How To Speak English Fluently
Jan 24, 2018
As a language learner, I’m sure your ultimate goal is to speak English fluently. But how can you start speaking English fluently? It doesn’t just happen! Read our article to see how you can reach your goal!
What does ‘speaking fluently’ mean?
You might think the answer to this question is obvious and that speaking English fluently means not making any mistakes and being perfect. But it’s not true and it’s important to remember that. Speaking a language fluently means being able to communicate easily. The majority of non-native English speakers will always continue to make a few mistakes in their speaking and writing, even at an advanced stage, and will never stop learning new vocabulary. But that’s not a bad thing, on the contrary, it’s something that can help motivate you. Whatever level you are now, I’m sure you make a few mistakes, but you can still say some phrases quite easily. And as you learn and improve, the number of these phrases you can say easily will increase, and you will become fluent.
The quickest way to become fluent in English
The most effective way to become fluent is to speak. If you learn a language by speaking, as children do, you can learn naturally through listening to others and copying. And the more you speak, even from the first stages, the more confidence you will gain, which makes speaking fluently become a very achievable reality.
At Wall Street English, your central focus will be on speaking and you will work on feeling more and more confident about your speaking from the very first lessons, even as a beginner. You will spend all the lesson time learning to use practical, everyday language in an open-plan setting that is very similar to a real situation in which you need to speak English abroad. By learning English in this natural way of language acquisition, you can easily obtain the characteristics of a native speaker and become fluent.
Make mistakes and become fluent
As a child, you learned your native language through trial and error – making mistakes and correcting yourself. And the best thing to do to become fluent in English is to adopt the same method. When you’re learning, it’s almost impossible to say something perfectly the first time. You need to try, then try again, and then when you feel you’ve got it, you can put the new language into practice in a real-life situation. And even in that case, making mistakes is natural and useful because mistakes teach you the right way.
I often hear new students saying they feel scared to speak in front of others because they’re worried about making mistakes. But after a couple of lessons they quickly feel more comfortable as they listen to other students of their level speaking openly and confidently, making mistakes without any embarrassment. It really is a fundamental element of learning because if you don’t take a risk and let yourself make mistakes, you can’t grow and improve.
Make time for pronunciation
Some language students focus a lot of attention on grammar and don’t consider pronunciation very important. But whether people will understand you or not depends on how you pronounce a phrase. Getting to a high level of English but with poor pronunciation makes you still sound quite elementary. But if you learn to pronounce English well, you can quickly sound fluent even if you’re a fairly low level. So make time for improving your pronunciation from the very start of your English course.
As a Wall Street English student you have the chance to give a lot of attention to pronunciation. During every lesson, you listen to a variety of characters in a fun video story who introduce new words and phrases to you. And as you listen and copy the right sounds, you listen to yourself and can correct any mistakes.
The key sounds to focus on are vowels, the letter ‘h’, and the ‘th’ sound. Using phonetics is a good way to help you understand how to pronounce new words. Click here to learn more about pronunciation techniques and phonetics.