How To Be The Perfect Student

Do you have a good attitude for learning a new language? Learning is a skill and you can’t put all of the responsibility for learning onto your teacher, a great deal of how much that you’ll learn in a class depends on you and your attitude. Let’s look at 5 things that we can make sure we are doing so that we get the most out of our teacher, our classes and the most out of life in general.

1. Be Confident

Many language learning theorists, such as Stephen Krashen, have shown that the more confident that you are about your language abilities, the more successful you will be. This is called the Affective Filter. If you have negative feelings about your language ability then you are going to be inhibited, this means something similar to ‘blocked’. Often this comes from an external source, meaning, some horrible person who makes a stupid comment and makes you feel bad about your English. This person could be a friend or it could be the bus driver, so you need to do you best to ignore them and at least keep a positive internal dialogue. Say to yourself: I’m great at English, I’m always learning and I’m always getting better.

2. Be Positive and Enthusiastic

This is possibly the most important one. The best classes are obviously when all of the students are as positive and as enthusiastic as possible. It’s not only better for your teacher, because their students are helping them to create a positive learning environment where everyone is taking an interest, but it’s also better for the students, that’s you. Why is it better for the students? Because if you are going to class every day, or every week then I’m sure you would rather spend your time in an enjoyable environment full of happiness… not in a negative environment where everyone is sad, and you yourself are responsible for creating that positive environment. Here are some things that you can do:

- Be enthusiastic about an activity that your teacher sets and try to get the most value out of it as you can.

- Don’t say anything to your teacher or to other classmates that might make them feel bad about themselves. This is very basic stuff and just being a decent person, but surprisingly some people need to be told.

- If you’re not getting value out of anything at all that you do in class then speak to your teacher privately and tell them, in a positive way, the kinds of things that you would like to do. If they’re doing their job properly, they will program different activities in accordingly.

- If you notice another student who is being negative and bringing the class down, there’s no reason why you as a student shouldn’t ask them what’s up, but be aware that it could be something completely different that’s happening in their life, so be prepared to be compassionate as well.

It should be noted that it is also, in fact primarily, your teacher's job to create a positive and entertaining learning environment. So if you have a teacher that is not doing that, either speak with them privately and let them know how you feel, or… find a new teacher! Remember that a language class shouldn't feel like a mathematics class or anything like that, it should feel like a house party with everybody laughing and communicating, that's how we best acquire language.

3. Be Curious about English Speaking Culture

English speaking culture is very dominant in the world. If I were teaching another language, like German or Japanese I would feel more comfortable recommending that students learn about popular culture in that language. But alas, you are learning another language and one of the keys to providing yourself with lots of input and things to talk about is to start taking an interest in the culture, particularly pop culture. A lot of my students don’t know much about any English music, TV series or movies. And this will be a limiting factor in their interactions with other English speakers, because this is something that we, as humans, often talk about and debate: music, TV shows, movies and celebrities. They are common ground, meaning shared experience or knowledge that we can talk about together. Here are some tips on how you can make a start:

- Google the most famous movie stars, find some of their films, and watch them in English with English subtitles.

- Listen to podcasts about current events and pop culture, the best ones are: Today, Explained, Pop Culture Happy Hour and Keep It.

- Google ‘most popular TV show’, pick one that you like, find it and watch it.

4. Connect with Your Fellow Students

Language learning is about communication and making new connections, a little bit like that other thing…. life! So if you are in a class full of people, online or IRL then help them out, let them help you out and make your class into more of a study group. You are all people with the same goal and you should use your time in class to connect with them. Don’t look at your phone and chat with people who aren’t even in the room with you, don’t worry about the other person's errors or accent negatively influencing your own (this is not actually a thing, in fact, if you are conscious of the other person’s mistakes it will probably make you a better and more conscientious learner). This is your time to learn about other people and connect, take advantage of it!

5. Read and Listen to as Much as Possible

This one I have to include, to be a good language student you need to be reading and listening. A lot of teachers seem completely unaware of this and think that language learning is about memorizing grammatical concepts; it isn’t at all. Language learning is about the unconscious connections between words and meaning that your brain creates when you read and listen to correct English. When you read and listen you are actually learning grammar, in the best way possible, by acquiring it, or absorbing it.