Developing Clear Speaking Skills And Improving Your Pronunciation

Hello, my dear souls! ♡

In today's post, I'll talk about how to develop clear speaking skills and I’ll also give you some tips on how to improve your pronunciation.

We all know how important is English these days, so the ability to speak it well will open many doors for your career and social life. That’s why we need to focus on our learning goals and achieve them as well.

DEVELOPING SPEAKING SKILLS

How can we develop our speaking skills?

The first thing is, that we need to build a strong foundation. That means that we need to expand our vocabulary in order to express ourselves fluently in English.

And what I mean by that? I mean that we need to learn new words every day – 10 per day or 15, it can also be less. We can use for example YouTube and different language apps. It is also important to lean all those words that we’ve learned in phrases and sentences (to link them together, to use some functional expressions).

And that also applies for sounds. We put two sounds together, make them disappear or even change the sound for a better flow. The flow is a secret! With the flow we come to better speaking skills.

All that is connected with stressing of words as well, which is another important thing to keep in mind.

There are stressed / unstressed syllables in a word and stressed / unstressed words in a sentence.

If the person is not sure where to put a stress, the best way to find out is to look up in the dictionary. If we want to sound even more “professional”, I suggest you to use contractions.

Contractions are shortened forms of two words.

While we are learning how to speak a language, we should also pay attention on how native speakers talk. They talk with rhythm, which is the overall result of the things that I mentioned on the top of this blog post – the result of linking, stress and contractions.

Another tip is, that we can make ourselves more understood by simply training our mouth muscles with different word games, so that we can produce the sounds of English properly.

More fun strategy for developing speaking skills is participation. Participation in public speaking events in university or theaters will bring you a lot of new experiences (for instance: TED Talk).

PRONUNCIATION

After all that said, we come to more serious problem. The biggest problem of English or any other language, is that we might know a lot of words, we’ve learned all the vocabulary, but we still pronounce the words wrong and because of that, we'll not be understood, then there’s very little point of learning all those words.

Some of us speak another language (native language) and our mouth and tongue are trained in a different way. They are trained to make the sounds of that language and not of English for example.

Now, I'm going to give you 5 tips on how to improve your pronunciation, so stay with me :)

TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR PRONUNCIATION

Tip one: focus on articulation! A lot of people make mistakes while speaking, and the main reason is their speed of speaking. I personally have (sometimes) the same problem. When we talk too fast, we swallow the words that are not supposed to be swallowed. We should pay attention on how our month is moving and making sure that we pronounce every single sound in each word. I learned that in Linguistics class with IPA table (I'll explain IPA for you in my other blog post). We can first talk slowly and then after some practice, faster.

Tip two: use online dictionaries (as I already mentioned) and their speakers to know how to pronounce certain word in every accent.

Tip three: We can practice English with repeating the words over and over again.

Repetition!

We cannot expect to improve our pronunciation or speaking skills, if we only say a word once. And the best exercise for this is a game called Tongue Twisters. (training our mouth muscles).

© Pinterest & Reader's Digest: Tongue Twisters

Tip four: We can also practice our pronunciation by listening to the videos on YouTube with subtitles and try to imitate a native speakers, speak out loud and record ourselves. After recording we can compare our recording and the original.

Tip five: identify your weaknesses! We can spend our time by focusing on which English sounds are the most difficult for us personally and write them down. Then the other step is to type in google “Tongue Twisters” and search for the list with a lot of those sounds and practice.

So, let me repeat my words once again...

With a lot of practice you’ll improve your pronunciation

and develop your speaking skills, plus you'll get more confident.

Remember, it is important to build English speaking confidence.

After a while, you’ll completely rid yourself of any speaking fear, building a strong foundation in the language.

♡

Thank you so much for reading till the end, my fellow students! I hope my post will help you with your studies. Good luck and see you in my next post!

With love,

Anja