Improving Your Spoken English

By Ira Rasikawati

Many English Language Learners (ELLs) consider speaking skill as the hardest skill to acquire. The learners’ high level of anxiety might be one of the explanations for the difficulty. Different from other skills such as reading and writing, speaking requires direct response as it takes place in real time (Bailey, 2003). The speakers are often anxious as they have no time to prepare, edit or revise whatever they want to say. Some language courses promise prospective students instant methods to help them speak English fluently; however I believe that there are no shortcuts to learning a foreign language. Depending on the learning objectives and preferences, there are at least several strategies we can employ to improve our speaking skills.             

The main goal of speaking is to deliver a message to and be understood by the person we are talking to. It is therefore crucial for us to make sure that the person we talk to understand our language easily. ELLs might often find it challenging to attain near native speakers’ fluency. In fact we do not need to worry about sounding like a native speaker. It is more important for us to speak clearly than fluently so that people understand what we say. To be understood, we need to speak with correct pronunciation.  Reading aloud will help us to remove our mother tongue influence and improve our pronunciation. Knowing how to speak with correct pronunciations will also make us feel more comfortable and increase our confidence level drastically. Recording our own voice and listening for pronunciation mistakes are ways to improve our pronunciation.     

Many learners know English grammar and vocabulary well; however they often have difficulty expressing their ideas orally. One of the problems is due to the difficulty in constructing proper phrases or sentences. Keeping journals or diaries in English will help us to develop phrases and sentences both in writing and speaking. There are many resources we can use to construct words that naturally go together to create phrases or sentences when we write entries in our journals or diaries. In addition to dictionary, corpora can also assist us to build sentences.

Nowadays we can easily find dictionary online for a quick definition search. A good dictionary however, provides us with more than just definitions of words. It is highly recommended for English learners to use monolingual English learner dictionary (English-English dictionary for learners). This type of dictionary is recommended because the explanations provided in the English learner dictionary are aimed for people who are learning English as a second language (Szynalski). It consists of sample sentences, pronunciations, phrasal verbs, idioms, word frequency information, etc.  The sample sentences are real English sentences with appropriate grammar. If we use our dictionary regularly as we learn to write, we will learn and remember the grammar and the words at the same time.

Another tool we can use to help us build sentences is a corpus. Corpus is a collection of real samples of spoken or written language that is available via internet or software installed in our computer. For beginner users, we can use corpora to look at the language samples that are meaningful to us and keep those samples in our diaries. We will be amazed at how much we can explore the various language contexts of a word. The two corpora that we can access online to see the samples of English phrases and sentences are Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) http://www.americancorpus.org/ or British National Corpus (BNC) http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

Coca Interface

 Exposing ourselves to English music, television, and movies is not only fun but also effective to develop our listening, pronunciation, and speaking skills. Listening to English music and news and watching English movies will make us familiar with the English sounds, improve our comprehension, and help us to think in English. When we listen to the English songs, it is better for us to find the song lyrics and sing along.  We can practice reading the lyrics as the artists sing. There are many internet sites where we can find the words for most songs. We can even find links to free online karaoke in which we can sing along and record our voice. Watching English films and news can also be a great way of expanding our vocabulary and comprehension. Try not to watch movies with our mother tongue subtitles to practice our listening skills. We can also imitate the actors’ flow of speech and mouth movement when we watch the movies or news.

 The most important way to improve the spoken English skill is by speaking the language. There are many situations we can engage ourselves in to practice speaking. Being a member of an English club will definitely provide you with the English speaking environment. Finding foreign friends also gives us good chances to practice and evaluate our speaking ability, whether or not we are well conversant in the language. With the development of technology at present, it is easy for us to find friends overseas. We can easily find friends online through social network such as Facebook and Twitter. Other chat engines such as Skype, Yahoo or MSN Messengers are great tools to build friendship and develop our English speaking and writing skills.

Finally use every opportunity you have around you to practice English and most importantly have fun!

Glossary:

acquire (verb): to gain knowledge or learn a skill

anxiety (noun): the feeling of being very worried about something

appropriate (adjective): correct or suitable for a particular time, situation, or purpose

conversant (adjective): able to hold a conversation in a foreign language, but not able to speak it perfectly

corpus (noun):  a large collection of written or spoken language, that is used for studying the language

crucial (adjective): something that is crucial is extremely important, because everything else depends on it

employ (verb): to use a particular object, method, skill etc in order to achieve something

engage (verb): to be doing or to become involved in an activity

journal (noun): a written record that you make of the things that happen to you each day

monolingual (adjective): speaking or using only one language

References:

Bailey, Kathleen M. (2003). Speaking. In David Nunan (Ed.). Practical English Language Teaching. New York: McGraw-Hill/Contemporary.

English for Students http://www.english-for-students.com/Fluency.html

Hunston, Susan. (2005). Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Improve Your English Speaking and English Pronunciation Skills. LEO Network.

http://www.learnenglish.de/ImproveEnglish/improvespeakingpage.htm

Lloyd, Garret. How to Improve Spoken English? Ezine Articles.

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Improve-Spoken-English?&id=2020830

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. 4^th Ed.

Szynalski, Tomasz P. How to buy a good English dictionary. Antimoon.com. http://www.antimoon.com/how/dictionary.htm

7 Tips for Speaking English Fluently. Englishforum.com. http://www.englishforums.com/English/7TipsSpeakingEnglishFluently/wbjxk/post.htm

(published in UKRIDA Newsletter | No. 66 - Year VIII, June-July 2010)

Available on http://www.ukrida.ac.id/index.php?/ukrida-newsletter.html