Improving your speaking

Assessing speaking ability is often difficulty as it always runs the risk of becoming very subjective and it somehow depends on objectives, levels and needs and often on one’s expectations. “

“How can I improve my spoken English?”  

Let’s get what I think a few facts straight :

Adult learners aim at speaking English the way they do in their own language. It’s important to point out that this is a fairly unrealistic goal in many cases for a number of factors: age and cultural aspects of languages being two of them.

Age is a limiting factor because it’s been proven that the older we get, the harder it gets to learn grammar and syntax of foreign languages. It does not mean that we lose the ability to learn, it’s just we’ll never speak as native speaker. Most of what we produced is influenced by our L1 mental patterns. 

 Plus as I said above, there are cultural differences in the way we communicate and express ideas. Your culture too influences the way you speak a foreign language, how you understand the world. And thirdly, there is also the fact that if learners struggle to perform well in English is often down to the way they  express ideas in their mother tongue sometimes failing to give a coherent, and a clear line of thought. In an over simplistic statement, I’d say hat if you are too shy, as a personality trait, this shows in how you speak English (or any foreign language for that matter).  

Needless to say, that this varies from languge to language depending on their origin and similarity to the target language, and also on how many languages the learner can speak and a number of other factors. 

These ideas are meant to encourge people to really put it time and effort and be realistic about their learning. I often see people who lose heart because they have unrealistic views on the speed learning takes place. Improving one’s speaking skills in a foreign language as an adult takes commitment and effort. It just doesn’t happen only by speaking for the sake of speaking AND it is mainly when there’s a very real need for the language that our brains and abilities switch to real-learning-and-processing mode. Therefore, not until your mind and body are aligned with the idea that you really need to learn, will you do it.  

Views? Ideas?