How to Improve Your English Speaking Skill

The following tips can help you to improve your speaking:

1. First of all, remember that becoming good at speaking requires a pretty large amount of time and practice. So don’t expect yourself to speak like a native speaker in a fortnight’s time. Keep in mind that “Rome wasn’t built in a day”.
2. Like a baby, who starts speaking after listening for a pretty long period of time, you should be patient and cling to the hope that one day, sooner or later, you will be able to speak fluently.
3. Your speaking ability is partly influenced by your personality, for example, whether you are talkative and sociable, or reticent and reserved. However, you should note that speaking a second language is never as natural as your mother tongue, so you need to have interactions with others in the second language in one way or another. Bear in mind that “Practice makes perfect”.
4.  Finding a language partner is an ideal technique for practicing speaking, especially when your partners are considered to be your peers, that is, they are the same age as you and there are many things in common between you and them.
5. Thanks to the internet, you can now go beyond the national boundaries and make friends with native speakers overseas. That is to say, you can find pen-friends on the internet and start a friendship with them. In so doing, you can get to know each other more, and since there must be some cultural differences between you and them, the conversations would be more interesting.
6. If you are more or less an introverted and reversed person, that is, you don’t easily socialise with others, you can speak to yourself. This is called ‘Private Speech’, and could help you a lot, particularly when you don’t have enough self-confidence or you are just a beginner.
7. Remember that even a 1000-mile journey starts from the first step, and the first step is perhaps the most difficult one. But as soon as you take it, the rest would be a lot easier. So the most important thing is to get the ball rolling no matter what.
8. Don’t worry if you are not perfect at the very beginning. Don’t’ think that other people will make fun of you as soon as you make a mistake. It’s important to notice that speaking a second language without making mistakes or errors is almost impossible. The fussier you are about speaking perfectly at early stages, the more ineffective you will become at speaking. Remember that you are like a baby who speaks her mother tongue with a lot of errors and mistakes.
9. You can judge the way you speak by recording your own voice when you have ‘private speech’ or you give a lecture. Then when you are at more ease, you can listen to yourself, focusing on your strengths and weaknesses. If you are not sure about the pronunciation of some words, the best way is to consult a standard dictionary.
10. In communication with others, sometimes it happens that you don’t know some special words or phrases. In this case, never lose your confidence; instead, try to use some other words and phrases to explain about what you have in your mind. This is technically referred to as “Compensatory Competence”.
11. It is believed that “there is an entire world behind each word”. So the more you enrich your vocabulary, the better you can express yourself at both speaking and writing. As a language learner, it’s better to make vocabulary learning one of your daily habits.