5 Smart Ways to Improve your Speaking Skills

hello listen, do you feel like you know you're not progressing with

your

spoken english like you're stuck? Well, today I will help you. I will give you five tips, five simple things that you can do every day that will help you. It helps

improve

your

spoken English and helps you get unstuck so that you can achieve very good results in the IELTS

speaking

exam. Are you ready? So come with me. Hello again. My name is Keith and I run the Keith Speaking Academy here to help you speak better English. give better answers and get a higher score in the IELTS

speaking

test, so maybe you are right, you have taken the IELTS test several times but you are stuck at the same level, maybe a band six or a 6.5;

There can be several reasons for this and today I am going to look at the most common problem of getting stuck and it is actually not that you need more exam techniques or tips, it is just that your overall level of spoken English is too low, so the English in your head it can be great but when you speak it's just not the same as a student once told me, he said, you know, when I have ideas in English, English in my head is like driving a Ferrari, it's great, but when I speak It's like a car accident, which is a big picture, I think, for many students, so today I'm going to address that and help you

improve

your spoken English with these five tips.

I'm going to look at the following how to learn to speak, how to automate your vocabulary how to increase fluency how to gain confidence and how to make sure you're choosing the right tools to help you okay, okay, let's get started. First of all, how to learn to speak or how to learn to speak, the most important advice here is What we think is to learn to speak by listening, unfortunately many students around the world learn to speak with books by looking at words, reading and reading aloud and why, probably because their teachers told them and the reason their teachers told them is because they learned that in school too.

And I think one of the reasons is that in the past there was no access to the voice of the native speaker, but the world has changed and unfortunately education has not changed, but you need to know why this is important, because speaking and writing are two different systems, right? from history to explain I like history our way of speaking we have been speaking correctly for over 10,000 years we have only been writing for about four or five thousand years correctly we began writing with the Egyptians and the Sumerians with their cuneiform writings approximately in 3000 BC C. they began to speak Early writing was a way of capturing what we say and grammar is a way of capturing what we speak and it does a pretty good job but it is not perfect and yet many people choose books to help them To learn to speak, it is the other way around. round, well, we should start by talking and listening, and the books come later, that's a bit right, imagine like Messi, the soccer player comes knocking on your door with his ball and says, hello Keith, would you like to come to play soccer with me? and you say um no, actually I'm going to stay home and read this book about football.

Why would you choose to read about this when you can do it well and learn very well? I mean, the book can be useful maybe later, but it starts with doing the right thing, it starts with listening, speaking and writing, then learn by listening, if I haven't convinced you, let me finish by convincing you, learning by listening has the following benefits, first What's more, you learn spoken English naturally. you know the language is spoken, not written, you learn the pronunciation, you get the context, so you know how to learn to use the language when you speak, it's a no-brainer, you have to start by listening well and I said before, right, the world has changed, now we can, we are surrounded by texts from native speakers or competent speakers, audio texts, videos, netflix, youtube, you can get it anywhere, Keith Speaking Academy, if you have heard that there are audios all over the world just by doing Click a button, so start. using it, learn to speak by listening, okay number two, how to automate vocabulary.

I love that word, automate a big word, Keith, yeah, what does automate mean? It's a good question and I'm glad you asked to automate something to make it automatic, like without thinking about it. You know the phrase autopilot, doing something on autopilot, sometimes I'm driving on autopilot, it just means I'm driving without thinking at the same time, so you can know that I actually have a fluency course and a strong course approach. of fluency is automates grammar, so we'll look at maybe 16 different grammatical elements and, through practice, automate them so that you use them without thinking now you can do the same with vocabulary automates your vocabulary how do you do it? very simple advice proven method repeat and juggle Okay, repeat and juggle, what do I mean by that?

Well, first of all, find something to listen to. Remember what I said in tip number one, learn to speak by listening, you hear something and you repeat a word or a phrase, maybe a collocation, so. you're listening to something, for example, an audio tape and it says "I love Paris" and you stop "I love Paris" and you repeat, of course, that's the easy repetition, the juggling is that you then change a word. What is juggling? Good question, let me show you. You juggle oranges like the magician, this is juggling, why do I call it juggling? Don't know.

Why do I call it juggling? Because you take a word and change it correctly. So in our example, I love Paris. I change the word Paris. I love Hanoi I love New Delhi I love Manchester right now easy you can juggle by changing the word or you can change the time I love Paris I loved Paris I would love Paris I used to love Paris I'm sure I would love Paris if I could go there so you're doing time juggling very very simple, listen, repeat and juggle, and that formula starts to make you automatically use and program the vocabulary, making it active and more automated now, in fact, as I said, education has changed at this time .

Surrounded by audio and video, there is a lot of it and there are a lot of really good tools that you can use. I found one the other day that I thought was really good and I'll show you very briefly how it works. It gives you access to a lot of audio and video and it helps you do this by repeating and juggling let me show you so let me show you this app properly. I downloaded it from the Apple Store. I'm on my tablet here, this is here, woodpecker and once. get in there, let me get on the screen and show you how it works so we have the whole bunch of YouTube videos.

If you have Netflix, you can log in, log in, and access your Netflix videos. You can go to the web browser and also get some websites here and there, there is a built-in dictionary. I think now let's imagine on youtube if you want to select by topic you can do that so if you are interested in I don't know books you can find them all. The videos that are related to books you can also choose by channel if you prefer or choose by teacher, so all your famous English teachers are here, so let's see how we can use the repetition and juggling technique. a video, if we go into this video here on the right, you can see that you can see the cool video when people ask you what I do.

The tape script throughout the video is here with timestamps so you can click on any timestamp. popular in his time and pause and I can repeat that, right, he was very popular in his time. I can check the meaning of a word by pressing it, it tells me the meaning of the popular popular word from the dictionary, but if I press the timestamp. will only be repeated he was very popular in his time he was very popular he was very popular press the timestamp was very popular in his time he was very popular great and now I can juggle I can change the ending he was very popular 10 years two years ago he was very popular two years ago was very popular a year ago and so on was very popular in its time total flexibility to move and repeat and juggle absolutely brilliant great so that's it tip number two listen to repeat and juggle let's move on to number three , how to increase your speaking fluency, so the advice here is to focus on fragments, so what are fragments you ask?

Fragments are fragments of language, usually two words together or maybe three or four words that normally go together, so your fragments can be, for example, collocations like heavy rain, right, we don't say heavy rain, we say heavy rain, these words go together like friends, pieces stick together, could be idioms like kick the bucket, i.e. die, kicked the bucket, kicked the bucket, um could be a filler like on top of that, just when we say on top of that, You don't want to think, is it on top, on top of this, on top of that, you don't want to think that you want a ready-made fragment on top of that, so that you learn the fragment without thinking about all the words and this, as you can imagine, speed up your fluency i.e. take collocations, let's take the word buy for example, just when you learn the word buy, you should also learn some common collocations, you can go to a website like ozdik.com.

The brilliant website gives you instant placements and you will find things like weekly shopping, online shopping, late night shopping, shopping spree or shopping schedules, these are bits of language that if you learn them you can use them much more flexibly you don't have to think well someone says you know what you did at the weekend oh I did my shopping you know from Monday to Saturday you know the shopping for the week oh you mean your weekly shopping yes I did my weekly shopping if you learn the collocation it will just help you to be a lot more fluid is very simple when you think about it just when you learn words a word you have to think about putting them together when you learn chunks you don't have to think about putting the words together, just think about putting the chunks together imagine this well, imagine a builder building a house and you are using bricks and you place the bricks one by one, you place the bricks on top of each other which is quite slow and takes time to build a house, but now imagine that someone has a new invention and you give him four or five bricks in a layer glued and all you have to do is put the layers of bricks on top of each other, it is much faster and also the house will be better because it will be aligned more precisely, it is more precise and it is the same with language, using these layers or fragments, more precise, it's faster, the faster you become more fluent, so when you're learning vocabulary think, learn and use fragments let's move on tip number four right how to gain confidence well here my advice to you is to push your comfort zone your comfort zone is the area of ​​doing things where you feel comfortable so maybe you learn english by watching a movie you feel comfortable you read a book you feel comfortable but then someone says well listen why don't you record your voice oh no, I don't feel very comfortable no no no oh why don't you find a buddy to talk to on facebook oh no no no no no no I don't feel comfortable with that why don't you go and join the classes later? oh no no no no no I don't feel comfortable with that and so there's almost fear if you like to break your comfort zone but when you use English in the world you will have to interact with other people talk to strangers be nervous make mistakes make other people a Sometimes they will laugh at your mistakes that is going to happen so get used to it and Believe it or not, when you take the IELTS Speaking test you do it with a real person.

Yes, the examiners are real people and you will have to get used to being nervous. Get used to making mistakes in front of them. Get used to those feelings of being nervous. Uncomfortable How do you get used to it? Push your comfort zone. Do these things that make you uncomfortable. And I think one of the best things you can do is practice with other people. Yes, you can practice speaking on your own. That's great, but you have to take it. your confidence to the next level you should practice with other people. You know I'm a big fan of platforms like italki and cambly or facebook to find conversation partners that you know, but by doing this, you'll be practicing with other people, yes.

You will feel uncomfortable, but the good news is that you will get used to being uncomfortable, you will get used to feeling nervous, you will get used to making mistakes in front of other people and then by pushing your comfort zone you will be in a much stronger position and be more confident facing the IELTS examiner on test day, so go out and push your comfort zone. Well, speaking of tools, let's move on to the next tip number five. It's about tools. Correct advice number five. All about choosing the right tools. Well, my suggestion here, tip number five is to immerse yourself in natural spoken English, it is very good, have a textbook, have a teacher and practice with English, which is for students, but it is very important that you do not forget the real world. also participate and immerse yourself in natural spoken English, which is not for students, which is not used by non-normal people, by native speakers or English speakers with a levelcompetent.

Why is this important? Because teachers are great, right? But teachers and textbooks usually limit the language they use. they expose you they speak slowly they correct you they are polite they encourage you it's a kind of artificial bubble where you can develop your confidence and that's great but also the real world is a little different right people are not that polite maybe not Correct yourself, they talk fast, they wait so you understand, there is no mercy in the IELTS oral test, you have to answer immediately, so there is pressure, so I think, of course, have the teacher the course and the book, that's great, but also make sure that you. re-immerse yourself in spoken English and this connects to a lot of things I said before about listening, learning to speak by listening, about using different tools, so today there are many opportunities and I'm sure you know through videos and podcasts you can find on the internet on your TV or through your radio, if you still have a radio, call me the old fashioned way if you like, but there are plenty of opportunities to listen and watch, I think it's great to watch news broadcasts , current affairs programs, chat. shows interviews with great people ted talks in natural english can be great obviously movies are good i mean keep in mind that movies are scripted to be semi natural but they are still a great source for immersing yourself in english and There is also the tool I mentioned before. which I think has a great balance because it's the woodpecker learning app that gives you not only access to ESL stuff, meaning student stuff, but also real world stuff that you have access to, I think, to hundreds of thousands of videos you can choose from. the app and see them all in one place, many of them have correct subtitles, so that gives you support if you want written support, but it is a great opportunity to immerse yourself or immerse yourself in the natural English language, go and check it out, I will put a link in the notes below.

You can go and download it. It is available on Google and Apple. Go take a look and tell me here. Let me know in the comments below what you're seeing. in the app now to help you improve your English go and check it out it's free of course lovely let's move on so listen those are my five tips to help you improve your English speaking

skills

so we've seen how learn to speak by listening to how. to automate vocabulary, repetition and juggling, how to increase fluency with those chunks, how to gain confidence by pushing your comfort zone and how to use the right tools and immerse yourself in English.

Great, I guess I mean, remember these are tips, but they are needed day to day. practice be patient but be persistent keep practicing day after day that's what it's really about because we're talking about increasing your general level of English it takes time but it's fun it's great and I hope that with these tips they will maybe help you go from being a student of Struggling IELTS to be a successful IELTS speaker now, that would be nice, wouldn't that be great? That's all, please subscribe, remember to activate notifications on YouTube so you can find out about my next videos.

Leave me a comment below. Know what you're watching or hearing to help you improve your English today. Brilliant as al

ways

, it's been fun and a pleasure, take care mate, bye.