7 Simple (and EASY!) Habits for Better English Speaking

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments
Captions
I’ve been teaching English as a  Second Language since 1999. Guys,   that was last century. I see students who  succeed, and students who don’t ever reach   their goals. In my online courses at  Rachel’s English Academy, of course,   we want all our students to succeed, so  we often, as a team, get together and   talk about what makes a student successful  and how can we make all students successful. I’m Rachel, and I would love  to give you my free course,   the top 3 ways to master the American Accent.  Please visit Rachelsenglish.com/free to enroll. Today I’m going to introduce you to  the Seven Habits of Highly Successful   students. This is what I’ve noticed  from my own thousands of students:   people who want to improve their spoken English,  their American accent, their listening skills. One: First, a practice schedule. This one seems obvious but too often we make a  goal, we want to reach it, but we don’t plan how   we will. I actually get emails from my Academy  students almost every day asking, how can I stay   motivated and do this? My most successful students  are the ones who make practice a part of their   daily schedule. They prioritize it. It’s not an  afterthought, something they will squeeze in if   they can. For a lot of them, they practice at the  same time everyday. Planning it in consistently   removes the stress of needing to find time for  it every day. I talk about my student Chao a lot,   because she is just a great example of what  you can get when you do a little every day. I’ve been recommending to a lot of friends,   they’ve been noticing that oh,  I think you’re speaking better,   more natural and stuff like that so I introduce  every time I will tell, that’s Rachel’s English! That’s awesome! Can I ask you a question? How much time on average  would you say you’ve spent working on your accent? I think every day, 10 minutes. That is not much guys. That is not  much. I was thinking you might say   like a half hour or an hour. But it’s  the consistency of doing it every day. Yeah. Well, Chao I think you’re an inspiration to   a lot of students. You just  sound absolutely fantastic. I appreciate that. I always think that you  as an inspiration for us. Thank you so much. And I always think you guys are because you’re  actually out there doing the work so you just   sound just amazing. I see Jambo here in commenting  “10 minutes a day!” He can’t believe it. When she first joined the Academy, her  speech was a little choppy and she was a   little hard to understand. Not now. Now  her English is so natural and easy to   understand. Make a schedule right now,  think of a 10-minute chunk of your day   that you can set aside. Just try it for a  month. Once you’re in the habit, it’s easy. Number 2, the method. Now, if you make  time to study 10, 20, 30 minutes a day,   but you’re not using the right method, you won’t  get too far. And the method for changing your   accent involves a lot of repetition. After  all, it’s not a CONCEPT you’re learning,   that’s easy. But speaking, that is a physical  habit. A physical skill you’re building. That   takes time. Think of a classical pianist learning  a new piece, or an athlete practicing a move.   Over and over. This is how my  student Adrian described it. When you’re doing like a session, like  let’s say you’re working on a soundboard,   how many times in a row will  you do the same audio file. I try to repeat like maybe a million times. Do you spend a month on one  sentence? One soundboard? Yeah, one soundboard usually  because that would be boring. Yeah. It might be boring but it works. I know! I know, that’s what I always try to tell  people. I’m like there’s nothing boring about   getting better. And yes it’s repetition and we  kind of, we’re not used to having learn that way   you know. As adults, we learn something and we  know it but when it comes to your body and your   accent, it is repetition. But yeah, you sound  awesome and like I said, people in the class,   they’re hearing it and they’re loving it  so thank you for sharing how you work. Repetition gets the sound that you want into your  body. It’s how you learned your first language,   and even though it’s not how we’re used  to working on things as we get older,   it’s very effective. So my most successful  students are the ones that just repeat.   Dedicate and repeat. Adrian mentioned working  on a soundboard. In my Academy I have hundreds,   actually maybe over a thousand at this point,  of these soundboards, so you can play a phrase,   say it, play it, say it, play it, say  it. My students may do the same word or   phrase 20 times in a row. You go through the  whole soundboard, you do the same soundboard   for a month. That is the method. You put in this  time, and it accumulates into sounding like this. I signed up to sound better and more natural,  that was my first goal uh, right now I live in   Miami so, and I use English every day so I just  want to sound more natural, that’s the main goal. Really good, smooth, easy to understand English.  By the way soundboards are also a part of the free   course that you can at RachelsEnglish.com/free,  yet another reason to try it out. The third habit of my most successful students  is: developing the right mindset. This is one   that gets ignored way too often. But as  I’ve worked with students I’ve realized,   they have a mindset. Whether or not they think  about it. And often, it’s a negative one that   makes their progress much slower. I remember a  conversation I had with Tom, the head teacher here   at Rachel’s English, when we were trying to figure  out why some students progress so much slower than   others. And we decided a lot of it has to do with  mindset. Some people are more open to real change   than others. Changing your accent means changing  your voice, and that can be scary for some people. So we let our students know, to  sound natural in American English,   they’re probably going to have to change something  fundamental about their voice. One student said,   I have my Spanish voice, and I have my American  voice, and I thought that was brilliant. You   allow yourself to develop something totally  different, and you approach it positively. Others really do want to change but  in their mind they’re saying, “Oh,   I can’t have this kind of conversation”, “I  have a big problem with this kind of sound,”   and so on. And they say this to themselves even  as they practice, and the practice doesn’t work   as well. Try saying this to yourself instead: “I  have a wonderful American R sound. I can think   quickly and express myself the way I want to.”  Successful students change their image and their   mindset about themselves and the improvement  is great. So you have to have your method,   but you have to address your mindset as well, and  this what some of my most successful students do. I have a course that helps students with  their mindset and approach in my Academy,   but I also have one of those lessons free here on   YouTube. I’ll put a link to that  video in the video description. Fourth Okay. Now the next habit gets you so much  bang for your buck. Record yourself. There are   actually two different great exercises  for this, and I’ll describe both for you One: Free talk. Record yourself talking  about your day. Not long, just a minute,   maybe even less. Then you go back and listen to  it. You’ll notice the words that were difficult   for you. The more you study the American accent,  the more you’ll notice things like sounds that   are unclear, or flow that’s choppy. You’ll  actually be able to become a pretty good coach   to yourself with this practice. As you notice  words or phrases or connections that need work,   do them slowly. Maybe find examples of that  online. You can go to Youglish, type in your   word. Let’s say it’s “interesting” and you  can hear lots of examples of native speakers   saying this word. Maybe you start to notice that  it’s not as complicated as you thought. It’s not   interesting but INCH-ruh-sting. Interesting,  interesting. You start to collect so much   knowledge about American English then you practice  it over and over. Interesting, interesting – then,   before you know it, the words that were the  hardest for you to pronounce are now easy. The second recording method is to record yourself  repeating with a native speaker. This allows you   to hear things that might not have heard in  the moment, and that’s going to get your sound   closer to natural. One of the students in the  Academy posted a video of her practice session with the soundboard to our community for other students to see. Along Also Recording yourself and listening to it  will make you an expert in your own accent,   and the tweaks you can make to sound more natural. The fifth habit of highly effective students is  taking notes and tailoring studies to their own   situations. This ties back to recording yourself.  If you record yourself talking about your day,   or talking about your favorite book,  or what you think about current events,   you’re going to be finding words and phrases  that are relevant to YOU. Maybe you can even   record yourself in conversations:  a conversation with a colleague,   or someone at dinner, or at a grocery  store, record a voice memo. Delete it   when you’re done with your lesson on it so  it’s not weird that you recorded someone. But you can use this. Listen back later and  find the phrases where you struggled to express   yourself. Now, you don’t have the pressure  of the conversation. You can stop and think,   how could you have said that better? Maybe  there’s a particular English word that you   didn’t know. Look it up, learn it. Or maybe  there was a phrase that didn’t seem quite right   grammatically. See if you can work it out,  do a search on the phrase or key words from   the phrase and see if you can find examples  that make the grammatical structure clearer,   or show you a different word choice that might be  better. Memorize this phrase. Keep a list of your   words and your phrases that you’re discovering  you need to know because of your own conversation. Six. The sixth habit is simply speaking,  speaking with others. Trying. Don’t wait for   perfection. It’s through speaking and making  mistakes that we’ll make the most progress,   the fastest progress. For some people, it’s  just not in their personalities to speak up,   or to try something out before it’s perfect.  But those students who aren’t afraid to try, who   aren’t waiting for perfection, are the students  who make the most progress. So please, challenge   yourself. You can even track this as part of your  practice plan. “Today I tried speaking with John   when I passed him in the hall even though I wasn’t  feeling totally comfortable or confident.” And   every time you find yourself writing that down,  dang. Take a moment and congratulate yourself.   That’s not easy to do. Challenging yourself out of  your comfort zone speaking English. You did that. Seven. The last thing my most successful  students do is find a practice partner to   speak with on a regular basis. Just  last month I was teaching a student   from the Academy in our live class and she  told me, even though she lives in the US,   she mostly just speaks her own native language  of Thai. But she found some practice partners   through the Academy’s community,  and that practice has really helped Well, on the speaking partner  part on the community. Yeah, where do those two speaking partners live? Uh, one of them lives in Texas and I asked him to join to watch me in this live video. Oh good, that’s awesome! I love that. Yeah. Uhm, who, where’s the other one? The other one is in Canada. Okay. That’s so great, I’m so glad you’ve  connected with people and it’s just so good   to practice thinking and speaking and  like all at once, all at the same time I also reached out to a student who’s actually not  in the Academy anymore. He used to be, and he went   through all the practice materials, and he really  transformed his sound into something smooth and   natural. But I remembered that he coordinated  conversation meet ups and really worked hard   with other students, so I asked him to share  how he did that and what he got out of it. Hi, this is Shikhar and this is a brief  account of how I found my speaking partners,   how we trained and what I gained from this effort.  It was really about three things. Motivation,   accountability and feedback. Initially, I  trained by myself going through the modules   and working on the feedback I got from the  instructors. But eventually, it dawned on   me that I don’t have to do this alone. I could  accelerate my progress if I trained with other   members who were just as serious as I was. So  I reached out to some members who were quite   active in the community. I engaged with their  posts, offered some feedback and built some   rapport with them. And soon, we connected on  messenger but I was careful about one thing.   Whenever I reached out to anyone, I made sure I  knew them and approached them with a clear plan.   Explaining to them what, why and how we could  practice. Now, the ones who like the idea of   practicing together happily joined in. There were  also those who approached me in a similar way. We   planned our practice routine in a way where we  were training alone by ourselves on the weekdays   and meeting up sometime on the weekend sharing our  learning insights and progress. We mostly had our   meetings on Saturdays. I used to send reminders  in advance so that everyone showed up on time.   We recorded our meetings which we reviewed later  to figure out what mistakes we were repeating. There were times when no one showed up and I still  went ahead with the meeting recording myself,   practicing alone, completing what was planned and  posting it in our private group. Our key strategy   was to automatize the general speech patterns.  Speaking is a motor skill and we were building   new speech habits. We first started with phonetics  focusing on the difficult vowels and consonants,   reading out lists of challenging words and  phrases, paying careful attention to the   stress and intonation pattern and then shifted  our focus practicing conversation scripts and free   talking. We rewatched our recordings from time  to time to figure out what needed more work. I   even documented what we covered in our practice.  We focused on one topic per week but sometimes   it took longer. I gained a lot from practicing  groups, my speaking partners were able to spot   the errors that I missed, we also reflected on  the feedback from our instructors but the biggest   benefit was that we kept each other accountable  to our goals, checking up on each other from   time to time making sure we completed our tasks  that we committed to. It was truly worthwhile. So that sums up my story, hope that helps. Shikhar, thank you so much for sharing  your experience here. Congratulations   on the dedication you made to  yourself, you sound just amazing. And thank you for watching this video. Can  you pick up all 7 of these habits of my   most successful students? It takes some work and  dedication, but to reach our goals, it’s worth it!   Keep your learning going now with this video and  don’t forget to subscribe with notifications on, I   absolutely love being your English teacher. That’s  it and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.
Info
Channel: Rachel's English
Views: 108,976
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Habits for better english speaking, How to improve my english speaking, English speaking skills, How to improve my american english speaking, English speaking tips, How to sound like a native English speaker, How to master American spoken english
Id: 6rQNFZN4ZKc
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)
Published: Tue May 07 2024
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.