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English is very important nowadays. English language is a world language. In fact, most text books that we used or reference books are mostly in English. In Malaysia, the Ministry of Education have change the syllabus for Mathematics and Science subject from Malay to English. It will help students in their university as in universities, we will learn in English. As i am going to study abroad, English is very important for me to survive there. In Uniten, I took IELTS to help me with my study there. IELTS can be divided into few part which are writing, reading, speaking and listening. I have tried few ways to improve myself in all four skills.

Writing skill is one of the hardest part of the test. Writing involved few components which are grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary and the content. Without all these skill and component, we cannot get good marks for writing. So, to improve my writing, i read a lot of material to get the knowledge. Reading lots of material helped us to get the idea to write if we are given certain topic. This will help to put additional example or information in our essay. I started reading English books since I was in standard six. I think it really did help me to write. It helped me to familiarized with new words and sentence structure. Sometimes when I went to the hospital, i love to read the magazines provided, such as Health Today. My favourite author since i was in primary school is R.L Stine as he loves to write thriller and horror stories. The language being used is not that simple or too hard to understand. Beside that, doing lots of practice helped me to improve my essay writing. Doing lots of exercise help me to discipline and time myself to finish the essays in required time.

Reading is all about understanding the passage given and answering the question given referring to the passage. I did some practice to help me understand and familiarized with the pattern of questions. In reading, time is very important. It takes time for me to understand the passage as to me, the language being used is quite difficult to understand. To help me to understand the passage better, i referred to the dictionary if i could not guess or catch the meaning of a sentence. Doing lots of exercise helped me to time myself so that i can answer the questions in time provided.

In my opinion, speaking is the most crucial part. Speaking is very hard to score. That's because in Malaysia, we did not use English as the first language. We used Malay in our daily life. We are more fluent with Malay than English. Most of us nowadays are afraid of being tease when speaking English. It has been a culture among our people to tease those who speak English. This kind of culture should not happen as this will discourage people to speak English. I improved my speaking by using English in my daily life. At my house, we used English sometime as we talked and chit chatting among siblings. It helped me to improve my speaking skills a lot. Watching television helped me to learn how to pronounce words. Sometime i used Yahoo Messenger to interact with other people. I always go to the regional chat room. I can interact with people from all over the world. I think it helped me to communicate with them as we used English as we chatted. Most of them are from Australia and India.

For listening skills, I improved myself by listening to radio and watching television. As I am offered to further my study at Australia or New Zealand, i watched the television series from Australia, McLeod's Daughters. It helped me to familiarized my self to their dialect and pronunciation. This will automatically helped me when i did listening exercise in class as the person in recorded tape used their dialect to speak. Listening to mix. FM and Hitz.FM helped me to improve my listening while enjoying myself listening to music. Doing exercise and some practice in listening helped me too a lot. I used the website given by Miss Eliza to do online listening practice.

I really hope that i can improved myself in all English skills as it will help me in the university. May all my effort will give a good result.