hello listen do you feel like you know you're not making progress with your spoken english like you're stuck well today i'm gonna help you i'm gonna give you five tips right five simple things you can do every day that will help improve your spoken english and help you get well unstuck so you can do really well on the ielts speaking test are you ready then come with [Music] me hello again so my name is keith and i run the keith speaking academy here to help you speak better english give better answers and get a higher
score on the ielts speaking test so maybe right you've taken the ielts test several times but you're stuck at the same level maybe a band six or a 6.5 there may be several reasons for this and today i'm going to look at the most common problem for being stuck right and actually it's not that you need more technique exam technique or tips it's just that your overall level of spoken english is too low so the english in your head might be great but when you speak it's just not the same as a student once said
to me he said you know when i'm i've got ideas in english the english in my head it's like driving a ferrari it's great but then when i speak it's like a car crash which is a great image i think for many many students so today i'm going to address that and help you improve your spoken english with these five tips i'm going to look at the following how to learn speaking how to automate your vocabulary how to increase fluency how to gain confidence and how to make sure you're choosing the right tools to help
you right okey dokey let's begin so first of all how to learn speaking or how to learn how to speak the most important tip here i think is to learn speaking by listening unfortunately many students around the world learn speaking with books by looking at words by reading and reading aloud and why well probably because their teachers told them and the reason their teachers told them is because they learned that at school too and i think one reason is in the past there was no access to the native speaker voice right but the world has
changed and unfortunately education has not changed but it needs to why is this important because the speaking and writing are two different systems right a bit of history to explain i like history our speak we have been speaking right for over 10 000 years we have only been writing for maybe four or five thousand years right we began writing with the egyptians and the sumerians with their cuneiforms in about 3000 bc speaking came first writing was a way to capture what we say and grammar is a way to capture what we speak and it does
a pretty good job but it's not perfect and yet still so many people choose the books to help them learn to speak it's the other way round right we should start with the speaking and the listening and the books come later it's a bit like right imagine like messi the football player comes knocking on your door with his football and he says hey keith would you like to come and play football with me and you go um no actually i'm just gonna stay at home and read this book about football what why would you choose
to read about it when you can be doing it right and learning really well i mean the book can be useful maybe later but start with the doing right start with the listening and the speaking and the writing comes later learning by listening if i haven't convinced you let me finish with convincing you learning by listening has the following benefits right first of all you learn natural spoken english you know that the language is spoken not written you learn pronunciation you get the context so you know how to learn how to use the language when
you're speaking it's a no-brainer you must begin by listening right and i said earlier right the world has changed we can now we are surrounded by native speaker texts or proficient speaker audio texts videos netflix um youtube you can get it anywhere keith speaking academy if you've heard of that there are audios all over the world at the click of a button so start using it learn your speaking by listening okay number two how to automate vocabulary i love that word automate great word keith yes what does automate mean it's a good question and i'm
glad you asked to automate something is to make it automatic like without thinking do you know the phrase autopilot to do something on autopilot sometimes i'm driving on autopilot it just means i'm driving without thinking at the same time so you may know actually i have a fluency course and a strong focus of the fluency course is to automate grammar so we look at maybe 16 different grammatical items and through practice automate them so you're using them without thinking now you can do the same with vocabulary automate your vocabulary how do you do it very
simple tip tried and tested method repeat and juggle right repeat and juggle what do i mean by that well first of all you find something to listen to right remember what i said in tip number one learn speaking through listening you listen to something and you repeat a word or a phrase maybe a collocation right so you're listening to something for example an audio tape and it says i love paris and you go stop i love paris and you repeat right that's the repeat easy peasy the juggle is that you then change a word what
is juggle good question let me show you juggle right oranges like the magician this is juggling whoa now why do i call it juggling i don't why do i call it juggling because you take a word and you change it right so in our example i love paris i change the word paris i love hanoi i love new delhi i love manchester right easy now you can juggle by changing the word or you can change the tense i love paris i loved paris i will love paris i used to love paris i'm sure i would
love paris if i could go there right so you're juggling the tense very very simple listen repeat and juggle and that formula starts to get you automatically using and hardwiring the vocabulary making it active and more automated now actually as i said education has changed right we are now surrounded by audio and video there's lots of it and there's lots of really good tools you can use i came across one the other day that i thought was really really good and i'm going to show you very briefly how it works gives you access to lots
of audio and video and helps you do this repeating and juggling let me show you so let me show you this app right i've downloaded it off the apple store i'm on my tablet over here this is it over here woodpecker and once you go in there let me go inside the screen and show you how it works so we've got the whole bunch of youtube videos if you've got netflix you can go in and sign in and access your netflix videos you can go on the web browser and also get some websites here and
there is a built-in dictionary i think now let's imagine in youtube if you want to select by topic you can so if you're interested in i don't know in books you can find all the videos which are related to books you can also choose by the channel if you prefer or choose by the teacher so all of your famous english teachers are on here so let's go into let's see how we can actually use the um repeat and juggling technique in a video if we go into this video here right you can see you can
watch the video great when people ask you what i do the tape script all the way through the video is here with time stamps so i can click on any time stamp he's very popular in his time and pause and i can repeat that right he was very popular in his time i can check the meaning of a word by pressing on it it tells me the meaning of popular well liked popular dictionary voice but if i press the time stamp it will just repeat he was very popular in his time he was very popular
he was very popular press the timestamp he was very popular in his time he was very popular great and now i can juggle i can change the end he was very popular 10 years ago he was very popular two years ago he was very popular a year ago and so on he was very popular in his time total flexibility to be to move around and be repeating and juggling absolutely brilliant great so that's it tip number two listen repeat and juggle let's move on right number three how to increase your fluency when speaking so the
tip here is focus on chunks so what are chunks you ask chunks are pieces of language typically two words together or maybe three or four words that go together normally so your chunks may be for example collocations like heavy rain right we don't say big rain we say heavy rain these words go together like friends they stick together chunks could be idiomatic expressions like kick the bucket right meaning to die he kicked the bucket kicked the bucket um it could be a filler like on top of that right when we say on top of that
you don't want to be thinking is it in top on top on top of this on top of that you don't want to be thinking you want a ready-made chunk on top of that so you learn the chunk without thinking about all the words and this as you can imagine speeds up your fluency i mean take collocations let's take the word shopping for example right when you learn the word shopping you should also learn some common collocations right you can go to a website like ozdik.com brilliant website give you instant collocations and you'll find things
like well weekly shopping online shopping late night shopping a shopping spree or shopping hours right these are chunks of language that if you learn them you can use them much more flexibly you don't have to think right somebody says you know what did you do at the weekend oh i did my my my shopping you know for monday to saturday you know the shopping for the week oh you mean your weekly shopping yes i did my weekly shopping if you learn the collocation it just helps you become much more fluent it's very simple when you
think about it right when you learn words one word you have to think about putting them together when you learn chunks you don't have to think about putting the words together you just think about putting the chunks together imagine this right imagine a builder building a house and he's using bricks and he puts the bricks one by one he puts the bricks on top of each other that's quite slow and takes time to build a house but now imagine somebody has a a new invention and gives him four or five bricks in a layer glued
together and all he has to do is put the layers of bricks on top of each other it's much faster and what's more the house is going to be better because it'll be more accurately aligned it's more accurate and it's the same with language right using these layers or chunks more accurate it's faster it's faster you become more fluent so when you're learning vocabulary think and learn and use chunks let's move on right tip number four right how to gain confidence well here my tip for you is push your comfort zone your comfort zone are
is the area of doing things where you feel comfortable so maybe you learn english by watching a film you're comfortable you read a book you're comfortable but then somebody says well listen why don't you record your voice oh no i'm not very comfortable no no no oh why don't you get a speaking partner on facebook oh no no no no no i'm not comfortable with that why don't you go and join the classes down the road oh no no no no i'm not comfortable with that and so you're there's almost a fear if you like
of breaking your comfort zone but when you use english in the world you are going to have to interact with other people speak to strangers be nervous make mistakes have other people sometimes laugh at your mistakes it's going to happen so get used to it and believe it or not when you do the ielts speaking test you do it with a real person yes the examiners are real people and you will have to get used to being nervous get used to making mistakes in front of them get used to those feelings of being uncomfortable how
do you get used to it push your comfort zone do these things that make you uncomfortable right and i think one of the best things you can do really is practice with other people yes you can practice speaking on your own that's great but to take your confidence up to the next level you should practice with other people you know i'm a big fan of platforms like italki and cambly or facebook for finding you know speaking partners but by doing that you're going to be practicing with other people yes you will feel uncomfortable but the
great news is you will get used to feeling uncomfortable you'll get used to feeling nervous you'll get used to making mistakes in front of other people and then by pushing your comfort zone you'll be in a much stronger position and have more confidence to face the ielts examiner on test day so go out and push your comfort zone good talking of tools let's move on to the next tip number five it's all about tools right tip number five all about choosing the right tools right my suggestion here tip number five is immerse yourself in natural
spoken english it's all well and good right having a course book having a teacher and practicing with english which is for students but it's really important you don't forget the real world and that you also engage and immerse yourself in natural spoken english which is not for students which is used by not normal people by native speakers or proficient level speakers of english why is this important well because teachers are great right but teachers and course books normally limit the language they expose you to they speak slowly they correct you they're polite they encourage you
it's kind of an artificial bubble where you can build up your confidence and that's great but also the real world is a bit different right people are not so polite they may not correct you they speak quickly they expect you to understand there is no mercy in the ielts speaking test you must answer straight away so there's pressure right so i think having of course have the teacher the course and the book that's great but also make sure you're immersing yourself in spoken english and this connects with a lot of things i said earlier right
about listening learning speaking by listening um about using different tools so nowadays there is so much opportunity and i'm sure you know through videos and podcasts that you can find on the internet on your television or through your radio if you still have a radio call me old-fashioned if you will um but there's lots of opportunity um to to be listening and watching i think it's great to be looking at news broadcasts current affairs shows chat shows interviews with people great natural english ted talks can be great obviously films are good i mean bear in
mind films are scripted so they're semi-natural but still a great source to immerse yourself in english and also there's the tool i mentioned earlier right which i think has a great balance because it's the the woodpecker learning app it gives you not only access to esl stuff so stuff for students but also the real world stuff you get access i think to hundreds of thousands of videos that you can choose from on the app and be watching them all in one place lots of lots of them have got subtitles right so that gives you the
support if you want the written support but it's a great opportunity to submerge yourself or immerse yourself um in the natural english language go and check it out i'll put a link in the notes below you can go and download it it's out on google and apple um go and have a look and let me know here you go let me know in the comments below what you're watching on the app now to help improve your english go and check it out it's free of course lovely let's move on so listen those are my five
tips to help you improve your english speaking skills so we've looked at how to learn speaking by listening how to automate vocabulary repeat and juggle how to increase fluency with those chunks how to gain confidence by pushing your comfort zone and how to use the right tools and immerse yourself in english great and i think i mean remember these are tips but it needs day to day practice be patient but be persistent keep practicing day after day that's what it's really all about because we're talking about increasing your overall level of english it takes time
but it's fun it's great and i hope with these tips it will help you maybe move from being a struggling ielts student to being a successful ielts speaker now that would be nice wouldn't it great that's it please do um subscribe remember to turn on notifications on youtube so you can find out about my upcoming videos do leave me a comment below let me know what you're watching or listening to to help improve your english today brilliant as always it's been fun and a pleasure take care my friend bye bye now [Music] you
