How to improve your English speaking skills by yourself.
Yep, you read that correctly: you don’t need a speaking partner to improve your English speaking skills.
When it comes to learning English, learners struggle the most with practising speaking. The main reason is that you need a speaking partner to practise speaking. But: do you really need a speaking partner?
Let’s not beat around the bush: speaking to someone is always the best and easiest way to improve your fluency. But there are good reasons you’re unable to speak to someone.
One of the reasons is that you need someone to talk to. In these COVID-19 times, it’s difficult to travel the world and speak to people who don’t speak your native language. Fortunately, there are ways to practice and improve your English speaking skills independently (= on your own), without a speaking partner.
Tip 1: Shadowing
This tip is particularly interesting for new learners of English. Shadowing is a technique you can use to improve your speaking skills. It does require some concentration, and you should do this regularly. What you do is you look for a native speaker you like to listen to (like I did with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie), and you mimic the way they speak. This means that you try to sound as much as them as possible, and you even try to move your mouth in the same way as the person you’re mimicking moves their mouth.
Shadowing works extremely well for your pronunciation because you don’t have much time to think about what is being said; you have to reproduce the language you hear, and since you’re doing that “on-line”, you don’t have time to use other brain processes to understand what you mean.
This makes shadowing an excellent exercise to improve your pronunciation and fluency. It appears to be more effective when you already have a high level of English proficiency, but using a simple example (without too many complex language structures) could still be benificial for beginners.
Tip 2: Retelling
This second tip is also an excellent way to improve your speaking skills in English on your own. Instead of following a particular person and mimicking what they say, this method focuses on the content. This is a good way to practice creating sentences, and this is an excellent way to practice some vocabulary.
Another benefit of this method is that you’ll get exposure to real-world language, ánd that you’ll do something with that exposure (which are two of the most important elements of language learning: exposure and interaction).
So, how does retelling work? As the name suggests, you retell something that you’ve listened to. This means that you need to listen to something (maybe a TEDtalk or a podcast) and make some notes while listening. Then, you pause the video (or podcast) and retell what you’ve heard.
Here’s an example of how this works:
Assume you’re listening to a talk on why gaming is the best way to learn English. Here’s a transcript of a part of the video:
“Because [gamers] are anonymous, because people are not showing or giving their real name, their real face, and the place where they live, they can use the language without people making fun of them and without annoying teachers — like myself — correcting them when they’re doing their game.”
When you’re retelling this piece of information, you could say something like:
“Gamers are anonymous. Because they are not showing their real name, real face, or the place where they live, they can use the language without people making fun of them and without teachers correcting them when they’re playing their game.”
As you can see, your retold version is mostly the same as the original version. That’s what you want: you want to stick as closely to the source as possible because you want to use as much language from the source as possible.
Tip 3: Focus on individual sounds
Tip 1 focuses on mimicking someone, tip 2 focuses on retelling chunks of language, and this tip focuses on individual words.
You want to pick some words you find difficult to pronounce and go to an online dictionary to listen to these words’ pronunciation. Then, try repeating that word several times until you sound as close to the recording as possible.
Most dictionaries like the Cambridge Dictionary or the Oxford Dictionary offer great recordings you could use (see the pronunciation of the word “country” — a word Dutch people mispronounce quite often). They also provide the IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription, which is the transcription of sounds. You’ll benefit from some basic knowledge of IPA.
So, what now?
If you’re ready to practice your speaking skills using these methods, you’ll be able to improve your English speaking skills on your own. You’ll become more fluent, and you’ll even sound more like a native speaker.
But, there’s one extra way how you can really sound like a native speaker, even as a beginner learner of English. You can find the tip here!
Let me know what you think: will you use these methods to improve your speaking skills, or do you prefer talking to someone?
