How can I improve my speaking?
Advice for English learners who want to speak
Hello!
The most common question I’m asked is “How can I improve my speaking?”
I think a lot of English learners (and even teachers!) think that learning a language is somehow a complicated and mysterious thing.
But basically, if you want to speak English, you have to do two things:
1. Put knowledge of the language into your brain
By this, I mean you have to learn the words, the pronunciation and the grammar.
You can do this in many ways: read, watch videos, listen to podcasts, do grammar and vocabulary exercises, buy a Teach Yourself English book, find a teacher or join a class.
2. Practise using this knowledge
By this, I mean you have to speak! Just putting the language into your brain is not enough. You have to practise getting it out of your brain through your mouth, too.
It’s like learning to drive. You can learn a lot about how to drive a car by reading or watching videos but that doesn’t mean you can drive. The knowledge is no good if you don’t actually practise driving a real car as well.
(Writing is a good way to practise using the language too - we talked about this in last week’s post - but if you want to speak English better, you have to practise speaking.)
These are the two most important things you have to do.
But for a lot of people, perhaps there’s a third thing which is often ignored.
3. Overcome the fear
Many learners are afraid of speaking. They don’t want to sound silly, they don’t want to make mistakes, and they worry about their pronunciation.
So they do a lot of the first thing but they don’t do the second thing. They don’t speak!
You have to find a way to get past the fear or you will never start speaking.
The best answer to this problem is to find a safe place to practise. Find somebody you are comfortable talking to.
It doesn’t have to be a native speaker or a teacher. It could be a practice partner or a friend.
But this leads to another very common problem. Many people want to practise their speaking but they can’t find anybody to practise with.
One solution is to practise speaking on your own. You can talk to an AI. You can talk to yourself. You can even talk to the dog!
But I know it’s so much easier, more natural, more real and more comfortable if you can talk to somebody else.
And more valuable too. Practising on your own is a good thing to do but perhaps it can’t fully prepare you for real conversations in real life.
Here are a few ways I can help you with this:
Group chats for Facebook group members - FREE
Members of my Facebook groups are invited to group chats on Zoom.
If you’re not in one of my Facebook groups yet, you can join my women’s group here and join my group for everyone here.
Substack - £6 a month
Free subscribers get an email like this one every Friday.
But if you upgrade to a paid membership for just £6 a month, you’ll be invited to monthly group chats on Zoom. You can upgrade here:
Conversation Club - £40 for 4 sessions
I have two conversation clubs running at the moment and I’m hoping to start a third one! These are small groups (maximum 6 members) and we meet for an hour a week for speaking practice. You can learn more here. If you’re interested, please leave a comment or reply to this email.
One-to-one lessons - £120 for a monthly package
If you’d like more individual attention, tailored to your own particular needs, I offer one-to-one lessons. You can find out more here.
Let me know if you have any questions about any of these things. Reply to this email, leave a comment or click one of the links and use the contact page on my website.
See you next week!
Katie 💙