Beneficial skills to improve English proficiency and exercises to better at them

A skill is a learned capacity that allows us to achieve a goal by using little effort for a positive result. Based on this, each of us have different skills for a variety of activities in our lives. We have the skill to cook a meal for four in less than an hour, to fix a dress with a broken hem (or a blouse without a button) 5 min. before leaving, to make ourselves (us, girls) look nice when we only have lipstick at hand, to repair a leaking faucet when we only have Teflon tape (the guys). Life gives us many skills through the years and our experiences and we sharpen and improve those skills thanks to practice and repetition.

Work and study skills

The same, there are other skills we develop to succeed in other areas, such as work or study. Concerning work, the skills we learned come in time and sometimes they are a result of hard training (provided by the work place or on our own initiative) and advice from colleagues. They have to do with understanding work-related documents, setting objectives and determining the strategies required to reach them, prioritizing ideas and exposing them to be proactive, identifying problems and proposing solutions, etc.

But, what about study? Rarely are we provided with training to study. Study skills are those learned capacities related to success in school and they are associated with having good grades and believed to be essential to learning in a person’s life.

Well, they do have to do with how well we do in school and thus how well we might do in our professional life. Since every person has a different learning style, we might develop some skills easier and/or faster than others. Maybe those who are auditory learners have a good listening skill, while those who are visual might struggle with such a skill.

… so?

Let’s not panic! It’s not like we are hopeless. This does not mean we cannot have, in time, a good listening skill, no, not at all. This only means that we have to work a little bit harder improving that skill in which we know we are weak.

How to know it? First we would have to go back in time and try to recall those school situations in which we did not do so great and see if they have something in common, i.e. if they were related to something we had to listen but did not understand; or some report we had to do from a text but could not do. That way we can spot the study skill we need to improve. Once identified, we need to start an action plan to be better at it. If it is listening, well, expose ourselves to audio texts and take notes, understand intonation, etc.

Some pointers

As for me, visual learner, I know I have trouble with my reading skill and through the years -not many, I’m not that old- I have worked on getting better at it, probably not to the point of loving reading, but at least to performing better in tasks that involve it; so let me give some ideas in case you are in the same situation.

Let’s say you identified your weak skill and found out that it is the reading one, like me, what to do next? Practice. Yes. Practice makes perfect, right? Whenever you have the opportunity, take the time to read, it does not have to be a book per week, not even a chapter per week; it might just be a short paragraph, they important is what you do with it.

      Read the paragraph (one you selected from a book, a magazine, a newspaper or even a brochure), try to get what its main idea is; identify the important points in it.

      Having trouble with words you don’t know (whether it is in your own language or a foreign one)? Do not stop reading to rush for the dictionary, do not open a new tab on your computer to ask Wikipedia; try to connect the ideas in the paragraph and deduce meaning from context.

      You want to read more but are running out of time? Skim the following two or three paragraphs to get the idea of what awaits in your next reading-time.

      Share. Take notes of what you read and share it with someone else, this way not only will you realize how much you understood from the text but also exchange opinions and points of view with others.

      Go further. Out of those notes you take, what about writing a synthesis? It will allow you to see clearer the contents of the text and evaluate them or comparing them to something you have read before.

If you consider these ideas, as I do, you might find that improving a study skill is easier than you think, it will be beneficial for your academic life and it will contribute to your professional life. So, what about giving it a try?