1. Listen

The first step in improving your speaking skills is actually working on your listening. 

Listening to English has several benefits – it allows you to pick up new words, phrases, and ways to respond in conversations. Secondly, listening provides opportunities to understand pronunciation, how some words are omitted when speaking, how some are joined together, the rhythm, the intonation, and the sounds of language. 

What should you listen to? There are many resources available to you to listen to for free. Start with short English clips or videos: pick your favourite English TV show or YouTube channel. Listen to a clip and notice carefully what the characters are saying. Repeat any dialogues or phrases that interest you. Replay the same clip until you understand every word. You could also turn on the subtitles or look at the transcript of the video if available and practise saying the dialogues with the characters.

2. Imitate

Imitating or copying someone is a wonderful to improve your speaking skills. Not convinced? Watch babies and children – how do they learn a language? They copy everything an adult says. Another benefit of imitation is that it will help you become more accurate in English without having to learn grammar rules. To effectively improve your speaking skills, you need to follow these steps:

• Listen: Pick your favourite video or audio clip from any of the sources provided in the earlier section of this article. Play the audio and listen to it carefully. Play as many times as you like to understand how each word is spoken.
• Repeat and record: After playing the audio, repeat saying the words and conversations exactly as you heard. Pay special attention to the intonation, stress, and rhythm of language. Record yourself while repeating the words. You could use a voice recorder on your phone or a use a web-service like Vocaroo . Recording will provide you an opportunity to listen to yourself and self-correct. So, do not skip this step. 
• Compare: Listen to the audio again and compare it with your recording. Does it match? Note down changes that you may need to make.
• Correct: Repeat the entire process again until you get better and more accurate. 

3. Read

 

The most common reason why people hesitate with reading is that it takes quite a lot of time to read a book from start to finish. However, when learning English, reading even for a few minutes is greatly beneficial. Short articles or notes in English are great for this. They only take a few minutes to read and are quite easy to find.

You can start with materials you find every day. Think of notes and memos at work, pamphlets and brochures at your local supermarket, or notices and safety instructions in the elevators – wherever you are there is always something to read.

4. Reflect

Reflection is a very useful step in improving your speaking skills. Reflection is nothing but asking questions to think about what you learnt, how you learnt, what progress you see, what could be done differently, and how to change the way you learn to allow progress.

It is important to reflect on your language learning abilities on a daily basis, especially if you are learning a new language independently. Reflection is another way to provide yourself some good feedback in the absence of a teacher.

5. Prepare

A lot of us hesitate to speak or take part in conversations in English because we are nervous about what to say. We are anxious that what we say may not be appropriate or we may make mistakes. We can easily fix this problem by preparing ahead. Are you going to a restaurant with your colleagues? Think of situations that require you to speak English. Order food, perhaps? Ask for changes to a dish? Ask your colleagues’ preferences? Ask for the bill? What vocabulary do you need in these situations? Write up a simple list of phrases to use. 

6. Speak

Yes, speaking. There is no magic pill that would help you speak better. You must put yourself in situations where you are forced to speak in English to get better at it. Start small. Do you live or work at a place where you need to speak English to get by? Great! Take advantage of this situation by speaking to people around you. It could be at your workplace or even at a coffee shop – doesn’t matter where, as long as you can speak.

7. Practise

We cannot stress this enough. Regular and consistent practice is the key to success when it comes to speaking English. The tips and suggestions that we’ve described above only work if you use them regularly. So, here’s what we recommend. Start small – spend just 10 minutes every day doing 1-2 of the above things. Maybe listen to a short video clip today and imitate. Reflect on what you learned. Tomorrow, pick up a short article. Read aloud and summarise in your own words. Reflect on what you read and the new words.