0:00 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 going to help you. I'm going to 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 me. Hello again. So my name is Keith and I run the Keith Speaking Academy here
0:49 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 gonna 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
1:35 the same. As a student once said to me, he said, you know, well, 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 gonna 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,
2:21 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
3:07 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. We have been speaking, right, for over 10,000 years. We have only been writing for maybe four or 5,000 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
3:57 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 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, no, actually, I'm just gonna stay at home and read this book about football. What?
4:43 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
5:29 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, 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
6:20 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 the 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. You can do the same with vocabulary. Automate your vocabulary. How do you do it? Very simple tip.
7:07 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?
7:54 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 changed 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.
8:43 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 gonna show you very briefly how it works. Gives you
9:31 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 a 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,
10:18 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 repeat and juggling technique in a video. If we go into this video here, right, you can see you can watch the video. Great. The tape script all the way through the video is here with timestamps. So I can click on any timestamp. 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. Dictionary voice.
11:08 But if I press the timestamp, it'll just repeat. He was very popular. He was very popular. Press the timestamp. 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 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.
11:55 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, 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, meaning to die. He kicked the bucket, kicked the bucket. It could be a filler like
12:42 on top of that. 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. You can go to a website like ausdick.com, brilliant website, give you instant collocations and you'll find
13:30 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 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
14:15 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 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.
15:01 And what's more, the house is gonna 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 is the area of doing things where you feel comfortable.
15:52 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, 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
16:41 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,
17:31 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
18:17 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 practising 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?
19:07 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,
19:53 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, 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. But there's lots of opportunity to be listening and watching. I think it's great to be looking at news broadcasts, current affair shows, chat shows, interviews with people, great natural
20:41 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 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 them have got subtitles, right? So that gives you
21:26 the support if you want the written support, but it's a great opportunity to submerge yourself or immerse yourself 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. 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,
22:14 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.
23:02 Now that would be nice, wouldn't it? Great. That's it. Please do 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.
