That is the worst type of student.
Welcome back to the Learn English podcast. The podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
On today's episode I want to talk about English students and mistakes that I see them make that harm their ability to learn English.
If you haven't listened or watched the podcast before, you might not know I am an English teacher.
I teach English to students who are learning it as a second language.
I've had a few years of experience now, which means I've had a lot of students and there are some mistakes that I see students make that I really wish they would just stop doing.
Things that irritate their teacher, of course, but more importantly hinder their ability to learn English.
On today's episode, I want talk about them, so you can avoid making the mistakes and you can better learn English while you're on your English learning journey.
If you're interested in learning what these mistakes are, and of course, if you're interested in building your English vocabulary, then follow along because we're about to begin.
Before we begin, I want to remind you to look the description of this podcast episode.
There you will find helpful links, like links to take classes with me, but you will find the vocabulary list. The vocabulary list is the list of words and phrases that I used in the episode.
That way you can take them, study them, and build your English vocabulary.
Let's talk about some mistakes that I see that students make.
Like I said, these are irritating mistakes.
But I think they're mistakes that, more importantly, harm students and prevent them from really doing as well as they could or getting the most out of a lesson.
When you take a lesson with someone, it's a big commitment, it's a time commitment, and it's a money commitment.
You have to pay money to take a lesson.
And you don't want to waste your time and you definitely don't want to waste your money.
So you want to make sure you're the most out of your experience.
If you're not, it really just is a waste of your resources, it's a waste of everyone's time and you'd be better off doing something else instead.
So I'm going to give you some of the things that I see that I see students doing that I really wish they would stop doing.
Let's start with the first thing, the first mistake that I see students make and that is being flaky.
You might not have heard the word flaky.
What flaky means is that you don't show up when you are supposed to, you don't honor your commitments.
Let's say you are supposed to go meet a friend for lunch and then the time comes and they call you and they're waiting at the restaurant for you and you just don't answer your phone and you never show up.
That is flaky. Also if your friend goes to the restaurant and then you tell them at the last minute, sorry, I can't go!
That's flaky as well.
You did tell them but you didn't tell them ahead of time and you didn't show up for the lunch appointment They wanted to see you and you just cancelled your plans So when I say don't be flaky with your English lessons That means don't miss your English lessons I had one student who bought five lessons from me He bought a package of lessons for a five lessons and he showed up for one One lesson.
He paid for five and he showed up one time and then I never saw him again.
Now, he scheduled the lessons, he said he was going to show up and then the day of the lesson would occur and I would get a message saying that he was out of town, that he was sick, that he was busy, some excuse for why he couldn't be at the lesson today.
Now, it wasn't the worst thing in the world and maybe he was sick, maybe he was out of town, maybe he was busy, but it really just was a complete waste of his resources.
He spent money, he paid for these lessons, and then he never used them.
And I would have been happier if he had just not bought the package from me.
If he had just paid for that one lesson that I saw him and then never showed up again.
That would have been less annoying.
That would have been less irritating and also less Wasteful, of course life can sometimes happen everyone gets sick.
I've gotten sick I've gotten COVID before and had to cancel a lesson.
It happens once in a while is okay But four out of five times is not acceptable If you do not have the time or if you think you might not have the time Don't buy lessons.
Don't book lessons with a teacher and cancel repeatedly, if you cancel multiple lessons with me, I'm just not going to have you as a student anymore.
I don't need to deal with last minute cancellations, and I also don't want people to waste their money.
I don't like to have students who constantly cancel, and I would highly recommend that you don't do that.
The second mistake that I see students make is that they overcommit.
This almost sounds like it's the opposite of what I'm saying.
Right? Someone makes a commitment and then never shows up and I'm complaining about that and then I'm complaining about overcommitting.
But what I mean by overcommitting, is that they make these goals for themselves that are crazy difficult, that are very hard to do, and then of course they don't reach them.
For example, I had a student who said he was going to write an essay every single day in English.
Now, maybe he really thought he was going to, but when he told me that goal I already knew that was not going to happen.
Most people cannot write an essay in a single day in a foreign language.
Most people. Some people can, but I'm going to say most people, especially most people who take lessons with me.
And if you tell yourself that you are going to write an essay every single day, you really need to have a plan and an idea of how you're going to do that.
Psychology research has shown that if you set a goal that is too crazy, that it's something that you can never achieve, you actually demoralize yourself.
So demoralized means that you're less likely to have motivation to want to do something.
You've lost your will to want to do a particular action.
So if you set a goal that is really extreme and very hard to reach, you actually have less will power to do anything.
And that's what I mean by it harming your ability to learn English.
Yes in theory, that really doesn't change your English level, but it does change your willpower.
It does change the motivation you have to continue on your English journey.
And that's not good.
If you want to increase your willpower, if you want to increase your motivation to study English, make small goals.
Say you're going to write a paragraph in English once a week.
That's way easier than writing an essay every day, and most likely, you are going to be able to reach that.
When you do reach that goal, when you are successful in writing that one paragraph every week, you actually get more motivation to continue.
Research has shown that the more goals that you're able to achieve, the more successful you are in reaching those goals, the more motivation you get.
So when you are planning out your study habits, when you're planning out your lessons and how often you're going to do everything, be realistic.
Know what you can do and what you can't do, and make a goal that is for sure something that you can do.
The third mistake that I see students make is that they only give one word answers.
Oh my goodness this has happened so much to me and it is infuriating.
So infuriating is another way of saying that it makes you really mad.
The word furious means to be very angry, very mad.
So when something is infuriating that means that it makes you very angry.
And when students only give one word answers I get infuriated, it infuriates me to get one word responses to a question and the reason is, is that they're not getting a lot out of their lesson.
If you sign up for a class with someone, you need to be speaking in the language you are studying.
If you're signing up for an English class, you should be speaking the majority of the time and you should be in English as much as possible.
Now I say as much as possible because of course if you are a beginner you need some time in your native language maybe you need an explanation or ask how to say something but you need to push yourself to speak English as much as you possibly can.
If you are just saying a one word answer if you're only saying a few words in a lesson why are you bothering to take a Talk to chat GPT.
Talk to the mirror for all that matters, right?
If you're just going to say yes and no and okay, just talk to the mirror.
You can say those three words really easily.
You do not need to pay for a lesson to say three words.
If you're taking an English class and trying to practice your conversation, you really need to speak.
You need to speak in complete sentences, you need to be able to say your ideas, you need to speak as much as possible.
And that's really the biggest piece of advice I would say for this point.
Speak as much as you can for as long as you can.
Take advantage of the time that you have with the teacher who is able to correct your pronunciation, your grammar, your vocabulary, but you don't get those corrections if you don't say anything.
You have to speak as much as possible so you can get that feedback, so you can get that growth and you can really improve your English level.
The next mistake is being too self -critical.
I have noticed this the most with my most fluent English students.
I have had some students over the years who have had amazing vocabularies who spoke English at an incredible level who had barely any accent, And these students in general were the most self -conscious students I ever taught.
They would be so embarrassed to speak.
They would be so self -critical and talk about their accent and talk about how embarrassed they were to speak.
And that was really self -defeating.
They were having this idea in their head that they should be ashamed of speaking English.
That their English was not good.
That people couldn't understand them.
And to be honest, they had the best accent of anyone that I taught.
I would go from a lesson with someone I could barely understand who was talking for most of the lesson, who I could barely even correct, because they just kept talking.
And then I would go into another lesson with a student who spoke this beautiful English, who barely had an accent and who almost wanted to give up studying because they thought they were a failure.
And when you think of it from a teaching perspective, which student would you rather have?
The one who is trying really hard and talking a lot and really motivated or the one who is trying so hard to be perfect that they want to give up.
That is a really difficult situation to put yourself in and it's something that I wish students would do less.
You don't need to be embarrassed about how you sound.
You don't need to be embarrassed about what country you're from and that English is not your first language.
You don't need to have judgment on yourself.
And you don't need to hold shame when you are speaking.
If I could give one thing to my students, I would want to give them that mindset of it's okay.
It's okay to have an accent.
It's okay to not be perfect.
It's okay to just try to express yourself the best you can.
If you're trying to get better, you have to make mistakes and you have to be okay with that.
You have to accept the fact that you're going to make mistakes but that you're going to learn from those mistakes and that's all part of the process.
When you change your mindset to one that is growth oriented, that it's okay to make a mistake and that you're going to learn from it.
You have so much more freedom.
You have the ability now to talk without shame and you can get rid of all of that judgment and all of the embarrassment and everything that you just don't need.
You don't need to take that with you.
You don't need to take that on your English journey.
And the last mistake I wish students would stop making is being inconsistent with their lessons.
Now I know I talked about students who are flaky, who cancel the day of their lesson or just never show up and never tell you.
But there is also another type of student who doesn't make lessons.
So it's not like they're being flaky or they're canceling, but they just aren't consistent.
I've had a couple of students where I see them maybe every three months, maybe, maybe less, maybe more sometimes.
But they're just students to say that they want to learn English, say that they want to improve their fluency, and then don't really seem to have a plan to do that.
They want to improve their English, but they don't really seem to have a plan or a way to set themselves up for success.
Like I said, you really want to be successful to improve your motivation, to keep you on your path to learning English.
So when you are not successful or when you don't have a plan to make yourself successful, you can really just fall through the cracks, as we would say, which means that you just kind of forget about everything and you're not able to achieve the goals that you want.
When you don't have a study plan, when you don't have a particular time during your day or during your week to take a lesson or study English, you don't really have the tools that you need to be successful in English journey.
You need to look at your day, at your week, at your month, and really figure out where you have time where you can sit down and study, or take a lesson, or do something to help you with your English.
I did a video about how to make English part of your daily routine.
I will leave a link for that if you want some tips, but the idea is that you look at your day or your week and you really see where could you spend some time, and then you need to commit and be consistent with that.
If you're someone who is saying, I want to be fluent in English this year.
I want to reach fluency.
And then you take two lessons for the entire year.
You're not going to reach your goal, right?
You're not going to become fluent.
And even if it's not lessons, if you just study for two hours out of the entire year, you're not going to become fluent.
I'm sorry. There's really nothing else you can say except for language learning takes time, it takes commitment.
and even though it is a slow process it gets easier as you go along and you learn more and more and you get better and better over time.
But you need that time, you have to have that time and even if it's only 20 minutes a day it's better than nothing.
15 minutes is better than 0 minutes, right?
And this is true with just studying in general with watching TV or watching Netflix, watching movies, listening to podcasts, reading a book, writing in English, talking to someone, all of that is methods of studying, all of that is dealing with English and helping you improve your English, you just have to have that time to be able to do those activities.
Try to plan and try to be consistent with it.
This is specifically for people who are saying that they really want to improve that they really want to become fluent and improve their English abilities.
If that's you, then you need to have a study plan you need to make goals that you can achieve and you have to be able to be consistent and stick with that study plan and that study schedule so you can get that improvement in your English.
If you're just taking a lesson once a month or once every other month and you're expecting it to do a lot for your English growth it's not really doing anything.
Personally if I was trying to become very fluent I wouldn't pay for lessons if there were only once every other month.
I would want to have lessons more frequently if I was trying to reach that higher level of fluency.
If it was just for casual conversation and just for fun, then yeah, that's completely fine.
There's nothing wrong with that but just know what your goals are, where you are in your journey, and really what you're looking for, what you're looking to get out of taking classes with someone.
I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope you thought about some of would want to do if you are trying to become much more fluent in English.
If this is not you, if you are not someone who's trying to really increase your English level right now, that's okay.
And please don't take this as a criticism.
I'm not trying to criticize you in any way.
This just really is focused on the type of person who is really pushing to get fluent this year, so that way you can set yourself up for success and you can avoid these mistakes that I see people make way too often.
If this episode helped you, if it got you thinking about how you should prepare and how you should set out your study plan, then please let me know, leave a comment, tell me about what you thought about this episode.
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Until then, keep learning English.
in three decades.
