8 Tools for Anyone to Start Talking About School in English

Have you ever sat in an English class feeling lost and confused?

When I was teaching English in South Korea, I spent most of my spare time studying the Korean language.

I had a stack of textbooks that I would read every night.

After a while, I started to get pretty good at holding a basic conversation in Korean.

Eventually, I decided to take my language skills to the next level by taking Korean lessons at the local university.

My excitement quickly turned into horror after the first day of lessons, when I realized that I couldn’t understand a single thing that my teacher was saying to me.

The problem wasn’t that I didn’t have a good understanding of basic Korean—it was that I hadn’t taken the time to learn how to talk about school in the language.

Fortunately, I had a patient teacher and I was motivated enough to study every night after class, so I quickly caught up with the rest of the class.

But this experience taught me something important—you have to practice talking about school in a language if you want to study it in a classroom setting.

This means that if you’re a student of English and you plan to go to an English-speaking university, you need to know your academic English.

If you’re the parent of an ESL student, it’s also a good idea to learn a little bit about educational English just so you can keep track of their progress.

Even if neither of the situations above apply to you, school is a subject that comes up frequently in English-language discussions.

So any English learner can benefit from learning some basic school-related vocabulary.