Hello everybody. Are you ready to upgrade your English competence to the next level? In this first writing, I am going to tell you how we can improve our English speaking. I hope you are enjoying it, guys!
How long have you learned English? 10 years, 11 years, or 12 years. Have you been able to speak English fluently? Many people still find it difficult to speak English although they have been learning for years. What’s the problem?
Let’s take a look at the Cone of Learning below. It says that if we only read, we only get 10% of the knowledge. It is too low, isn’t it? It is the same when we study English and we only read and then translate the English textbook. Such kind of activity will not make a significant improvement in our English speaking.
What are we going to do, guys?
Speaking English is like swimming. Can you swim if you only read the book about swimming, or hear and see the swimmers? Of course, it will help us, but it will not give us a big improvement to be a good swimmer. So, the best solution and the fastest way how to swim is “Let’s jump to the pool and practice swimming!”. That’s the only way.
To master English speaking, nobody can do it if they don’t practice at home in their free time. All good English learners started their English learning by saying something in English frequently. Have you done that? If not, let’s get down to our business. Here are the tips that you can do.
- Practice at home.
We only have 3 hours a week for learning English at school and it is not enough. Find free time at home, and then start making simple sentences about your daily activities. Say and speak to yourself. Speak everything that comes to your mind in English. You just need to do this in 15 to 30 minutes each day.
- Watch English videos then shadow them
Learning English is fun. You have to keep it in your mind. If you think that learning English makes you frustrated. You are wrong. To improve your English, you can do it in fun ways. You can just watch English films and change the subtitles in English. Then you can shadow or repeat what the speakers say. It would be fun, isn’t it?
- Listen to English songs then sing them out
No matter how bad your voice is. Just sing some English songs you like! It trains your pronunciation a lot and add you more new vocabularies. Sometimes you can search for the meaning of your favorite songs to make you understand the lyrics better.
- Follow English accounts on your social media.
Find interesting topics you like such as football, sport, music, or news on social media. Follow or join the accounts. Read their posts and try to give comments in English. You can also find specific accounts that focus on English. For instance, if you are an Instagram user, you can follow @englishtoday, @englishforall.id, @guruenggress and many others. They can keep you updated with learning English tips.
- Find and join an English Club
We live in Indonesia. It’s hard to find English native speakers here. In order to train our speaking, we are supposed to find and join an English club. For example, you can join SLES (our English extracurricular) at school or maybe join an English course to practice your speaking. If you don’t have much time to do them you can join some English forum on the internet or Whatsapp group and then be active to share your idea with the members.
- Be active, dare to speak
The last thing you have to do if you want to speak English well. You have to be active and dare to speak. Everything you have done will be useless if you do not speak up. Try to speak English if you have a chance to do it. Dare to speak English with a foreigner when you go to Bali or other tourist attractions. You can also practice your English speaking with your English teacher.
By RIKO ARFIYANTAMA, M.Pd.