#139 How to activate your English vocabulary - ESL

Speak English Now through mini-stories with teacher Georgiana

Hi, everybody! I am Georgiana, your English teacher and founder of SpeakEnglishPodcast.com. My mission is to help you speak English fluently.

In this episode:

– I’m going to talk briefly about how to activate your English vocabulary.

– Next, I will comment on the appearance of mysterious islands. Sometimes, on a given day, certain people have seen some structures on the horizon that have caused an element of surprise. What could it be?

– Finally, we will practice fluency with a short mini-story of questions and answers—the best exercise to speak without translating mentally.

First of all, I want to thank all of you who are writing to me. I read all the emails personally, and I also answer them myself.

One question I sometimes get is this:

How can I activate my English vocabulary?

I’ve covered this topic before, but I think it’s worth remembering. Most of the time, students understand much more than they can talk. That is, they have a lot of passive vocabulary, but no active vocabulary ready to be used in a conversation.

An easy way to improve, but sometimes not too obvious, is to listen to the same audio several times. This is one of the techniques I use in my premium courses, although you can also use this podcast.

Let’s say you have short audio with some vocabulary and expressions you want to activate. If you listen to it once, even if you understand it, you will forget most things, but if you listen, for example, once a day for a week, you will surely activate an essential part of the vocabulary.

Another way to increase the number of repetitions of words is to listen to a specific topic. This way, you are much more likely to hear many times the vocabulary that is characteristic of the topic.

Finally, you can listen to the same author, even if they speak about different subjects.

A useful resource is this podcast.

READ the TRANSCRIPT here: SpeakEnglishPodcast.com