3-2-1 High speed English

Dear Students,

Here are some ways you can develop some listening and speaking exercises to improve your oral English. It is a great way to learn English that is very interesting. I call it the 3-2-1 approach.

THREE

Visit http://www.voanews.com/ or if you are in China try http://www.unsv.com/. There are thousands of interesting stories there on all kinds of subjects. You can choose something that interests you. (This follows Stephen Krashen's ideas on Comprehensible Input and the related concept of Voluntary Free Reading.)

All of the stories are in "special English" which is a little slower and simpler English that is much easier to understand. Find a story there. DO NOT READ THE STORY! Listen to the MP3 THREE times until you think you have a pretty good idea of what the story is about.

TWO

Read the story TWO times. Read it while listening to the MP3 and try to understand it. Do not use a dictionary. Guess the words you don't know. After you think you have a better understanding of the story then read it again and use a dictionary to see if your guesses about the words you did not know were correct.

ONE

Talk about the story in ONE practice session with someone. Choose some new words you have learned and make sentences with them. Call your teacher to practice using these new words plus talk about the story you chose. What did you learn? Is your country also like that? Do you agree with the story? Why?

This is a fast way students can improve their spoken English, improve their listening and enlarge their vocabulary in an interesting way.