In this lesson, I’m going to help you boost your English speaking skills, and guess what? You can do it all by yourself! Whether you're starting out or levelling up, this lesson's got you covered. I’m going to give you different exercises and techniques that will help you. Ready to chat like a champ? Let's get started!

English Speaking Warm-up

Let’s begin our lesson with a fun yet effective warm-up: Tongue Twisters!

These are great for practising those more challenging vowel and consonant sounds and are perfect for all levels. Tongue twisters help improve pronunciation by forcing you to repeat tricky sounds. The idea is to start off slowly and then gradually speed up as you gain confidence. This repetition helps train your English-speaking muscles and will get your tongue used to making English sounds.

First up, a tongue twister for beginners, designed to help you practise the voiced /b/ and unvoiced /p/ sounds, which can be a bit challenging for some learners.

• Big bears play before painting pictures.

My lips close to make the /p/ and /b/ sounds. In fact, the only major difference between these two sounds is that the /b/ is voiced - that means your vocal cords vibrate. The /p/ is unvoiced. 

Now let’s try one that’s a little bit more advanced. Pay attention to the /θ/, /ð/, /s/ and /ʃ/ sounds:

The sixtieth sheikh's sixth sheep's sick.

Try saying that 3 times fast!

Remember, the key is to start slow, then gradually speed up while maintaining clear pronunciation. These exercises are a fantastic way to warm up your mouth and get ready for more speaking practice.

Now, I’m going to share some of my favourite methods and exercises that you can start doing today that will greatly improve your English speaking ability.

I. Repeat

We are focusing on two important parts of speaking English: improving your pronunciation and building up your basic vocabulary.

Here's how it works:

1.Play a recording of simple English phrases or sentences.

2.Listen carefully to the sentence or phrase, then pause and repeat what you heard.

3.You can also practise repeating the sentence at the same time as the speaker. This will challenge you to speak faster.

II. Describe yourself

This exercise is fantastic for practising simple vocabulary about physical appearance and clothing. All you need is a mirror, or you could record yourself on video using your smartphone or computer.

Here’s what you do. Stand in front of a mirror and start describing what you see. It could be your hair colour, your clothes, your smile... anything!

If describing yourself feels a bit awkward, choose a character from your favourite TV show or film. Describe them instead.

You can even talk about what you did that morning to practise vocabulary connected to daily routines.

Your sentences don’t need to be long but try to use newly learnt vocabulary in complete phrases. Practising new words in chunks like this will help you remember them for life!