Skyrocket your IELTS band score by 1-2 points in under a month with our premium plan!
↔
I think you already know that if you want
to improve your English speaking skills, you
have to practice, right?
You have to speak.
Studying grammar will never improve your speaking.
Listening to English alone will never improve
your speaking.
You have to actually speak.
But what if you don't have someone to talk
to in English?
How can you practice then?
Well, there's a technique that allows you
to learn to speak English by yourself.
No speaking partner is required.
This technique can help improve many aspects
of your spoken English: your sentence structure,
your grammar, your vocabulary, and most importantly,
your ability to express your thoughts and
ideas effectively.
So what is this technique?
Well, here's what it is...
Learning to speak English through imitation.
When I say imitation, I'm not talking about
repeating after native speakers using the
exact same words to improve your pronunciation.
I'm talking about something a little more
advanced than that.
Here's how it works: you listen to a conversation,
a story, or some kind of speech, and then
try to deliver that speech in your own words.
Let's see this technique in action:
When I was a child
When he was a child
my parents liked to pretend, like many other
parents
his parents liked to pretend, like many other
parents
that Santa Claus would bring us presents at
Christmas.
His parents liked to pretend that Santa Claus
would bring them presents at Christmas.
So when my siblings and I would wake up on
Christmas morning
So when he and his siblings would wake up
on Christmas morning
there'd be a bunch of presents, from supposedly
Santa Claus, sitting in front of the fireplace.
there'd be a bunch of presents, from supposedly
Santa Claus, sitting in front of the fireplace.
So that's how it works.
But that's just one way to do it.
There're other ways too.
For example, instead of imitating small portions
of speech like phrases and short sentences,
you can imitate larger portions of speech.
So in this case, you wait until the speaker
completes a thought or an idea, then pause
and try to express that idea yourself.
Another approach is to simply listen to the
whole speech and then try to deliver that
entire speech yourself.
So there are several ways to go about it,
but what I recommend is to combine them all
together, and I call this approach easy-to-hard
imitation.
Easy-to-hard imitation is based on the concept
of progressive training.
The idea is that you start with something
easy and then increase the difficulty of the
activity, forcing yourself to get better.
A number of studies have found this kind of
training to be very effective.
Here's how you can apply this concept: start
by imitating small portions of speech first
like phrases and short sentences, then move
on to imitating larger portions of speech
like long sentences or even groups of sentences,
and finally, try to deliver the entire speech
on your own.
This technique offers many benefits.
You get to listen and imitate correct English,
which helps you learn to form sentences properly.
You get to learn idioms, expressions, and
other speaking patterns that are used in day-to-day
conversations.
you get to learn grammar.
When you imitate other people, you're learning
grammar through a process called implicit
learning.
This is the process where the learning happens
without your awareness.
This is how babies and children learn the
grammar rules of their first language.
When you imitate, you don't think about grammar.
You're not trying to understand why the present
perfect tense is used in this situation or
in that situation.
Instead, you're focused on communication — on
understanding and expressing ideas.
You're still learning grammar but you're not
aware that it's happening.
This is one of the proper ways to learn grammar.
OK, that concludes this video.
To help you get started, I've put together
a step-by-step tutorial on this technique.
If you're interested, click here to go to
that tutorial.
Please play the YouTube video first