What can I do to improve my speaking?
One question often ask is ‘How can I improve my speaking?’ If you live somewhere where you don’t have a lot of opportunity to speak English, this can feel like a big problem. However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do to improve.
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| Photo credit: Wiki How |
The first piece of advice I would give is ‘listen’. It’s never been easier to listen to lots of English. The internet gives you access to millions of songs, podcasts, stories, video clips – there is so much stuff out there in English for you to listen to. And if you’re listening to songs, sing along – a lot of people find that it really helps. If you’re watching short video clips, pause them and repeat what you’ve heard. Listening to get an idea of how people speak can really help you with your own speaking.
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| Photo credit: Wiki How |
One thing that a lot of learners find difficult about speaking is that they worry too much about making mistakes – grammar mistakes, vocabulary mistakes and so on and this worry stops them from speaking fluently. Remember though that speaking is about accuracy – using language correctly – but it’s also about fluency. So of course you need to try to use correct English but fluency is just as important.
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| Photo credit: Wiki How |
One tip to help here is to record yourself speaking English. You can try copying something you hear a native speaker say or just record yourself talking about yourself or anything you want to. Try speaking about a topic for a minute and see how you do.
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| Photo credit: Wiki How |
Another thing that people say a lot is ‘How can I sound like a native speaker?’ My answer would be ‘Why do you want to?’ When you speak, the important thing is that people can understand you and you can communicate. If your accent makes that difficult for people then there are things you can do to improve it – you can practice individual sounds – find out which sounds cause problems for speakers of your language. You can practice intonation by listening to native speakers and getting used to the sound of sentence stress in English. There’s a lot you can do to improve your spoken English – but you don’t need to sound like a native speaker – as long as people can understand you, that’s fine.
Here are links to some online resources to help with some of the areas as mentioned on the video above:
Pronunciation
The Phonemic Chart - hear the sounds of English by clicking on the symbols, then hear sample words including the sounds and try practice activities.
Pronunciation activities to practice problem sounds.
The Sounds of English from the BBC.
Sentence stress - activities to help you understand and practice how sentence stress can affect meaning.
Record yourself
Vocaroo is one of the easiest ways to record yourself online and share recordings with others.
Test advice
These Exam speaking videos from LearnEnglish Teens give useful tips, vocabulary and practice in a range of tasks.
IELTS Interview Skills videos take a lighthearted look at some of the common problems and mistakes people make during the interview.
IELTS Practice Speaking Test
The Phonemic Chart - hear the sounds of English by clicking on the symbols, then hear sample words including the sounds and try practice activities.
Pronunciation activities to practice problem sounds.
The Sounds of English from the BBC.
Sentence stress - activities to help you understand and practice how sentence stress can affect meaning.
Record yourself
Vocaroo is one of the easiest ways to record yourself online and share recordings with others.
Test advice
These Exam speaking videos from LearnEnglish Teens give useful tips, vocabulary and practice in a range of tasks.
IELTS Interview Skills videos take a lighthearted look at some of the common problems and mistakes people make during the interview.
IELTS Practice Speaking Test
Source: Future Learn - Understanding IELTS
