1. The conversations should be short (no longer than 4 minutes on a given topic)
2. The conversations need to be real-life and authentic, just as if they were spoken by native speakers
3. You should be able to read the conversation you hear so that you can become familiar with it before listening
3. You need to listen to the same conversation as often as possible, over and over again until you feel confident that you know it well
4. You can add conversation after conversation on topics you enjoy

You should begin to see results after one week and amazing results after one month if you are consistent.
The best time to listen is when you wake up and just before you go to sleep.

You can walk around with conversations playing through your earphones all day if you want! If you want to try it, I can send you MP3′s and the written conversations (transcripts) to try.

Contact me now to receive free audios and conversations.

1. Cutting Edge
2. Total English
3. Headway

These texts have online resources that you can use online. If you want to practice speaking live with someone, find a friend who is also learning English on skype or find an English speaker to help you.

Native speakers of English generally speak quickly. They tend to shorten words, run words together, use incorrect grammar patterns, speak informally, and say things out of sequence. They do not speak like your classroom teacher or the text books and audios that you may have studied as these materials are all designed for classroom use. It can therefore be quite difficult when you try and use your English in a real situation. Don’t give up!

What can you do?
Listen to or watch short news items, videos, blogs, conversations, movies and songs that use natural, spoken English. This will help your listening ability especially if you do this every day. Practice speaking like the native speakers that you hear or see. Converse with native speakers whenever you can and on a daily basis if possible. Ten minutes every day speaking on a range of topics will be more productive than 30 minutes once a month!

I then learned German at University because my sister did it at school and got good results and there was a German student called Hans in the student halls who I practiced everyday with. It was good fun as he taught me some really complex sentence patterns that made my lecturer fall off his seat from amazement!

I then learned Japanese before I went to Japan at night school but I thought the teaching was not very good and I didn’t seem to learn much. I really learned Japanese when I went to the country and HAD to use it to live! I was really motivated then and also paid for private lessons with a university student to accelerate my language.

When I returned 6 years later, I learned Maori at a University in Wellington because I needed it for my job.
So why learn a language? There are many reasons but for me, I had to be able to use it in a practical way or I really couldn’t see the sense of spending all that time studying it. What’s your reason?

Using movie scenes to complement your language learning is a fun and simple way to accelerate your ability to speak and listen to natural English. If you have never left your own country, watching a foreign movie can help you get a sense of how other people live, talk and communicate.

Here is an example of a short movie that will help you speak English naturally from a previous blog. You can also look at this short scene from Pretty Woman and the script that goes with it and try your spoken English out.

Try it!

Part 3 is where your command of spoken English really starts to show and is a continuation of Part 2. You will be asked questions that are thematically linked to the subject that you talked about in Part 2. For example, in my last blog we looked at a famous person and what you admired about them. The examiner might choose to ask you questions about leadership in politics. The questions asked will depend on how long you take to discuss your answers. You are not expected to give technical or specialist answers but you will be expected to give your opinion in natural, fluent English.

For example you could be asked to:
1. Describe a world leader. In this case you could describe anything you know about a leader and give your own opinion on the leadership qualities they have demonstrated.
2. Describe the person’s key achievements over the last 10 or so years. You could select one key achievement that created change or progress. If you are not sure of their key achievements, you could describe what you think they could have done to make things better for people.
3. Describe what the person may achieve or do in the next 10 years. This is asking you to speculate, guess or imagine so you can pretty much say what you really think or feel. Again, if you are not too sure of the person, you could indicate that if you were that same person, you would want to ……….

The key is to practice giving spoken answers in English to a range of questions on different topics. Remember to also choose topics that you know very little about. This will help you develop responses and give opinions on a wider range of topics that you might not normally consider. For more questions and answers go to our samespeak site and look at the free english speaking lessons for example IELTS questions.

Describe a famous person that you admire. You should say who the person is, what they are famous for and why you admire them. I also made some suggestions about note taking and gave an example of what you could quickly write down in the one minute that you are given to prepare.

Here is a short sample answer (remember you need to speak for 1 – 2 minutes without stopping).

Someone famous that I really admire is Barak Obama…the President of the United States. He seems to be a real family man and his wife, Michelle is quite a role model too – she’s a lawyer so she must be quite a good communicator and fast thinker. I think that because he has two children and a happy looking family, that he comes across as quite a down to earth man – I mean it’s interesting that he comes from a working class background, he wasn’t rich or pampered. Actually he had to work his way to the top, probably against racial barriers and adversity but it just goes to show, that you can achieve whatever you want if you have the determination. It kind of brings the American dream alive I guess but it reminds me of how focused and hrd working my father is. Anyway, Obama is obviously a high achiever as he worked his way through College earning scholarships, graduating as a lawyer in Civil Rights I think and then moving into politics. So being the first black President in the USA is quite an achievement if you consider how segregation was still quite prevalent in the mid 1900′s…it’s a big change for American society but probably reflects the move from a mono-cultural society to a richer one of diversity. I think it would mean that he would be more empathetic to minorities and understand their struggles as he’s experienced struggle for himself. He really did achieve something against the odds and is one of a kind.
You know I even remember when I found out he’d been elected cause my phone went crazy and I received a lot of texts announcing the news. I was on a train at the time, passing through Akihabara and I think a lot of other people seemed to know too as I could hear people talking about it. I must say, I was quite surprised as I hadn’t been keeping up with American news…I’m more interested in politics in my own country!

Ok so there’s a sample for you. If you keep practicing the same question, you can try different ways of answering it and gaining more confidence in the topic. You can then try the same question with a range of different people that you admire such as your parents, friends, actors, actresses, sports people and so on.

In the next blog, we will look at Part 3 of the IELTS speaking test!

I then thought that this would be a good way to practice speaking English live with friends at no cost other than your time. Here are some guidelines for a successful group:

1. Keep the group small – 2 is ideal, 4 is probably the maximum
2. Keep the goal focused – practice spoken English to become more fluent
3. Select topics to talk about (you could all talk about the latest news topics)
4. Have one person act as the facilitator (for groups more than 2)
5. Keep the time short and constant (for example every Monday from 8pm – 8.30pm)
6. Create your own page on Facebook, Myspace or any other free social networking site to post news items and topics that you can talk about