Tag Archive: learning english

Tara’s ESL VLOG: The Future Part 2 – Simple Rules

What’s up everybody! My name is Tara Musich and I am a certified and experienced teacher of American English. Today I am presenting you with a video that’s part of a series that I am making on the Future Tense. Today’s video is about some special rules for using the future tense. These are some rules that I have shared with several of my students while working on using this tense and I thought it would be nice to share with you – my YouTube viewers and subscribers. So, we’re going to go over four rules together. We’ll go over the rule and then take a look at the example. You can look in the text below to follow along, if you like!

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Tara’s ESL VLOG: American Pronunciation – Part 2 – Using the Color Vowel Chart

Here is the second video in a series of videos that I want to share with you about pronunciation. Today we are going to take a look at just the VOWELS. By VOWELS I mean the 5 letters in the alphabet that create the SOUNDS of English – A, E, I, O, U (and sometimes y – but we will talk about that in a later video).

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Tara’s ESL VLOG: How to Choose the Right Teacher for YOU!

Hello again, Tara Musich here, teacher of American English. Today, we are going to talk about how to choose the right teacher for you, whether it be an online teacher or a live teacher, like face to face, a live face to face teacher. Most of us educators will sit here and try to tell you why you should choose me or this other person to teach you. So today I am going to give you a few tips on how to choose a teacher that is suitable to you and your personality.

So, there are three, three tips, three things that I think that are important when choosing a teacher, and the first one may sound a little funny, but I really think that it’s important. The first one is the person’s voice, the teacher’s voice. When you are learning a foreign language your teacher’s voice is very important. It is the voice that you are imitating. It is the voice that you should want to sound like. So that’s why I think that this is very important. It needs to be appealing to your ears, you should like it! It should be something you want to try to sound like. So, first and foremost the voice of your teacher I think is very important when you’re trying to work on speaking skills and pronunciation skills. Sounding good is always great, you know, in any language that we are learning.

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Tara’s ESL VLOG: Why Listening is NOT Enough!

Hello everybody! my name is Tara Musich and I am a teacher of American English, currently teaching online while living abroad. Today I am going to talk to you about a topic that many of my students and I discuss together. The topic that we often discuss is “Why listening is not enough.” Now, when I say that to you, you might think “Hey wait teacher what do you mean listening is not enough? Everybody tells me I should listen like a baby and I should just be listening all the time and then this will help me speak”…and in many ways listening does help you, but let me give you an example of why it is not the best way to start speaking.

So, imagine you want to learn to swim, swim, right? In the pool or in the ocean. You know you start reading books and watching documentaries about swimming. Maybe you watch some sporting events about swimming. Maybe you decide to talk to someone about swimming. Someone who is a good swimmer, for example …And they can give you some advice about how to swim correctly and how not to make mistakes and things like that. Maybe you join a special group guided by an experienced swimmer and you know, you can discuss all of your worries and difficulties in regard to swimming. After you’ve done all of these activities, have you learned to swim? …Well the same is true for speaking, truly. You can read about it, and you can watch movies and you can think about it, do all of these things, but unless you truly use it and practice with it, you’ll never really be able to speak in a foreign language, any foreign language, if you don’t really start speaking.

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Three Good Ideas about Learning Language

1. Reading allows you to connect with the language, and it builds your vocabulary within a specific context – which makes your speaking stronger.

Many people “moan and groan” when presented with the prospect of having to read something – anything! As a lover of language, written or spoken, this was never a problem for me as I love to read literature of all types. However, as a teacher of English, I realize that not all my students feel the same way that I do, and so I asked myself how I could help my students to enjoy reading more. It seemed like the best answer was: only read what you are interested in!

You should put extra effort into finding a form of literature that is appealing to you – don’t read anything that seems boring to you! I have found in my experience that there is something for everyone, whether it is a paragraph of text or dialogue, a comic strip, a news article, a famous poem, a short book or even a series of novels! If your teacher has presented you with a text that you are not interested in, SPEAK UP, and tell them! The most important thing for you and your English language learning is to choose a subject that is not only useful in daily life, but also very interesting to you.

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Tara’s ESL VLOG: The Future Part 1 – Will, Going To & Gunna

There are 2 forms that native speakers use to speak about the future. Many teachers and textbooks will tell you that there are rules for how to use each of them, but you should focus on using them interchangeably. Native speakers of English do this, so you can too! Once you can USE them easily, and switch between the two forms, then you can focus on the grammar rules. Let’s take a look at the following “language equations”:

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Learning a Language Opens Doors

I believe that learning, especially a language, should be a lifetime commitment. Foreign languages are my passion and the opportunities that being bilingual has given me have been priceless.