Learn English skills

Speaking skills

Speaking is the most common and fastest way of communicating with other people. I can help you to improve you speaking skills by allowing you to do most of the talking in the lessons. While you speak, I will listen and show you which words you pronounced wrongly. By using only a picture, you will use words from you memory not a written text. Doing so means that you are making your memory of vocabulary stronger, which will improve your fluency.

Speaking is used for many different reasons and it can be formal or informal. Business English is much more formal than social English, that is English used among friends and family.

Maybe you want to learn how to complain about a product over the telephone or help someone with a problem. Maybe you need to make a business presentation or speak in a meeting, or simply talk to your friends about a film you watched last night.

I can help you to learn how to speak in different situations and with different kinds of people.

Pronunciation and meaning

Pronunciation is the most important part of speaking. If you don’t pronounce your words well, people won’t understand you. Pronunciation is not the same as accent. Pronunciation is making your mouth the right shape and putting you tongue in the right place. Pronunciation also includes word and sentence stress and intonation. These two things make the ‘music’ of English, how the sounds go up and down and change volume (how loud they are). Word and sentence stress is VERY important to learn. Get it wrong and you change the meaning of the sentence.

The example below shows how the meaning of a sentence can change with the stress in different positions in the sentence.

English pronunciation - You Tube video place holder

Speaking tip

A great way to practice speaking is to listen to yourself. You can record your voice and then listen to it. If you want to practise an accent, you can listen to a recording of someone speaking, record your own voice, and then play it to find out if you sound the same.

There are thousands of free audio books at librixox.

In the UK there are many accents. You can listen to some on the BBC’s voices website.

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