How To Take Advantage Of Feedback to Improve Your English

Feedback. I've been thinking a great deal about it these past few weeks. If you've been following along in my podcast, then you'll know that over the past few weeks, I've been dealing with several ongoing issues with my podcast. Mistakes, editing errors, and sound problems. I've Last week, I'm happy to say, at least for me, my podcast turned out pretty much the way I hoped it would.

Not perfect. As I know, I can always improve. But as I listened to it after it was published, I distinctly remember smiling and saying to myself, That's it. I fixed what I had been doing wrong. Now, I don't say that to brag. Not at all. I say that because I learned something from my mistakes over the past few weeks, and I think there's something valuable in this to share with you as you work so hard to prepare for the CELPIP and develop your English skills.

Let's talk about feedback today.

 

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.

Who am I? My name is Aaron Nelson, and I've been an English teacher for over 17 years, and I now help students prepare for the CELPIP exam through online classes. So if you recall, the reason why I've been making so many mistakes lately is because I'm attempting to do something completely new and very scary for me, a video version of this podcast.

Last week I shared what I had thought to be the causes of my problems, or at least some of the causes. The first and most obvious reason I'm making mistakes is because I'm trying to learn how to do something new. Not only am I recording audio, I'm now also recording video, and then I need to edit it.

This requires me to learn new skills, and for me to be trying things I have never tried before. Mistakes should be expected because of all of that newness. The second thing I thought was causing my mistakes was that I was overusing a tool to help me shorten the spaces or the gaps between some of my words.

I was aiming for a faster sounding product for YouTube, where I've been uploading the video version. Thinking that attention is hard to command on that channel, I thought going faster might help me. My hypothesis seemed to have been true. I was careful in my editing last time, not to use this specific editing feature very much at all, and I seemed to get the result I was hoping for.

Now, I know, my friend, that you care very little about podcast editing. You're here to develop your English skills and your skills for the CELPIP exam. But hear me out. I want to talk with you today all about feedback. What do you normally think of when I say that word? Feedback. . Go ahead. Think about it a second.

I'll wait for you Feedback. What comes to mind? Now? I know for me, when I think of feedback, I often think about the comments A teacher writes me at the end of a research paper, for example, or I think of a score on an exam. I think about the compliments I get after preparing a good meal, or, gee, I think this needs a little bit more salt.

What comes to mind for you? The truth is this. Feedback comes to us in a multitude of ways. On the CELPIP, your feedback is a number. Either you got the score you needed or you didn't. But if that's the only feedback you're depending on to determine your progress, then you're not giving yourself a fair chance to achieve the best results possible.

Sure. The score the exam gives you is great feedback.

It tells you what your current level of English is. It also tells you if your skills are strong enough for your Canadian immigration process. Boy, that feedback carries heavy weight, doesn't it? So wouldn't it make sense to start noticing feedback way before that big final score comes in so that you can begin making changes in what you're doing with your English?

I think learning how to listen to feedback that you get every single day is just as important, or maybe even more important than the final score on your exam. But I wonder something, are you picking up that feedback that comes your way each day that has the power to help you forward if you notice it? For me and my podcast, I could have easily ignored the feedback I was getting.

Poor sound, Aaron. Mic bumps, text messages arriving midway through my recording, and my voice getting clipped out here and there. I could have easily ignored the feedback that was there altogether by simply not listening to my finished product once it was out in the world. I could have also easily decided not to do anything about it once I did hear it.

A simple shrug of my shoulders and, oh well, I'll do better next time. And I continued to do the same things I was doing that created those mistakes in the first place. But all of those mistakes are not just mistakes. They're clues. Clues to help me focus my work on what I can do to get just a little bit better with each podcast episode I put out.

I'm working with some students through James Clear's book, Atomic Habits. He writes about the power of making 1 percent improvements that, and I quote, small changes often appear to make no difference. Until you cross a critical threshold, the most powerful outcomes of any compounding process are delayed.

You need to be patient. End quote. In other words, making small changes and improvements patiently and over time end up creating powerful results down the road. If you continue with them. They may not look like much now. But if you continue improving a little each day over an extended period of time, you'll see amazing results.

I hope you see what I'm getting at with your English and CELPIP skills. Feedback comes your way daily, but are you noticing it?

Maybe today your feedback comes in the feeling of confusion you felt when you heard the news report on your way to work. You were understanding the report for the most part. Then the reporter said something that you didn't quite understand and you suddenly felt lost and then found yourself distracted by something you saw out the window of the bus or of your car, and as a result, you lost track of what was happening in the report.

That's not just you missing a news report. It's feedback. What is it telling you?

Or how about this? You're paying for some groceries at the checkout, and the cashier asks you a question that you totally understand, but you suddenly feel self conscious because you forgot a few of the words you wanted to say to answer. It's not that you didn't know what she was asking you, you just forgot what to say.

That's feedback too. Or how about this one? but Your coworker, who knows how hard you're working to develop your English skills, comes over to you at lunchtime to say how well you did on that last email you sent. The words were perfect. Your ideas were flawless. You're a great writer. You smile happily. Yes!

Writing in English has always come easier for you because it gives you time to think about what you want to say. And of course, you can delete your words if you make a mistake. And spell check! That has come to your aid multiple times. You nod your head and smile, thanking them. All the while thinking, If only I had the ability to delete and word check the things I say.

Which is why you almost never attempt to speak in English when you have the opportunity to. Did you know that that's feedback as well? So here's what I want to leave you with today. You are getting feedback on a daily basis on your English. But are you noticing it and using it to help you improve a little bit each day?

The feedback that is most helpful for you is feedback that is targeted, specific, and timely. Here's what I mean by that. Targeted means, to see improvement, pay attention to one thing at a time. I want to improve my speaking skills in English is too broad. If you're like the person who hides behind their writing, Afraid to speak because you fear making a mistake?

Then perhaps the first area you could focus on is, I'm going to start and hold a five minute conversation about a project I'm working on with an English speaking co worker at lunch today. The feedback you can listen for is, number one, did you do it? Number two, were you able to start that conversation and talk about your project?

That's it. Listen to the feedback that comes back. If you managed to start that conversation, but you had trouble talking about your project, what was missing? Was it some key vocabulary words, or did you just find yourself feeling so nervous that you forgot what to say next? Vocabulary is an easy one to fix, isn't it?

Just go over the words you need to talk about what you need to talk about, and then try again. For nerves, that one might be a little harder to overcome. It takes repetition. Putting yourself in the situation again and again so that you become used to it.

You can also try rehearsing what you want to say ahead of time. Imagine yourself saying the things you want to say. Say it to yourself out loud as you're driving or out for a walk. Repetition is your friend in this circumstance. Number two, specific. In keeping with the same example that I mentioned above, You know, the person hiding behind writing instead of trying to use their English in conversation in order to take advantage of the feedback that has just come your way that you're getting praised for being an excellent writer, but you notice, Oh, man, I'm a good writer because I can edit myself, but I'm scared to speak out loud because I can't edit myself that easily.

So it's better for me to just hide. If that's the feedback that's coming your way, then. It's important to notice what's going wrong, or at least have a hypothesis about it so you can attempt to solve the issue at hand, like what was happening with my podcast. And I've got a really interesting, small little quote about what specific feedback is all about.

This is what it says, Effective feedback is specific, which means it is tangible and transparent. It's actionable and user friendly, and that comes from an EdTech book that I'm going to link to in my show notes. The feedback that I noticed about my podcast was very tangible. It was noticeable. It was also actionable.

I knew what I needed to try to do to fix my problem. For you, if you tend to hide or avoid using your English in front of other native English speakers, you also have tangible and very actionable feedback from that experience. The action you need to take is to find ways to repeatedly expose yourself to using English with native English speakers.

But how about user friendly? Keep it with someone sympathetic to you as you learn. Let them know you're trying your best and to please be patient with you. This one alone does wonders most of the time I've used it. I've told people with my Spanish skills, Hey, I'm still learning Spanish. Could you please be patient with me?

And almost every single time it changes that interaction completely. People tend to be calmer, they tend to be more friendly, they try to be more helpful as you are trying to use the language that they use. Make sure that you use this as well. The point here is this. Feeling afraid to use your English is telling you something.

You need to find ways to do it in simple, non threatening ways as much as you can. Timely. The last thing I wanted to share with you is how important it is to actively be working on this. Podcast means I have less than seven days to take any feedback that comes my way, think about it, and try again.

I often am thinking about what I'll do differently immediately after I hear what I have just published. The space between any feedback I notice in my podcast and my next episode being published is quite short. The same needs to be true for you. When you notice feedback coming your way, don't ignore it.

Take it in and act on it as quickly as you possibly can so you can put out another Episode if you like again if your feedback you got was oops I didn't have the right vocabulary words to express myself ,properly get to work and quickly learn what you needed to say and then try doing it again See what I'm getting at? Don't let there be a big space between your feedback, and you figuring out a way to resolve the issue, and then trying it all again. In fact, the smaller that feedback loop, the better. So to summarize, what I hope you'll take away from this episode today is this feedback is happening all around you that can help you to build stronger English and CELPIP skills.

But are you noticing it? And when it does come in, make sure you're focused on one specific thing to develop at a time and make sure that you take specific action to resolve the issue you're facing. Think about it like a hypothesis for an experiment. If you change this, Or add a certain ingredient. What happens the next time you run the same experiment?

And finally, run the experiment again as quickly as possible and notice the results. Did the changes you made work? And if they did, why? Did it almost work? Why? Did you fail again? Why? Repeat that loop again and see if you can solve the issue. I hope that this helps you as you work on your English this week.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I hope you'll come back again next Tuesday.