The good news: There are many things you can do to improve your English!
The bad news: If you really want to improve, you need to be doing these things in class and out of class in your own time.
1) Reading Reading is the best and most useful thing you can do to improve your English. Reading helps you: - Know more about the world you live in (information about the place, culture, people, current events, politics) - Understand more difficult ideas - Develop a larger English vocabulary - Understand correct English grammar
Key information: - Reading anything will help you but for the best results, you should: - read in English - read published works (i.e. a book, a newspaper article - if it's published, it has been checked by an editor and is less likely to have mistakes.) - avoid reading only from places where writing isn't edited (for example: people often make spelling mistakes on Facebook.)
English sentence structure is complex (difficult). But the more you can understand where things go, the better your own sentences will be. You want to have a clear meaning, with a complex structure. The most important thing is your sentences can be understood - sophisticated words won't help you if your sentence is nonsense.
Things to understand: - Sentence types (statements, questions, imperatives/commands, simple, compound, complex) - Sentence clauses, or parts - Functional grammar (what each part of a sentence does, why it's there) - Traditional grammar (the rules about what we can do with each word)
3) Build your vocabulary Learning more English words can help you in both understanding texts and creating them! The better your vocabulary, the better your writing and speaking!
Look for: - Synonyms or words with the same or a similar meaning - More sophisticated, technical and academic language - Words and groups of words to create descriptions
When we create a text, it's important that we know who we're writing for, why we're writing it, how to write it and what parts to put in. When we know that, we can make the best choices, and show our best writing.
5) Correct punctuation Using punctuation like full stops, commas and question marks correctly is a very basic skill - one that is important for you to understand and be able to do. However other, more complex punctuation, can be used to make your writing more sophisticated.
Self-compare: You can look at higher "Levels" to get an idea of what you need to do to take your writing to the next level. It's ok if you don't understand everything - these are what teachers use to judge students' level of English in SA.