For a lot of foreigners, the hardest part about learning English is speaking. Why is speaking English so difficult? Most of the time, the difficulties lie in listening, pronunciation, vocabulary and confidence.
Today Scots English College will describe these English speaking challenges and what you can do to overcome them.
1. Listening
When it comes to conversation, 50% of the time is spent talking and the other 50% spent listening to the other person speak. It is difficult to reply if you don’t understand what they are saying.
What can you do?
Practise listening every day. You can get free English postcasts on websites and listen to them while doing other things. Listening skills practice through movies is also another effective way.
You can also make friends with native speakers, talk with them and learn from them.
You can also use these phrases in conversation when you don’t understand something: “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.”; “Could you repeat that, please?”, “Could you say that again, please?”
2. Pronunciation
It can be difficult to pronounce English words. When speaking English, you have to consider not just word pronunciation but the connections between the words in the sentence. Rhythm and intonation of the sentence are other difficult things.
What can you do?
A great way to improve your English pronunciation is to keep practising your listening. The more you listen to English, the closer you can get to native pronunciation. And the best way to practise is listening and shadowing audio samples with transcript or movie speeches.
3. Vocabulary
Sometimes it is difficult to say what you are thinking because you are missing two or three important vocabulary words.
What can you do?
You can improve your ability to remember words by making connections when you learn a word.
4. Confidence
If you feel nervous and are afraid of making a mistake when speaking English, then confidence is your problem.
What can you do?
You can increase your confidence by:
Not worrying too much about grammar. Native and non-native English speakers still can understand what you mean if you make some minor grammar mistakes. Indeed, the grammar of spoken English is often more flexible than written English grammar.
Also, be positive. Celebrate what you know and do not be frustrated about what you don’t know.
Another good way is to practise speaking English as much as possible in less-pressurised situations. For example, talk to yourself; talk with your teachers and friends in English class. Scots’ teachers are super friendly. If you make a mistake, they can correct you. It is important to practise in less-pressurised situations as much as possible to increase your confidence. Then you will be more comfortable speaking English in high-pressure situations.
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