Hey there! This is TOP episode 239. What Affects Your Fluency?
Are you tired of lacking confidence when speaking English? Does it block you from achieving your true goals? This podcast is the place for you. This is Teacher Ola Podcast. My name’s Ola Mierniczak and I empower English learners to become confident speakers. The key to fluency is in your pocket. You’ll boost your vocabulary, brush up your grammar and improve your pronunciation. Enjoy your journey to fluency!
Hello there! Thank you so much for coming! I’m so happy you’re here, very grateful for having you here. I hope you’ll get inspired today and I hope you’ll use my tips on fluency in your daily life. Only consistent daily practice will give you lasting and true results. Let’s jump in!
What influences your fluency? Number one is VOCABULARY. Finding the right word is going to affect your fluency. If your vocabulary is not big enough you’re going to struggle with fluency. If you confuse words, mix up words , oh yeah, that will certainly impact your fluency. Now, the question is: how to eliminate that problem? Well, you’ve got to activate your vocabulary. Speaking. I know exactly that feeling of frustration coming from the fact that you see the words, you know them, you can read them but there’s no way you would use these words while speaking. Just like that. X That’s out of reach, it seems out of reach. But it’s just an illusion. You can and you should activate the passive knowledge you have. All the words are first your passive knowledge before they can become activated. That’s how our brains learn. But Ola, HOW to activate my passive vocabulary?
There is a number of ways to do it and I’ll make another episode on this but for now take this advice. Listen to something in English every day and read out loud something in English every day. Listen and read and on top of that: be patient! Trust the process. Those words you see and hear will eventually enter your active vocabulary.
The second thing that influences your fluency is grammar. When you have to stop to think about the tenses – well those stops, those long pauses definitely impact your fluency. So! How to activate your grammar? Use it automatically? Practice. practice, practice. I know you’d like to hear me say something else. Some quick trick, easy solution, but I really take you seriously. I take your fluency seriously and I’m not gonna lie. It takes a lot of practice before you reach that fluency with tenses and other grammar structures, like conditionals, modals, passive voice, reported speech and so on. Practice with grammar exercises but most importantly: while speaking. And just like with vocabulary, you need that extra ingredient, that magic ingredient that guarantees success: patience. With repetition you’ll master whatever you want. This way you’ll start to use it automatically and you’ll become more confident. Listen and read because not only does it improve your vocabulary but also grammar. It’s the same mechanism. You have to encounter a given word or a given structure many times AND in various contexts.
The third thing that impacts your fluency is pronunciation. Pff, I could talk a lot about various aspects of pronunciation and its effect on your fluency but let me focus on one element. That is not connecting words. Not using elements of connected speech. Connected speech is what will make you speak more fluently but also understand other users of English with more ease. Another thing I’d like to recommend with connection to pronunciation is this: learn phrases instead of words. Learn phrases or even whole sentences. For example: ‘in other words’. I can focus on separate words and try to memorize it this way and think about each word and end up sounding like a robot: ‘in other words’. But I can also learn the whole phrase, as if it was one sound: ‘in other words’, ‘in other words’. That’s how you automate it and learn better pronunciation. And of course, yes, you guessed it! Listen every day and read out loud every day. Additionally, I would add shadowing. If you want to learn more about shadowing, go to episode 25. It’ll help your intonation, words stress, sentence stress, vocabulary, grammar and of course: fluency.
What else affects your fluency? Stress. I know how it feels, and know how to eliminate that. Well, maybe not eliminate, but silence. Yeah, I think it’s a good word. I think you should SILENCE your stress. Of course you’re stressed speaking a foreign language, but how about acknowledging this fact and continuing speaking in spite of it? Try that. I’m stressed but that won’t stop me from speaking. I will be speaking more in this podcast about specific techniques you can apply to lower your stress, but today I have two tips.
One, speak. Whenever possible expose yourself to this stress and learn dealing with that.
And two. Tip number two is this: tell yourself ‘it’s only 5 minutes’. Yes! It helped me in the past and still helps me still when I’m stressed, not only with English, but with people in general. Ok? So you enter the room, the situation and you smile inside and tell yourself ‘I’m here for 5 minutes, this too shall pass and I’ll make myself a nice cup of tea and have a nice bath, and have time with family, or I’ll have my lunch.’ Does it make sense? I’m here just for a moment, I’ll do what is to be done and I’ll go on with other things in life.
Practice time! If you’re here for the first time, thank you for staying with me until now. We’re going to be practicing speaking English. Listen to these ten sentences and repeat out loud. That’s it! Let’s do it, let’s go:
How to eliminate that problem?
It seems out of reach.
That’s how our brains learn.
Trust the process.
In other words.
I really take you seriously.
I’m stressed but that won’t stop me from speaking.
Only consistent daily practice will give you lasting and true results.
If your vocabulary is not big enough you’re going to struggle with fluency.
Listen and read because not only does it improve your vocabulary but also grammar.
I hope you learned something new today and that you said the sentences out loud. If you want to support my work please leave a review or a like or a heart that will keep this podcast running. Thank you!
Don’t forget to download the Worksheet. If you’re a member of TOPeople you already get my newsletter. If not, go and grab it at teacherola.com/239.
See you next week! Stay fearless and say it out loud! I’m your teacher, Teacher Ola, and you were listening to Teacher Ola Podcast. Bye for now!