries seem to focus on the development of the skills, especially the oral ones, listening and speaking. However, there is a time in the learning process of any student, from intermediate level upwards, where substantial progress can only be made through vocabulary learning.

Karenne Joy Sylvester gives us a lesson about what knowing a word really means.

Do not forget to press the F5 key on your PC to view the slideshow on a full screen.

Subtitled music videos

This article from the Boston Globe is about the use of subtitles in music videos as a tool to teach native-language literacy, and shares some good stories and research. Consequently, it seems that music sites and karaoke sites may come in really handy to help us improve our English.

Self-study activity:
Why not visit the Tune into English karaoke section and have a go at any of the 7,000-plus songs on the site on a regular basis. You will certainly enjoy yourself, improve your singing ability and boost your grip of English, both vocabulary-wise and listening-wise. Just one minor catch -you may need to register before you start singing in the karoake.

Study habits revisited

Read this short article by Dr Jennifer Hartsein on the CBS site. It deals with key issues concerning how we should study, and learning a foreign language is mentioned as an example. You might wish to contrast Hartsein's ideas with those expressed in this other entry about the same topic.

Study habits

Click on the image below to read this article about study habits from The New York Times. It's quite lengthy and dense, but it's well worth a read because we might have to rethink our ideas about varying the type of material we study, the place where we study and the importance of tests.