When talking about the topic of oral English, many people often ask, "How to practice oral English?" Next, I have prepared for you whether oral English is made by practice. You are welcome to refer to it.
Oral English is made by practice
This question is very representative. Before answering, we might as well think about another question. Is oral English really made by practice?
not really. One of the most common sayings is, "My spoken English is not good, and my mind is blank when I speak English. It must be because I practice too little." But this may not be the case. The real reason for your poor oral English is not that you practice too little, but that you read too little and listen too little. Language is a process from input to output. Listening and reading belong to input, while speaking and writing belong to output. If you don't have a lot of listening and reading input, your oral English will be passive and can't be effectively improved at all. I don't know if you have noticed that students with good oral English may not practice the most, but they must have considerable listening and reading input.
Therefore, the most important basic principle to improve oral English is that input determines output, and a large number of reading and listening inputs are the premise to effectively improve oral English.
after determining the basic principles, we need to discuss more detailed things, such as the classification of spoken English. We can roughly divide spoken English into two categories. One is called General English, and the other is called Academic English. Life English is very easy to understand, and the English used in daily life, shopping and traveling all belong to the category of life English. Academic English is used in relatively formal occasions, such as in-depth communication, classroom academic discussion, speeches, debates, interviews, various presentation and so on.
For example, the following is a video of Tang Wei's interview with BBC all over the UK at Cannes Film Festival. This is a case of General English:
Tang Wei lived in the UK for some time before the interview, during which he also attended a language school. Judging from the performance in the video, her English level is basically no problem to cope with daily study and life abroad and simple English interviews, and it is also possible to talk and laugh with foreigners. Previously, this video was misinformed on the Internet as "IELTS 9 oral English", but to be honest, this oral English level is far from the standard of IELTS full score. If you watch the video carefully, you will find that Tang Wei's oral English at that time still has many defects, such as simple sentences, no compound sentence and main clauses, inflexible words and grammatical errors. For example, female is misunderstood as "male". According to the actual IELTS speaking standard, her speaking should be between 6 and 6.5.
The following is a very popular video of "The Chinese and Japanese Ambassadors Debate the Diaoyu Islands Issue by BBC" two years ago. At that time, the situation on the Diaoyu Islands was tense, and the BBC invited the Chinese and Japanese Ambassadors to the UK for a live debate. At that time, China's Ambassador to the UK was Liu Xiaoming.
This is a typical academic English case. To better illustrate the problem, I dictated a short live statement:
Moderator: It's nothing to do you say then with the natural resources which may be connected to this island or may be available from this island?
ambassadors: it was about sovereignty, you know that's about territorial integrity. Let me finish about why it cameup. You know, when we normalized relation( with Japan) in (19)72,both leaders agreed, you know, there's a dispute over island .We should shelve the difference. Deng Xiaoping in 1978, when he visited Japan he was asked this question about diaoyu island and he said,"we have a dispute with Japan, but I think we can shelve it for the time being. The (next) huge generation would be wiser than us." So we agreed to shelve it but the Japanese wanted to change the status quo in the past few years.You know what did they do? They tried to nationalize this island. They wanted to purchase this island by their government.
Moderator: How far are you prepared to take this issue?
ambassador: How far? First of all, we ask them they have to face to the fact that we have a dispute over this island even they refuse to recognize that there is a dispute between the tw O countries.
During the whole interview, Ambassador Liu's statement was clear in logic, varied in sentence patterns and accurate in words, and there was no nonsense, so it can be seen that his English level was quite good. This kind of academic English can also be called
Educated English, which is an advanced form of General English. This is also the goal we should pursue in English learning.
The above two examples are given to illustrate the difference between life English and academic English, and at the same time, their difficulty is different. We can use a learning curve to illustrate that the improvement of oral English follows the principle of "easy first, then difficult". To make an image, for example, anyone can reach Tang Wei's spoken English level through a short period of time (several months to one or two years), but it is not so simple to reach Ambassador Liu's level.
Our goal can't stop at the barrier-free level of daily life and travel abroad, which is the level of primary school students in Europe and America. As the saying goes, if you take it, you will get it. Being able to speak well-worded and grammatically authentic English and writing beautiful articles are our pursuit goals.
Next, we will talk about the improvement of oral English according to this learning curve. For the improvement of oral English, the general learning curve is: first master basic life English (initial oral English), and then slowly transition to academic English (advanced oral English). Let's take a look at Life English first.
how to improve the level of living English?
If you are now in a state where you hardly speak English at ordinary times, and when you need to speak English, your mind goes blank, and you can't speak a word, and it's hard to squeeze out a sentence that may still be "My English is poor." What do you need to do if you want to reach the level of being able to communicate in daily life without obstacles?
The key to improving oral English at the initial stage is the accumulation of oral materials, and a large part of the accumulation of oral materials is actually the accumulation of vocabulary. In other words, the fundamental reason why you can't say anything decent is that your vocabulary is too small and you have accumulated too little oral materials. Students who have brushed words may find that with the rapid increase of vocabulary in a short period of time, their oral English level will also be improved obviously. The most intuitive performance is that they can express more and more things.
So our first task is to improve our vocabulary. How big is the vocabulary to meet the basic requirements of daily communication? 5? 6? 1? One of the most effective methods is to make statistics on the corpus to see how many common words there are in daily life. Fortunately, this matter has been done abroad for a long time, and it has been counted by major dictionary publishers. We can use a data given by Macmillan Dictionary: 75 words. So if you want to meet the basic requirements of daily communication, how can your vocabulary not be less than 75?
I have always advocated remembering words through context, remembering words in reading and using Ying Ying dictionary to deepen our understanding of words. This method has the best effect.
Many people will ask, "Can I quickly accumulate words by memorizing word books and using APP to remember words, and then consolidate and improve by reading?" This can be regarded as a compromise method, and the key step is to consolidate and improve through a lot of reading after memorizing the words. The words obtained by memorizing the word book are not yours, they can only be regarded as negative words, and only through a lot of reading and listening can they become your positive words.
While accumulating basic vocabulary, we should also accumulate oral materials through a lot of reading and listening training. The selection of reading and listening materials should conform to the principle of being easy to understand and close to daily life. ESLPOD is recommended for listening materials. ESLPOD has moderate speech speed, and most of the materials are spoken, which can basically be used in practice and is highly practical. Reading materials recommend original books that are easy to understand and require low vocabulary, and it is better if they are bestsellers, such as Charlotte's Web, The Houseon Mango Street, The Seven Habits of High Efficient People, etc.
Improve your oral English by learning American TV series
You may encounter such a problem. After studying English for ten years, you don't even know how to order a cup of coffee when you go abroad. How do you like your coffee? It may make you feel puzzled. One of the main reasons for this strange phenomenon is that the learning materials are out of touch with real life. Traditional textbooks from junior high school to university are actually biased towards academic English, which is quite different from real life English.
The rich video materials brought by the Internet era can make up for this shortcoming to a great extent. For example, American TV plays can be used as a good source of oral materials for life. Not all American TV dramas are suitable for improving oral English. We should choose those film and television materials that are close to daily life and have strong stories, such as soap operas.
Recommend a good American middle-class soap opera Desperate Housewives, whose language is simple, standard and authentic, and there are not as many idioms, buzzwords and slang as sitcoms, which is very suitable for getting started.
Of course, learning English by American TV plays should also be carried out in accordance with the Basic Law, no, it is a scientific method. Before, many people wanted to learn English by watching American TV series, but as a result, they often couldn't help it, so they just went after the plot and didn't pay attention to English learning at all. Suggestions can refer to the following methods:
Prepare a small episode of American TV series and its corresponding script (this is very important)
1. Watch the subtitled version first, but not twice, and clear up the plot so that your next focus can fall on the lines
2. Learn the corresponding script, write down the practical lines in the script and take notes. Look up new words you don't understand in the English-English dictionary
3. Watch this episode again, cover up the subtitles when you watch it, and stop to look at the corresponding English subtitles when you don't recognize them
4. After the first three steps, you should be very familiar with the plot and dialogue. At this time, you can watch it for the third time and practice following it
The above process is almost self-abuse, but you can learn a TV series more effectively by this method.
how to improve academic English?
After the previous training, I believe that your spoken English has a certain foundation, and the daily basic communication should be no problem. Next, we should gradually transition to academic English to achieve advanced oral English.
Advanced oral English spelling is not only a simple vocabulary and oral materials, but also the diversity of logic, vocabulary and grammar, the understanding of British and American culture, and the accumulation of knowledge from international politics to celebrity gossip. For example, in the interview with the British in the Diaoyu Islands video, the ambassador skillfully used British Prime Minister Winston? Churchill's famous saying "Who Do Not Learn from History Are Doomed to Repeat It." is well-founded and convincing. And these are inseparable from the usual accumulation.
The task at this stage is not only to continue extensive reading, but also to consciously train the logic of speaking, and to work hard on vocabulary diversity and grammar.
how to train? One way is to read foreign periodicals intensively, such as The Economist. This magazine is written by the world's top journalists. Its articles are wise and humorous, with rigorous logic, and its words are often as accurate as cruise missiles. Read several articles of The Economist (such as the editorial section of Leaders) intensively every week, learn the diversity and accuracy of its words, feel the rigor of logical progression, and learn how to analyze a problem layer by layer and finally get a convincing conclusion.
for example, to express the economic downturn, can you think about it?