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How to practise spoken English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Janna Newbie China Joined 4790 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes Studies: Cantonese | Message 1 of 4 24 April 2011 at 9:02am | IP Logged | ||
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How to practise spoken English or do you got any website to practise it?
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| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5107 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes  | Message 2 of 4 26 April 2011 at 9:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| gambi Newbie New Zealand Joined 4918 days ago 37 posts - 52 votes Speaks: English Studies: Indonesian, Burmese | Message 3 of 4 27 April 2011 at 3:22am | IP Logged | ||
If you have any English speaking friends (they don't have to be native speakers), you could practise speaking with them via Skype or another chat program on a regular basis. Another suggestion is, if you're a university student, you could perhaps form an English speaking club at your campus, and practise it that way. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Samantha.Majka Newbie Czech Republic diaryofmysoul.blog.cRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4759 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English | Message 4 of 4 07 May 2011 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello,
Great recommendations btw. I think I will try some of them. I love speaking with people via skype. I have a lot of friends who are from different countries and only way to communicate with them is English. It is a great way to learn spoken English. I think that if people talk about something they are interested in or they want to talk about it's better than talking about things, they don't like or they don't see enjoyable. Learning can be fun and what people learn in a funny way, they know better and longer, in my opinion. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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