How to Improve Academic English Talking about how to learn English well, we’ve got a lot of methods in our general English classes. Academic English just combines general English with the knowledge of our own major. Everyone with a foundation of basic geology and petroleum engineering can learn that well. From my perspective, our students are relatively quite weak at general English rather than the basic knowledge. It is essential to strengthen our general English first. Tired of repeating those cut and dried ways, that you should do this or that, what everyone knows but never does, I’d like to tell some approaches that I do have done in daily study to improve my English. Usually, language proficiency is subdivided into four categories of communicative abilities: speaking, listening, writing and reading. But these four abilities are not independent of each other. I do not recommend to improve these four skills individually, in case to become a typical learner in China who is good at reading and writing articles in English but weak at speaking and listening.