Well, hello there, and welcome to the Speak English Fearlessly podcast. This is the podcast for motivated English learners who want to speak English fearlessly and learn practical tips and strategies to conquer the CELPIP exam. I also love to feature encouraging interviews with regular people. People just like you, who are working towards becoming fluent in English, so we can learn from their experiences together.

Meet Your Host: Aaron Nelson

Who am I? My name is Aaron Nelson, and I've been an English teacher for over 16 years. And I now help students prepare for the CELPIP exam through online classes. If you're just joining us, if today is the first day that you've downloaded this podcast, I just want to say hi, welcome, I'm glad you're here. I hope that today's episode is super helpful for you and that if you like what you hear that you'll listen to all the previous episodes that I've got here for you. And if you've been a listener for a long time, I'm so glad that you keep coming back. You make my day, that you keep showing up and you keep listening. I'm glad that you're here.

The Power of Consistency in Language Learning

So what's in this episode for you today?

I want you to realize something. When you're done listening to this, I want you to realize that effective practice doesn't have to be long practice. Effective practice doesn't have to take hours. It can literally take minutes. But more important, it takes consistency. It takes consistency, and that's what I want to share with you today.

Consistency matters more than in depth, immersive practice. Consistency matters more than in depth, immersive practice.

Why This Episode Is Uniquely Short

And to begin I've got a quick story, and it's going to explain why this episode is so short.

I've been sick, and I've been sick since December, when all of us, well. Three out of the five of us came down with COVID. I was one of those three. And I've had COVID three times in the last three years. And each of those times, I've been hit harder and harder. And one of the reasons why is I have asthma.

So what has been happening and what is specially happened this time around is I get stuck with a lingering cough that follows me around for longer and longer periods of time. So here we are in March. I am still struggling with a cough that began way back in December, mid December. And just in the last, like, Three or four weeks, the cough has gotten worse and it's actually gotten to the point where I lose my voice completely.

So, this episode is going to be super short, but I want to share a quote with you. Because this is the quote that actually kind of inspired this episode today. And it's a quote by a guy that I've quoted before. His name is James Clear. And, uh, if you want to hear the episode that I was talking about him before, I will put a link to it in the show notes for you.

But James Clear writes a lot about habits. He writes about behavior change, and he writes about how to make things happen in your life. And I especially liked this quote. This is what he says

Embracing Adaptability in Practice

In theory, consistency is about being disciplined, determined, and unwavering. In practice, consistency is about being adaptable. Don't have much time? Scale it down. Don't have much energy? Do the easy version. Find different ways to show up depending on the circumstances.

Let your habits change shape to meet the demands of the day. Adaptability is the way of consistency. And that's again by James Clear. But I just want to say this part one more time. Let your habits change shape to meet the demands of your day. That's interesting. My podcast episodes are usually 15 to 30 minutes long, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but on average, they're both that length.

But today, Knowing that my voice is the way it is, I needed to adapt. I needed to adapt what I am doing in order to remain consistent. And remaining consistent is really important to me, because I've been producing this podcast. This is going to be, this episode right here, the one that you're listening to, is episode 50.

Episode 50! I cannot believe it. Almost a year I've been working on this. So, that means, because I've been publishing episodes weekly, I have been publishing this podcast for 50 weeks in a row. That's being consistent. And there's countless hours of work behind it, which I have come to love, but I didn't want to break that, that stretch of episodes.

I didn't want to break that stretch of episodes by calling in sick today and saying, Oh, I can't do This podcast episode, because my voice instead, I decided that I would follow the advice that's found in this quote. I read this quote a while back now, and I thought it was really interesting. So I saved it into my notion account.

And I thought of it today, as I was thinking about what I was going to share with you. Because, you know, sometimes I know this happens to you that you don't have enough minutes in your day to do everything that you need to do, especially practice for the CELPIP exam. So probably what happens is you don't practice because you're just too busy.

Or maybe the practice isn't as focused or directed as you wanted it to be because you're just kind of, I don't know. Trying to find the time to do it. And sometimes it's just hard to find that time. Maybe you're working full time, maybe you have a family, you have to take care of kids, you have, you know, your spouse that you have to spend time with, and, not have to, but you want to spend time with, you have your own life, you know, you've got things that you want to do.

So it's hard sometimes to make time to practice for the CELPIP exam.

A Practical Guide to Effective English Practice

But One of the things that you should learn in order to be consistent is practicing in the fringes of your life. Practice in the fringes of your life. And all that means is using little blocks of time, if that's all you have available that day.

And use that block of time. for effective practice. Now, I'm going to put a big parentheses around what I'm about to share with you. I firmly believe that practice for your English should not be something that you isolate into a class or into a specific time during the week. And I've said that before in many different episodes, but it's so important for you to hear.

Practicing shouldn't be something that is reserved. for a specific time or a specific moment in your day, and then the rest of your day is filled with things that have nothing to do with English. No. If you want your English skills to grow and develop, you need to make English a part of your life. You need to be doing your life in English.

And if you are doing it that way, Finding fringe moments in your life, like maybe if you only have five minutes or two minutes to practice, it will still be effective.

Introducing a Two-Minute Listening Exercise for CELPIP

And today what I want to share with you, in keeping with a very short episode is I want to share with you

a two minute listening practice that will help you get ready for the CELPIP exam. You don't believe me, do you? Two minutes of practice? Yes, my friend, with just about two minutes of time. You can do some hard, but very focused practice that will help you get ready for the CELPIP exam if you do this consistently. Are you ready for it? All right. First. You need to know that on the CELPIP exam, you're only going to be hearing English.

That has Canadian accents. Now, I'm not exactly sure what a Canadian accent is because there's so many people from around the world living in Canada, but anyway, Canadian English is what you need to be listening to. Not British English, not American English. Canadian English. And one of the best places where you can find that for free to listen to will be on the CBC and I'm going to put a link for this in my show notes.

Okay, but if you go to cbc,ca/listen/liveradio, look for news world report, you will find cbc. ca forward slash listen forward slash live radio.

The, the day's, news in, recorded in little podcast episodes. Now on the website, those podcast episodes are about 10 minutes long, but they're not all the same story. They're broken up into segments and each of those segments are roughly two to three minutes in length. Now, if you want focused practice for the CELPIP exam and you don't have a lot of time to dedicate to it, this is what you should do.

first. Get a pen and a paper. And on that paper I want you to write the five W's with a space in between them, like skip a line. And the five W's are who, what, when, where and why. Okay, so get your paper and write down those five headings. So heading number one, who, then skip two or three lines, write what, then skip another two or three lines, then write when.

You see what I'm getting at? Who, what, when, where and why. When you have that written down on your paper, then go to that link. on the CBC, and pick one of the stories that seems interesting to you. Listen to the story, and as you are listening, try not to stop, as you are listening, see if you can pick out the who of the story.

And then, what happened? And when did it happen? And where did it happen? And why is it happening? Most of the time, if you're listening to a news show or if you're reading in a newspaper, for example, the reporter or the writer of the article is going to try to answer those five W questions. Make it your goal that as you're listening, that you pick out what those five W's are.

Try your best to pick it out the first time you hear it, without stopping it, without repeating it. And of course, if you need to repeat it, you can repeat it as many times as you want to. But remember, you're only working in like a two to five minute space of time. That's the whole idea of this exercise is to give you something that you can do in the fringes of your life.

Now the cool thing about this kind of practice is you can do it any day you want to. Any day that you have two minutes or five minutes to spare, or if you have ten minutes you can listen to the entire report.

But it's always there for you. All you have to do is go to that link if you just want to practice your listening skills. Go to that link. Follow this, this kind of workout that I have here for you and see how much you can pick up from what you're listening to. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, two minutes is not a lot of time.

How's this going to help me? Well, it goes back to that quote that I shared with you.

How to Stay Consistent with Your English Practice

Consistency, is way more important than having long, immersive learning experiences. But you don't do it very frequently, but what is effective is when you are consistently doing things that help you move towards your goal.

So give that a try and let me know how it works. I have created a whole workout session for you that will last you an entire week. And it will all begin with the listening suggestion that I just finished giving you the two minute listening workout for the CELPIP exam. If you're looking for a whole week's worth of short, less than five minute practice sessions that you can do at any time of the day or night.

That's not going to take you forever and ever to do, but will help you to remain consistent.

Exclusive Resources for Dedicated Learners

Then I want to invite you to subscribe to my newsletter. If you do, you will get my copy of the week long CELPIP exam workout that will take you just 5 minutes or 10 minutes at max to do each day. That's a full 4 skill workout session guide that will cover listening, reading, Writing and speaking and we'll give you enough workouts for you to do something a little something on a daily basis for a whole week. If that sounds interesting to you,

it's at celpipsuccess.com/subscribe if you would like to work on your English and make sure that you are consistent with your practice, then this is the resource for you.

Signing Off with Encouragement

Just go to celpipsuccess.com/subscribe thank you so much for listening to today's episode.

I hope you have a great week and I'll see you again next Tuesday. Bye bye.