How NOT to lose your audience when you speak English.

If I could wave a magic wand and change ONE thing about your English communication skills, what would you wish for?

I’m now going to use my incredible magic powers to predict what you chose.

[Closing eyes. Looking into your mind now...]

OK. I think you probably chose...

... “more vocabulary to express myself better.”

or

... “I want to speak more fluently.”

 Yes?

Well, even if I didn’t get it exactly right, I’m pretty sure those things are on your list.

 Today I want to help you out with one of those things. I want to grant you the wish of speaking more fluently.

What is fluency?

Miguel is a business development manager in an energy company. Every week he has 2-3 meetings in English with his team, clients and managers in various countries.

He has noticed that a few of his clients and colleagues seem to be stronger in English than him. They speak really smoothly and fluently, and Miguel also wants to sound like that.

So in the next few meetings, he speaks fast in English so that his English sounds fluent. But to his dismay, people do not seem to be responding to him very well. In fact, it’s almost as if they don’t understand him now.

So what is the problem?

Like a lot of people, Miguel made the mistake of connecting fluency with faster talking. He thought that the faster you can speak in English, the more fluent you are. Native speakers talk fast, after all; that’s why you have difficulties understanding them, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no. There are other reasons, but we’ll save that for another article.

The truth is if you try to speak fast, 3 things happen.

1. You slide over your sounds, missing out endings of words, and your speech becomes unclear.
2. You don’t have time to think about the next words, so you stop and repeat the last word over and over.
3. You are not helping your audience to follow your message because the clues that they should have from you are gone in your haste to speak ‘fluently’.

These 3 points result in 1 thing. You become incomprehensible.

Your audience can’t follow you and your message is lost. It’s the exact OPPOSITE of what you had hoped you were achieving.

This is not just true for non-native speakers but for native speakers too. I’m sure you know someone from your country who speaks much too fast and you wish they’d just slow down, right? I can think of at least 3 people, and 2 of them are in my family!

I agree that we want to avoid long pauses between words because this is a strain for our audience. But speaking too fast is an even greater strain because your message gets lost completely.

So if speaking fast doesn’t make you speak fluently, then what does?

How to really sound more fluent.

There are 3 things you can easily do to improve your fluency. And they are so simple that you may not believe me. But I promise you that I’m telling the truth. I use these 3 simple techniques with my clients, and they immediately get results.

1. The first thing you need to do is ...slow.... down... .

I know. It sounds counterintuitive. “Why do I want to slow down? That’s not fluent."

But remember, speed does not equal fluency.

When you reduce your speaking speed, your tongue has time to work on all the sounds in the words, and you are less likely to skip over the endings of words.

If you’re a Spanish speaker, you probably recognise this problem because speakers of Spanish often find certain consonants together at the ends of English words quite difficult to pronounce because these sounds don’t appear together in Spanish.

Slowing down also gives you a little more time to think. Rushing through your sentences gives your brain no time at all for working out the next phrase. But reducing your speed a little bit can give you just a little more time to think about the next phrase or sentence.

So number 1, slow down.

2. Use pauses.

Good speakers pause between phrases and sentences to give their audience processing time.

What do I mean by this? Here’s an example. I have used someone chairing a meeting for this example. Each “...” is a pause;

So ... I’d like to thank you all for coming today. ... We have a lot to get through ... but we should manage to finish everything .. by 3.30pm. ... ... Let’s start with our first point ... the budget for the completion .. of project X. 

The “..” indicates the end of a chunk of language. You have to get to end of that ‘chunk’ without a pause because those words make sense together. But you can safely put a very short break after that ‘chunk’.

Now I'm not suggesting that you talk ... like .... a ....slow ... robot .... . But try saying the sentences above in a natural way and make little breaks where I have indicated.

You can listen to me saying it here:

3.  Stress the key words.

The key words are the important words in your sentence, the ones that carry the message. They are usually at the end of the sentence.

Slow down and stress these words. Say them louder, longer, and let your voice rise a little on these words.

Let’s start with our first point ... the BUDGET for the COMPLETION .. of PROJECT X.

By doing this you achieve 2 things.

First, you are able to slow your speaking a little more and give yourself time to think. Second, your audience gets these verbal clues that these are the important words and they should pay attention to them. These clues are signals that help your audience to follow what you're saying.

So, I have waved my wand and given you 3 keys to your wish of fluency in English.

1.    Speaker slower, not faster.

2.    Use pauses to your advantage.

3.    Stress the important words and help out your audience

Combine these 3 things when you’re speaking and you should discover that you are more fluent. Not faster, but smoother and easier to understand. There are, of course, other things you can do to improve your fluency, but these tips are a great place to start because you can do them right now.

The only reason we speak is to communicate. We want our message to be heard and our audience to understand and respond positively.

If I can help you further with fluency or any other aspect of your communication in English, send me a message.