Do you want to get better at speaking English? Practise speaking.
It sounds obvious, and it is. Yet I often find that learners expect their speaking to develop mainly through the one or two language lessons they have each week.
Those lessons can be very useful, but there is a difference between maintaining a skill and developing it further. If you have one or two lessons a week, they may provide a useful framework for maintaining your English, but if you want to become more confident, more fluent and more comfortable when speaking, you need to create additional opportunities to use it.
Unless you live in an English-speaking environment, those opportunities are unlikely to appear automatically. You have to find them, or create them.
And that includes practising on your own.
You can practise speaking without another person
Many learners find this idea strange at first. If there is nobody to talk to, how can you practise speaking?
Quite easily, actually.
Actors rehearse their lines when they are learning a role, and public speakers rehearse presentations before delivering them. They do not wait until they are standing in front of an audience to start practising the actual performance.
Learning to speak a new language has something in common with learning a role. You are coordinating unfamiliar words, sounds, structures, rhythm and timing, while simultaneously trying to express a meaning.
It can therefore be useful to give yourself permission to speak English on your own, particularly when you are preparing something specific.
You can rehearse a presentation, practise a conversation, experiment with phrases you want to use, or simply talk through something you have done or are planning to do.
There is no audience to impress, so you can concentrate on the process itself.
And here is where musicians have something to teach us
If you have ever studied a musical instrument, you may remember that learning a new piece does not usually mean playing the entire thing from beginning to end at full speed.
Musicians isolate difficult passages, slow them down, repeat them, correct errors and gradually increase the speed as the movements become more secure.
The reason is simple: there is a great deal of coordination involved.
Your brain has to organise a number of elements at the same time, and performing them more slowly gives you the opportunity to notice and coordinate details that would be difficult to manage at full speed.
Speaking a foreign language involves a similar kind of coordination.
You may need to retrieve vocabulary, construct a sentence, pronounce unfamiliar sounds, organise your thoughts, monitor what you have just said and anticipate what you want to say next, all while keeping the interaction moving.
Trying to do all of that at full speed from the beginning can make the task unnecessarily difficult.
Slow down before you speed up
When you practise speaking on your own, particularly when you are learning new language forms or preparing for a presentation, try slowing down deliberately.
Give yourself enough time to process what you are saying and coordinate the different elements involved.
This is not about training yourself to speak slowly.
It is about giving the underlying skill enough time to develop.
As the language becomes more familiar and the necessary movements and patterns become more automatic, your speed can increase naturally.
That is exactly what happens in many forms of performance training: deliberate control comes first, and greater speed develops as the process becomes more secure.
So if you want to improve your speaking, don’t wait for your next lesson.
Find opportunities to speak, create opportunities if necessary, and practise in a way that allows your brain to learn the coordination involved.
And when something is difficult, take a lesson from the musicians:
Slow it down. Then build it back up.
Do you need help communicating clearly in English?
I help senior professionals who want to communicate with greater clarity and confidence in English.