How to Improve English Speaking

How to Improve English Speaking?

For many students who are learning English, being able improve your English speaking skills often feels like a distant goal that is hard to reach. So what can you do to improve your spoken English? Here are some useful tips to help you!

Listen

In order to learn how to speak well you need to listen. By listening you can become familiar with the right sounds native speakers produce and you can copy them.

The Wall Street English course is based on this idea of listening and copying because it is the most natural and practical way of learning. To speak in a natural way you need to hear English because many words are written in one way and pronounced in another.

It’s also really useful to listen to audiobooks or watch video clips or even a TV series in English for further practice. A little practice listening regularly makes a very big difference long-term.

Take every chance to speak

Practice is undoubtedly the key to success in speaking, so if you want to improve, take every possible chance you get to speak. When you study at Wall Street English, you speak English from the moment you enter your center and say hello to the receptionist to when you take a coffee with a member of staff or another student, and obviously during your lessons that are all based on speaking practice.

You can extend this practice to when you are studying alone. When you do an exercise, read out loud the phrases and words you hear or see. This is really useful because it will give you extra confidence when you need to use this language in conversation.

Try to connect words

When you speak a language naturally as a native speaker, you join words together. And this is particularly true of English. For example, the word ‘do’ in a question often becomes simply a ‘d’ sound, as in this example:

Do you speak English?

‘Do’ is joined to the more important word ‘you’ and is pronounced /dju:/. And the ‘k’ of ‘speak’ is joined to the word ‘English’ (which would probably be the accented word). So the pronunciation of the whole sentence is:

/dju: spi kin glish/

When you’re learning you might feel worried about joining words like this because you think people won’t understand you, but in reality the opposite is true. The best way to learn to say phrases is to hear them and learn the complete sound, and not just the separate words. Not only will you be easier to understand but you’ll also find it easier to remember the phrase.

A well-known example of joining words is ‘want to’ that is frequently pronounced as ‘wanna’. Perhaps you’ve heard this used in songs. It’s not really slang or bad English but simply an example of speaking quickly and naturally.

Think in English

A great way to improve how you speak English is to learn to think in English. I know this isn’t an easy thing to do, especially when you’re starting to learn. But there is one thing you can do that will help you to begin to think in English – eliminate your native language. You might think this is impossible at first, but if you try for a few weeks you’ll see great results and it will transform your learning progress.

The problem with translating is that after seeing the word in your language you often forget the meaning very quickly and it is often not a perfect match anyway. If instead you learn the meaning of something through context, images, sounds, or examples, you acquire that language naturally, and you will remember it.

Now you’ve seen some different ways you can improve the way you speak English, take action today and start learning! Check out our Student Experience page to be inspired by some students who have succeeded in improving how they speak English.

At Wall Street English we have tested and proved this method and in fact we use the same course and teaching material in 27 countries around the world, meaning that students of many different nationalities learn English without the need to translate.

Why don’t you take our English Test to see your level of English and start learning now!