How to jump-start your speaking skills in English

You’ve worked hard to learn English. You can read it well and understand most of what you hear. But when you think about speaking it in a meeting, do you feel like hiding in a corner?

Are you so nervous about making a silly mistake or not being understood that you decide it’s better to just stay quiet? Do you answer any questions as quickly as possible and then hope to fade from view?

Does it feel hard to volunteer your thoughts in a meeting instead of staying in the background? You know you have ideas to contribute, but when will you feel ready?

Getting started speaking regularly in English can be scary. That’s the whole point of a jump-start. A jump-start adds power from the outside to get things started, the way we connect a dead battery to a working one to provide the extra current necessary to start up. Then the revived battery can generate the power to keep going. You can do the same, with a little help at first.

A combined-skills approach to speaking

There are a lot of skills involved in speaking, so you may need to work on several of them. It can help to quickly review the English you already know, and maybe pick up a few details you missed. You might look at

• ???????pronunciation, especially word and syllable stresses and tricky vowel sounds (the ones a little different from the sounds in your first language)
• ???????vocabulary—especially words that you already understand when you read them, but aren’t sure exactly how to pronounce or use yourself
• ??????a targeted grammar review of verb tenses and key questions and answers related to your work (“Has your team finished enrollment for your clinical trial yet? If not, when will you be finished?” “We’ll be done by next Monday at the latest. We should be able to get the data on the participants to you by Thursday.”)
• ??????rehearsing and role plays to practice the kind of conversations you need to have in English at work and possibly also at networking or other events

A little practice may be all you need to increase your confidence enough to get started. As you find that your coworkers understand you and care more about your ideas than about your English being “perfect,” it can motivate you to keep trying—so you can keep improving.

Transitioning that combined skills approach to a new format

The approach above is what I’ve been teaching in one-on-one lessons for several years. Now I want to turn what’s been working in those lessons into a course that could help more people.

I hope to test how to apply this approach with fewer scheduled meetings. That way, much of the content could be watched and practiced whenever there is a little time rather than at a fixed time, all at once. It would also be less expensive than one-on-one lessons since much of the explanation would be shared in videos, exercises, and worksheets rather than face-to-face.

I plan to still include a lot of direct interaction to give the necessary support. Students will record themselves reading the more difficult words and phrases from the word stress and pronunciation videos. They’ll also record themselves answering questions to practice key vocabulary and grammar points. There will be at least one individual session with me, and several opportunities to practice with other students or as a group.

Feedback, please?

I’m really interested in feedback about these ideas. If you have already jump-started your English-- or would like to-- I would love to hear your experiences, whether in a comment, a message, or a quick Zoom call.

If you’ve had a ‘jumpstart experience’—some moment when you had to speak up and realized that you actually could express yourself in English, or when it just got easier to try—please share that to encourage someone else.

If you have any suggestions about what helped or didn’t help you, or if I’ve missed some aspect of what’s stopping you from making the progress you want in English, please point that out also. If you’re shy, just message me privately. We can discuss it and might find something that would work for you. I’d love to get on a quick call to hear your perspective!