4 essential steps to start speaking a foreign language
Many of us studied a foreign language. While mastering grammar or writing skills is relatively easy (all you need is to remember the rules and do a couple of hundreds of exercises), speaking has become a hurdle for many of us. Why?
There is a reason for that.
First, speaking is much more difficult because it requires to do a couple of mental activities simultaneously. You come up with an idea in your native language, then you put it into a speech in your native language and then you translate it into a foreign language. The task becomes even more complicated if you are required to use correct grammar and special vocabulary.
Wow, a real challenge for your short-term memory and a big impediment on your way to start speaking fluently.
So what can we do?
As you can see, our main goal is to fight the cognitive overload that many people experience when they study to speak in a foreign language.
I suggest that we structure the education process a bit differently to relieve the pressure from the brain. All we need are the following 4 steps.
1. Choose the topics that the student is very familiar with and can easily talk about in his or her native language.
2. Come up with 10–15 real-life communication situations that he or she is likely to face (making self-presentation, debating on a scientific topic or interviewing for a job).
3. Develop speaking structures for every situation.
4. Master these structures one-by-one until the student can use them fluently.
It’s better to do it with a teacher. However, students can try to do it themselves.
Now let’s look at the practical implementation of these steps
1. For example, my student is a lawyer. For him it is difficult to speak about hobbies and sports (it requires too much thinking), but he loves talking about law firms, legal projects, cases and clients. So let’s focus on the legal topics.
2. I came up with the following real life communication situations:
1) Self-presentation when meeting a client
2) Asking questions about the case
3) Answering questions about the case
4) Making a report on the recent developments in the legal market
5) Making a report + answering the questions to the report
6) Dialogue with a client
7) Discussion of a project in a group of lawyers
8) Persuasive speech in court
9) Debate with a counterpart
10) Brainstorm within a team (combines presenting, arguing, analysing and all other stuff)
3. Then we need to come up with the structures for every situation. Let’s start with the simplest one — self-presentation. Its structure resembles the structure of a paragraph: short intro sentence, a few ideas and a conclusion or call to action.
I always ask my students to first think about the structure of what they are going to say, and only then start speaking. While at first sight this may seem strange, developing structures makes the life of a student much easier.
For example. Most people who have to make a self-presentation in public in a foreign language feel very nervous. If they don’t have the structure of their speech in their head, they start speaking, make an intro, go further into the details and …
And then “Boom!”. A loud noise happens and distracts their attention. Or someone interferes. Or they just forget a word. They get confused, silent and scared. The impression is spoiled.
But we can always avoid it if we teach our students to structure their speeches. They will decide in advance to finish speaking with a simple “That’s why I want to join your firm” or “OK, enough about me, could you say a few words about yourself”. In this case no distraction will ruin their self-presentation and plunge the room into awkward silence.
4. And the last step: master each situation one by one. I have given you the simplest example. As you go further, the situations and structures become more complex, but the principle remains the same: we try to avoid the cognitive overload by thinking about the structure and ideas beforehand.
What are the difficulties of this approach?
Of course, it requires you to have a speaking partner. It can be a teacher or fellow student. They should be attentive and be able to discuss with you the topic that you are interested in.
Moreover, developing speaking structures is not that simple. It requires the knowledge of a foreign language as well as the basic principles of rhetoric and public speaking.
Teachers will also need to put up with their students’ grammar mistakes and shift their focus to the correct use of speaking structures. There are a few serious mistakes that you should not tolerate (like not putting an -s at the end of a plural form or not seeing the difference between “have” or “has”). But this is it. Other mistakes like using gerund instead of infinitive do not matter.
I hope that you will be able to use this method in your studies. If you want me to help you develop a similar speaking program for you, feel free to ask in the comments section.
If you are looking for language partners to improve your foreign language skills you can find it on swaplanguage.com.
