Michelle's independent resources for ESL Students at Vancouver Community College

This is a Canadian ESL blog for Intermediate and Advanced Students who want to learn and improve their English. Each PAGE above contains thousands of free English lessons, tutorials and practice exercises to help you learn and improve your English grammar, reading, listening, pronunciation, speaking, writing and editing. Some of the resources are Canadian. Others are from around the world.

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Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Take a A Positive View on Learning

As you start  back to school, ask yourself: am I an optimist or a pessimist?

An optimist is a person who looks at a glass of water that is only has 50%  of water in it and calls it half full. 

A pessimist is a person who looks at that same glass of water and calls it half empty.

Many of you tend to look at all the things you CAN'T do in English and rarely give yourself credit for the many things you CAN do and HAVE learned to do. 
   
As you get ready to go back to your English classes, why don't you write a list of things you CAN now read, write, understand and even say in English that you COULDN'T a year or two ago. 

You don't need to be able to do these things perfectly. That is setting yourself up to constant disappointment and feelings of failure. Simply think of the things you are reasonably comfortable doing and that you feel good about. 

Take time
Make sure you give yourself enough time to think about all areas of your life so that your list is as complete as possible. 

As you look at your list, think about how these accomplishments make you feel today compared to how you felt a year or two ago.

Then, focus on what life is likely to be like in another year's time after you have learned even more. By this I mean in September 2013.

SMART GOALS
In my next few posts, I will be discussing how to learn English more efficiently and how to set SMART GOALS goals for yourself. 

In the meantime, read the article Think Like an Optimist . which offers a some very helpful tips to keep yourself focusing on the positive rather than the negative. 

 Get in the mood to think positively about your studies

Listen to this cheerful song about focusing on the positive and do the listening activity below.  Enjoy!      

5 comments:

  1. This is very nice & useful post. There is lot to learn from here. We can learn & improve our vocabulary if we regularly go through such posts. Thanks for sharing this post.

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  2. I enjoyed treading this article. It made me feel better.

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