Learn English skills

There are four main skills to using English: speaking, reading, writing and listening. Sometimes you will use one at a time, sometimes you will use more than one.

When you are speaking, you are only speaking, but if you are listening for information to check on a written text, you are using two skills, listening and reading. When you give a presentation you could be speaking and writing at the same time. When you are taking notes over the phone, you are listening and writing at the same time. So, very often we use more than one skill.

Many students focus on speaking, which is okay, but what happens when you have to read a menu, understand a bus timetable or read a sales report? You can’t ask someone to read everything to you.

The words you read can look different to the way they are pronounced. A good way to hear how words sound when you read them is to listen to a recording of the text. Some ‘readers’ have a CD recording of the story so you can listen and read the story at the same time. If you enjoy the news, you can go to Euro News where the news articles are read out, but sometimes there are some differences.

Learn more

Have a look at these pages for more information about speaking, reading, writing and listening.

© 2011-2015 Lee Saunders All rights reserved - Website design: Lee Saunders