Wondering if you are making some mistakes? Looking for things to avoid? Or maybe you just want to practice English and you don’t care what this article is about? 🤣 Well, no matter why you’re here, we are going to talk about 4 common mistakes English learners make. If you want to talk about something else, sorry, you’ll have to leave now!
Endless Edutainment
Is studying fun? Would you like it to be? Wouldn’t it be great if you could learn to speak English fluently by watching movies and playing video games? Me too! But unfortunately, it’s not usually this easy.
The first common mistake English learners make is getting trapped in edutainment.
When we mix education and entertainment, it’s called edutainment. This is a new word that recently was accepted into dictionaries. We often learn much better when we’re having fun, especially kids, but that doesn’t mean we are always learning when we are having fun. As an English language learner, don’t get trapped in edutainment.
Learning a language should be fun and interesting. It should make us think and grab our attention, but that’s extremely hard to do as a teacher and English learning resource creator. It’s also impractical for the whole process to be fun and easy. Who can make everything fun?
Lots of the time, learning is work, and we there isn’t a simple and fun way. When we are tired or demotivated, we like to watch English videos to learn. Which isn’t bad, but it can be.
It’s unnatural for life to be all fun and games. After a while, we stop enjoying them, anyways. And let’s be honest, how much do you forget when you are overexcited?
If we spend too much time watching videos and too little time practicing and thinking, very little of what we watch will sink in. That means we won’t remember much or learn much. They say “no pain, no gain” for a reason. Improvement costs us!
To help me stay motivated and not get demotivated, I use language videos as rewards for studying hard. If I finish 30 minutes of studying today, then I can watch a few videos. That works well for me.
Getting Glued to Grammar
Love it or hate it, English has grammar. We have to learn grammar if we want people to understand what we are saying. You can know the words “me”, “you”, “can”, “give”, “the”, and “paper” but if you say, “Can me give you the paper?” instead of “Can you give me the paper?” people probably won’t get what you are saying.
But what happens when we put grammar first? This is called the grammar approach, when we learn English through a series of grammar lessons. Is this bad? Well, it can be. I mean, it is in this list of common mistakes English learners make! 😅
The problem you can run into is usually not learning grammar itself but the way that grammar is often taught. It’s usually taught by translating a grammar point into your native language and looking at a series of sentences with that grammar, out of context, and then doing some practice exercises.
This approach helps a little, but it’s not the best. It’s better for grammar to be taught in a clear and complete context. It’s better to be taught in a real-life situation where the meaning matters instead of within a series of unrelated ideas. Because it’s often impractical to teach students in real life since they are in the classroom, many teachers simply use the easier but not nearly as good translation method or the endless explanation method. Things don’t sink in if we don’t get to use them in real life.
What is context, you might be asking? It’s the situation around the thing. I could say, “I want it,” but you don’t know what I mean if you don’t know the context. If the context is at a grocery store with my mom, you would guess I am a young boy that wants some candy. If I am a businessman in a meeting, maybe I am taking on a task to complete or a big client to service. Grammar changes in different contexts, too, like “I’m going to the mall.” If we are looking at a calendar and pointing at the day after tomorrow, it is clear that it’s the future, but if you ask me when you see me walking down the street, it’s probably present tense.
It’s good to get some grammar lessons in and learn more grammar, but it’s not good if you do it too much and in the wrong way. A common mistake English learners make is getting glued to grammar. In other words, focusing too much on grammar and learning it the wrong way. And it can be frustrating to try to figure out grammar without lots of experience hearing it in context.
Don’t get me wrong, grammar is good. But if you spend too much time focusing on the formulas that make English, you will likely get confused and overwhelmed. Try to make sure you are learning the language naturally, not formulaically.
Test Taking Technique
Just like grammar, tests aren’t going away. We need them, and we should study for them, but what if you are learning English for a test, like the IELTS?
Many bad things can happen. You can develop an unnatural way of talking. You can spend a lot of money and get a lot of frustration. You can get overstressed and overwhelmed.
English is hard, and so are English tests. The challenge ELLs face is learning English for the sake of learning English instead of learning English for a test. Our motivation should be growing English instead of getting high testing scores.
I’ve seen it in young students, old students, and everywhere in between. Putting test scores first adds stress and takes away interest. This is OK for a short time, every once in a while, but it’s not OK for most people all the time. Humans are not designed to always have lots of stress. We need a good mixture.
Learning English because of or through tests is one of the most common mistakes English learners make that can really have bad results in the long run. Make sure you see English tests the right way, especially because lots of test taking skills are unrelated to English communication skills.
Let me just say here that for some people, studying through tests and focusing only on grammar only works best for them. It’s just a small minority, though, so for most people it can be a trap that demotivates them in the long run.
Expecting Extremes
What I mean by that is thinking you will get every little thing and then more. Another way to say it is having unrealistic expectations. If they are so unrealistic that they are crazy, they are extreme.
What are unrealistic expectations? Thinking something will happen that is not likely to happen. Like becoming fluent in a year. We hear of some people who do that, and some people sell that to us, but that’s an unrealistic expectation.
What’s another example? Getting great scores fast. Again, it’s not healthy to focus on test scores too heavily, but it’s also bad to think you can boost your scores quickly. It usually takes a long time to get a small score increase, simply because English level tests are designed to measure everything from zero to hero.
Setting an unrealistic expectation for yourself is like trying to carry to many rocks up a mountain. You can carry one at a time, and it will be easy, but it will be slow; you can carry ten rocks at a time, and it will be hard but fast; or you can carry one hundred rocks at a time, and it will be impossible. We need to learn our limits and find out how many rocks we can carry at a time and be happy with that. We aren’t Atlas!
These aren’t the only common mistakes English learners make, but they are 4 of the most common ones I’ve seen. If you are making any of them, you can ask for help if you need to! We are here to help you grow, even if we can just give some advice.