Polish Your Speaking

This is another great blog for the ESL (English as Second Language) folks who are dedicated in improving their spoken English skills. From my previous post, Trick to Improve Your English Pronunciation, you’ve come a long way: you've mastered the tricks on improving your pronunciation and working on doing it just like a native born speaker.

(Link: Trick to Improve Your English Pronunciation: https://helenfangyuanzhao.wixsite.com/website/single-post/2017/03/03/Tricks-To-Improve-Your-English-Pronunciation)

Now, it's the time for you to learn how to posh your speech so that whenever you speak, you will naturally sound the way as when you practice. if you wish you acquire more tips, please read on.

You may have already confronted this confusion: "when I practice, I sound close to perfect; however, when I start to speak in real life, I go back to my old habits. I don’t know why and how to adjust it."

This is a common issue among almost all the ESL speakers. It’s because when we speak, we pay less attention than when we practice deliberately. However, the reality is that it's nearly impossible to pay attention to our pronunciation while fully concentrate on the messages we deliver. Otherwise, we compromise our points for pronunciation. Therefore, we have to choose either or.

Don’t fret: this issue is not like a rock-and-science puzzle. I have 4 easy solutions, as long as you are absolutely willing to give enough time to practice until correctly pronounce words become your second nature.

​1. Create Muscle Memory

When pronouncing single words, make sure to pay attention how your month cavity muscles feel when saying these words. Remember these feelings, use them to adjust your pronunciation next time you say the same words. This is called ‘practicing mindfully’.

Repetition is the key. The more you repeat (correctly), higher the chance you are going to nail the correct pronunciation without even thinking. It takes roughly 1000 – 2000 repetitions for your month cavity muscle to acquire permanent memory, which means that you need to put in time to achieve the best result. Therefore, it’s all worth the effort.

2. Act Like You Were Giving A Speech

You’ve known the benefit of reading aloud. Now, we are going a level up. After reading an article aloud, you want to go back and paraphrase every single line. Please note that this point is not about paraphrasing.

The trick here is to imagine you are giving a speech in front of a full auditorium of people. By exerting such mental pressure, you are most likely to posh your wording in a way that is deliverable in a formal setting. This exercise prepares you for public speaking either in a ceremony or a corporate setting, and also helps you big time when you have to improvise during a speech (ie: when a CEO is asked random questions during a TV interview).

3. Replay

I can’t emphasize this enough: Replaying the recordings is so critical that it would be a waste of time practicing for hours without playing them back to your own ears.

Relaying is an opportunity for you to catch any pronunciation errors and do it correctly in the next attempt. It also helps you to understand your pronunciation habits so you can avoid falling back into these ‘traps’.

4. Do It All Over Again

We don’t improve much is partly because we move through practice materials way too fast. We expect to go through certain amount of work without putting our mind into them. The trick to improvement is to redo your practices after completing them. Focusing on small amount of materials makes it easier for you to follow through this habit.

The purpose of repeating the same material is to allow yourself to notice your own improvement. By sticking with the same contents on the same day, the contrast between the first and the second contrast is obvious to grasp. There are always rooms for improvement for one thing you do unless you decide to stop working on it.

I guess these 4 tips can keep you all busy for a while.

Achieving any positive result is challenge; maintaining or making improvement upon it requires even more effort. As long as you put your mind into it, you will get what you invest.