New Year's Resolution: improve my English

Did you make any New Year's Resolutions last week, as the clock ticked towards 12, the fireworks started and people everywhere tried to remember the words to Auld Lang Syne?  If your resolution was to get better at English, what are you going to do next?

Actually, it doesn't really matter what your first step is, just as long as you do something.  You could...

• look up language classes in your local area
• find out whether studying in an English-speaking country is a possibility
• set up a new social networking account that you'll only use in English
• download a language learning app for your phone
• beg, buy or borrow a book in English to practise your reading
• start a blog
• try to meet English speakers socially to practise conversation
• do what you love - look for English videos, groups and sites relating to your hobbies and interests

And whatever you do, practise, practise, practise.  Time, effort, and repetition will all help you to improve.

Congratulations!  By taking that first step and finding a way to incorporate some more English into your daily life, you are already doing better at keeping your New Year's Resolution than most of the population!  Now for the second step, and the third...

Photo taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @eltpics, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

IELTS Ahead? Read these tips first!

Preparing for an exam that is important for your future is not something that many people enjoy, and IELTS is no exception.  Just a few short papers can determine whether you get a job, university place or visa, so the pressure is on!  Fortunately there's lots of good advice out there about preparing for specific parts of the IELTS test, along with practice questions, model answers and video material for the speaking test.

This post is not more of the same.  Instead here are four tips of a slightly different kind, which are mostly related to you and your motivation: