Janna wrote:
How to practise spoken English or do you got any website to practise it? |
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Hello Janna, here some ideas, before this question gets out of sight:
Standard answer, and a good one: Speak. Speaking is learned by speaking, and yes, this cannot be wrong. You can use any occasion and try if you have anything to say about it. When waiting at the bus stop, watching tv, walking around, whatever, you can always try to express what comes to your mind, in your target language. You don't have to open your mouth for this, it can be done in your mind, or if you don't feel comfortable with such an exercise, you can wait for occasions when you can utter some nonsense, without anybody listening to you. And some real nonsense your are very likely to produce when you don't have a lot of practice; it does not matter, the sense of the exercise is to activate knowledge which is in your mind already, but not yet at the tip of your tongue, not active yet. (This means it is not very useful, if you have nothing ready for activation; but it is a good thing to do, when you can write, for example, slowly and with a lot of deliberation, but are not fast enough in real life situations.)
Another idea, recommended less often, maybe because it is so obvious: You can use any language material you have used for learning. Take a dialog of one of your lessons. The typical Assimil way is the good old two step procedure: First wave - familiarization, second step - activation by translation, and the step which is needed for becoming a fluent speaker is missing: Activation by production. Well, just use the dialogs for this purpose. You understand them, you can translate them (translating is very useful, of course), and now try to be the person who speaks in these dialogs. Imagine the situation, read the sentence, and then act as if it is you who wants to say what is said. It is a little correction of your position, to say so, you are no longer the one who gets taught, you have mastered these steps, now you are the one who produces and speaks these sentences. It is both reproduction (well, we can't ignore the fact that you know what will be said) and production, a little trick, a slight touch of schizophrenia, but in my experience useful nevertheless. The advantage is that you have the solution, the key for what you say, the disadvantage is that real speaking is one step, at least, more complicated, of course, but step by step can never be such a bad thing. (If I was not clear enough on this matter, just ask.)
If you try to vary the material by changing the sentences and dialogs, well, an excellent exercise, too, but slightly more difficult, and when there is nobody there to correct you, it may be better to wait with it or do it as a next step. You can change the things (nouns) and what is done (verbs), things like this: again, a very good training, but not so easy to be done (correctly) by a less experienced learner on his own.
Another idea, recommended by Iversen (but I do it, too): When watching tv or listening to the radio, try to translate whatever is said. You won't be able to keep pace, at the beginning, and you will have to use some tricks, some severe simplifications, replacing president by man, female artist by woman, and what not else, but after some time things get some easier, and even if you never manage to keep up with the actual speech (it is not your goal to become a professional interpreter, at this stage :-) ) you get at least an ongoing confrontation with all kind of words and structures, not only the ones you produce when silently speaking in your mind and on your own.
Edited by lingoleng on 27 April 2011 at 1:55am
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