How To Practice Your Speaking And Communicate Clearly

e all want to be able to communicate confidently in English. However, out of the 4 main English skills (you know; listening, reading, writing, and speaking) the one that most people struggle to improve is speaking. 

Speaking English is difficult for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of the main problems is being able to practice. The other skills are much easier to practice, even if you are on your own.

If you want to practice reading, you can find plenty of articles and books online to use. If you want to practice writing, all you need to do is grab a pen and paper and get to it. Listening is also pretty easy because there are so many podcasts out there. However, speaking is a bit more tricky to practice.

So that leads to the question… “how can I practice my English speaking skills?”

Well, today you are going to learn 3 simple techniques that you can use to improve your spoken English.

Shadowing is a pretty easy technique that lots of English language learners use to improve things like intonation, pronunciation, and word stress. It will also help you recognise correct sentence structure and grammar usage. 

The other main reason that it is popular is because it is very easy to do, it’s basically free, and you can do it from anywhere. You just need to follow these simple steps:

• Find a video or some audio of a native speaker talking (YouTube is perfect for this)
• Listen to a sentence and then pause the video.
• Repeat what they said – try to copy the intonation, pronunciation and word stress as much as you can.
• Do this until you get to the end of the video.

This technique is really simple, but very powerful. The only real problem comes in trying to find great materials to use for shadowing practice. I would always advise to practice using content made by native speakers, especially those with the accent you are trying to learn.

If you want to go one step further, I recommend this shadowing course from my good friend – StewSensei. He will help you practice your speaking with interesting topics about British Culture. Click the link below to check it out:

Shadowing: British Culture 1 Course*

This technique is very similar to the shadowing technique above, which is good because you get all the same benefits. However, there is one pretty big difference. 

When we do the shadowing technique, we are trying to copy what the speaker said exactly. On the other hand, when we do reformulation, we are trying to express the same idea in our own way. Imagine that you are re-telling the story to a friend. 

To try this technique, follow these steps:

• Find a video or podcast of a native speaker talking
• Listen to a sentence and then pause the video.
• Try to express the same idea in a different way or as many different ways as possible. 
• Do this until you get to the end of the video.

This technique has the added benefit of you being able to practice using different grammar patterns, sentence structures, and vocabulary, as well as improving your storytelling skills. 

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So far, we have focused on copying or expressing the same idea as another speaker that we are listening to. The next stage is to try to talk about yourself or your own experiences in a similar way. 

This technique is all about listening to a native speaker talk about something, and then talk about the same thing from your own perspective. 

You can use some of the same words and structures used in the audio, but you can modify it to fit what you want to express about yourself. This is really useful because it will help you talk about yourself and your experiences in a wide range of situations. 

Once again, the steps are pretty simple:

• Find a video of a native speaker talking
• Listen to a sentence and then pause the video.
• Talk about the same idea from your own perspective 
• Do this until you get to the end of the video.

You will still get the same benefits as the other two techniques we have looked at so far as well as improving your communication skills when it comes to expressing and talking about yourself.

Once you get to the end of the video, try to record yourself talking about the same topic for a couple of minutes. You can use your phone to record yourself and then listen back to it to make sure you are not making any mistakes!

In this article I have shown you 3 different ways that you can practice your speaking skills for free, even if you are on your own. They are really powerful techniques.

However, if you really want to improve your speaking skills as quickly as possible, you might want to think about BritSpeak private lessons.

The biggest benefit of private lessons is having a speaking partner who can also guide you. As a teacher, I can give you direct feedback on the mistakes you are making and areas that we can improve. 

It is much easier to fix any problems if you know what they are. This will mean you can mix the problems much more quickly and see a quicker improvement in your speaking skills. 

I have worked with 100s of English learners, just like you, to improve their speaking skills, so if you want to work with me, click the link below to book your lesson now.

*This post includes affiliate links. This means that if you click the link in the post and make a purchase, I will receive a small payment.