How To Improve Your Speaking

How important is speaking?

How can we improve our ability to speak?

And the reason I'm talking about it is that, you know, wherever I go, if I

speak to people about language learning, whether it was, uh, the group that

I met up with in Poland, one of the participants was a teacher who said

that her students are afraid to speak.

Uh, I met, uh, a few people in the, in the lounge in Toronto Airport,

'cause our flight was delayed, and this lady was saying that she had

French in school and she understands, but she's so afraid to speak.

It just doesn't come out.

Whenever she tries to speak, she fails.

Uh, and I get these comments all the time, people saying that,

you know, I understand, I can read and, but I just can't speak.

So kind of think about this and I, you know, The first thing is obviously to

speak well, you have to speak a lot.

So if people are intimidated and reluctant to speak, they will never

improve their ability to speak.

So the first thing is you have to get over that hurdle, uh, that reluctance

to speak, because ultimately, as I say, you have to speak a lot.

So the next question is, why is it that people are afraid to speak

but they're not afraid to listen?

They're not afraid to read.

Maybe I don't like to write 'cause I'm lazy.

But it's, it's not a fear unless you're writing a business letter

and you're afraid to make mistakes.

But by and large, the thing that seems to, you know, generate this fear in

people is, is the, is is speaking.

So I think there are a number of issues there.

Number one, uh, we need to be prepared to speak and as you know, if you follow

me here, that means getting a lot of the language in you listening, reading,

even using our mini stories, which is, you know, these are stories with

a lot of repetition of high frequency verbs, common structures in the

language, common words in the language.

You wash these over yourself so that you are familiar with them.

You at least potentially have words that you can use because

if you don't have the vocabulary, you're, you've got nowhere to go.

There...

you've got no weapons, nothing that you can find to actually

maintain a conversation.