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One of my MEFA members asked how she could get faster at doing things in English.
Here’s my top tip:
Give it a go.
Best,
Julian Northbrook
In the last few parts of the Accelerator Model, you’ve seen that mastery comes from:
Without fluency, your English will be slow and awkward. You’ll translate in your head and overthink everything. Without naturalness, your English will be messy, chaotic and disorganised with is hard for the listener. And without confidence, you’ll constantly doubt yourself.
Over the next 9 videos, I’m going to discuss the 9 Accelerators: the steps my clients take to develop fluency, naturalness and confidence.
But what does it mean to be a master of English?
That’s what this part is all about:
Mastering English doesn’t mean being perfect.
And it doesn’t mean knowing everything there is in English. That’s impossible. There will always be more to learn.
Native speakers aren’t perfect.
They make mistakes, pronounce things wrong and fail to explain things well.
Native speakers don’t know everything, either. Indeed, on average they only know around 2.5% of the words in English.
I define English mastery, or indeed mastery in any language, as speaking so well that you forget that English isn’t your first language. It’s when you are able to focus fully on the task at hand, and just do it without thinking about your English. And it’s when you’re able to speak without hesitation and communicate your ideas clearly so that the person you’re talking to doesn’t think about your English either.
In a nutshell, it’s when your English stops being a barrier to the things you want to do.
If you want my help transforming your English, add yourself to the MEFA waiting list – I open to a new group of 15 students on the 24th of every month.
Best,
Julian Northbrook
One of my clients asked how she can make her English classes more relevant to students.
She’s a school teacher in Hong Kong, as like many schools in Asia she has to use official textbooks… which are not always great.
Well, there are a couple of simple things you can do.
Here’s a video that discusses them in detail:
You see, it’s all about making things easy to visualise.
When students can imagine themselves in a context, it all becomes relevant and they can see themselves doing it — which in turn, raises motivation and makes the English they’re learning easier to remember.
But to this well, you have to describe a situation that’s actually going to be relevant to them and be of interest.
Make sense?
Great.
If you want my help being more inspiring to your students while making more money and teaching with less stress and less hassle, you might be interested in the Extraordinary English Teachers Project.
Best,
Julian Northbrook
A great exercise for developing good rhythm and pronunciation in English is “Shadowing”, but how much time should you spend doing it?
This is a question I get a lot.
And here is my candid, no bullshit answer:
If you’re not sure how to make shadowing work for you, I’ve got a free guide called “The Good Shadowing Guide” — Get it Here.
Best,
Julian Northbrook
Speaking English well means a balance of three things: fluency in English, confidence with using it in the real world, and naturalness when speaking.
If you’ve got only one or two of these things, your English will be imbalanced.
In this article, we’re going to look at what happens if you don’t have fluency in English: what it looks like, why it happens, and most importantly, how to fix it.
Get Julian’s Help Transforming Your English — Go Here.
Fluency does not mean proficiency.
Really, all fluency is efficient processing in your brain.
And native speakers achieve this by speaking in chunks of English, not words and rules. What this means is, if you want to speak as they do, you’ve got to learn in the way they speak. In chunks. Not words and rules.
Unless you’re already in (or have graduated) MEFA, you might want to consider putting yourself on the waiting list: we open for a new group on the 24th of every month.
The place to go is here.
Enjoy,
Julian Northbrook
You might have fluency in English, but is your speaking clear, orderly, and natural?
If not, don’t worry: I’ll show you how to fix your messy English.
Speaking English well means a balance of three things: fluency in English, confidence with using it in the real world, and naturalness when speaking.
If you’ve got only one or two of these things, your English will be imbalanced.
In this article, we’re going to look at what happens if you skip the “naturalness” stage, and just “talk talk talk” your way to fluency.
Generally, people who learn this way have a lot of confidence: they are outgoing and extroverted.
And yes, having a lot of confidence in English is a good thing.
But it can also be a double-edged sword.
Get My Help and See Results in as Little as 90 days – Go Here.
On the one hand, this confidence is very much a good thing.
A confident person will make use of the opportunities that come their way, and improve as a result. People who have no confidence won’t (and if that’s you, there’s an article here). On the other hand, someone who’s very confident won’t care much about their mistakes and messy English enough to fix it. They go out there, throw themselves into speaking English and do an OK job… but as a result, they get stuck at a weird level where they’re able to communicate very well, and fluently. But never go past that.
Yes, they tend to build fluency in English pretty well.
But the naturalness side of things lags far behind, and they end up speaking fast, but very messy and chaotic English that is hard for people to understand.
Improving in English in a balanced way requires two things to happen:
True mastery is always going to come from BOTH of these things happening again and again.
If you don’t know how to do this, I’ve got a free training here that can help.
Best,
Julian Northbrook