Virtual Immersion - Part 2
Updated: Oct 23, 2021
Living with your Family in an English Speaking Country
I know that the natural tendency is to speak your native language at home however, I tutor many students that have lived in Canada for many years and that experience difficulties in learning English even though they are surrounded by opportunities to speak English.
Speak English at home as much as possible, start off with one day a week of English only at home until you get comfortable.
If you have children in school, learning English, get them to help you, make sure that they speak English and native language equally, they can participate in English Day at home as well. Your children are a natural resource and they can teach adults if adults are willing to listen.
Use “Small Talk” with local people while standing in line at the grocery store, at the coffee shop, bus stop, or anywhere. These simple conversations will build your confidence.
Talk about: The Weather, Current Events and News, City Problems, Sports, Long Waits for the Bus, almost anything else.
Reading & Writing
Reading and Writing are important parts of learning the language, they are often more difficult than speaking and listening, especially if you are not used to the latin alphabet. Nonetheless they are important aspects of building your language capability and will be important to build your language proficiency.
Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing are all connected and each one builds and aids the other aspects of learning the language.
In my opinion, reading is going to be easier than writing so you should move to reading as the third step in language learning. Start by reading transcripts of english language news, this will be a great help in learning to read.
You should start to take notes about what you are listening to, start in your native language and eventually move to the language you are learning.
Conclusion
You can build an effective set of tools that will allow you to create a virtual language immersion environment. While this may not be perfect and it will be dependant on the amount of time that you have to commit to your goal, it should greatly assist with learning the language of your choice.