Many English learners may find frustration when communicating with native or English speakers even though they are good at practicing English grammar or reading academic articles without any struggle.
The following suggestions will give you some useful tips to improve your English speaking skills.
Firstly, you can practice speaking at home where you don’t get nervous and have the most comfortable feeling. You can, for example, record yourself by reading the same content you listen from the audio, a transcript, a book, newspaper, magazine or whatever you like so that you can listen to your pronunciation and evaluate where you need to improve. If you do not have a recorder, you can read aloud the material or article. This way will help you fully understand the material so that you don’t need to concentrate on meaning, sentence structure and grammar. It is also possible to train your brain by thinking in English and practice speaking by talking to yourself or retelling a story in English.
Secondly, a conversation obviously requires both speaking and listening skills. Therefore, it is recommended that you should try to balance these two skills by practicing with music, podcasts, news, videos from YouTube, TV, and movies. While listening, you should also try to imitate the pronunciation, the rhythm and the intonation by reading out loud and repeat few times until you feel that you can speak that words or phrases confidently. The more you practice, the better and more confident you will become.
In case you don’t know where to find good materials to play this imitation game then you should try eJOY Go – a website for English learning with videos.
On eJOY Go you are able to choose any from +10,000 videos of many interesting topics. Every video has a transcript for you to listen and repeat. Your recording after speaker will be compared and evaluated by the lastest speech recognition technology to give you a final result.
You can also download eJOY-English learning app to your phone and practice speaking by the Shadowing technique anytime you want to.
Download eJOY-English learning app
Finally, work hard by continuous practicing whenever you have an opportunity to chat with the native or any English speaker is the most important key to master speaking skills. There are a lot of ways to communicate in English with others. You can, for example, practice speaking by participating in English classes, English speaking clubs, public speaking events and international volunteer organizations or even having a private teacher or online tutor. While having the conversation, you should try to observe the speaker’s mouth movements and mimic the rhythm so that you learn how to use your lips and tongue to make the sound correctly.
Moreover, there is one thing you should remember: don’t shy away from mistakes. Especially, if you are in the early stages of English learning, it would be better for you to speak more slowly and clearly to pass your message across. Remember that English is not our first language therefore, it is normal to make some mistakes.
Speaking skills is like playing a musical instrument or new sport, the only way you can get better is by doing it. Besides those mentioned tips above, you should also practice grammar in use and expanding your vocabulary to be able to broaden your speaking content which allows listeners to understands fully what you want to convey or describe. Moreover, stay motivated and keep practicing every time, aiming to learn new phrases every day and being patient with yourself and English learning.
If all the hard works sounds a little bit too frustrating you can always choose to learn English in a more fun way, by using English learning apps like eJOY – English. Simply set your goal and enjoy listening and speaking English with joy!