Who is this for?

This leaflet is for anyone who is thinking about ways of practising, developing and evaluating their English speaking skills.

The aim of this leaflet

This leaflet aims to have you think about the opportunities for practising speaking English that exist around you. You will also find suggestions regarding some useful Language Commons materials for practice either in pairs or in groups. Finally, some ways of evaluating your speaking skills are put forward.

Practice Opportunities

This activity will help you to consider all the possibilities that exist around you for practising speaking English.

Activity

Follow these steps to complete the table on the following page.

• In Column 1 list all the opportunities that you can think of for practising speaking English. These can be opportunities you have at present or opportunities that you might create in future. Example: Having lunch with my English-speaking colleague once a week.
• Total up the number of opportunities listed.
• In Column 2 indicate whether you are taking advantage of the opportunities listed at the moment. If yes, write 1. If no, write 0. Add up the points in this column.
• Finally in Column 3, multiply the number of opportunities (Column 1) by the number of points (Column 2). Write down the result where it says ‘Grand Total’.

Your results

If you have 15 points or more – GREAT!
If you have 11-14 points – WELL DONE
If you have 7-10 points – OKAY
If you have 3-6 points – YOU’LL DO BETTER NEXT TIME
If you have 0-2 points – WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING?!

Thinking about your results and taking action

If you are disappointed in your results on this activity, first read the rest of this advice sheet. Next, consider one of the following actions (or better still, add to this list):

• See an Adviser on duty at the Language Commons Advice Desk. Ask the Adviser about the Language Commons’s English Conversation Groups or Language Exchange Programme or Toastmasters.
• If you can’t make it to the Language Commons, email lccommons with your enquiry
• Invite your English teacher to lunch! Alternatively, find a friend who also wants to improve his or her English and have lunch or dinner together – speaking English of course.
• Watch for notices of English activities on campus and join in whenever you can.

• Exchange taped messages with a classmate. Record a few minutes and then ask your classmate to respond later on the same tape.
• Practise situations when you are alone, perhaps in front of a mirror. Imagine introducing yourself, disagreeing with someone’s ideas, being interviewed or asking for information. If you can get someone to help, assign parts and do role – playing.
• Make friends with the exchange students on our campus – they are here because they want cross – cultural communication. Communicate with them!
• Join (or form your own) English drama group. Start out with a small part in a simple play if you feel shy. You’ll be surprised how much fun acting can be!
• Find a friend or two and agree to speak English at certain regular times – after a class together, at dinner every Tuesday, or riding home on the MTR.
• Practise reading aloud – get someone to check your pronunciation and intonation, or record yourself on tape and analyse your own speech.
• If you have a chance to travel, take advantage of the opportunities to use English – with airline and immigration personnel, hotel and restaurant staff or fellow travellers.
• Visit a former English teacher. Teachers like to hear how their students are doing.

Useful materials in the Language Commons

• Textbooks

  Many books specially written to help people improve speaking contain activities or tasks centred on various topics that work best in pairs or small groups. In these activities, it is not always necessary for you to correct each other’s mistakes. It is more important that you can make yourself understood and maintain a smooth flow of conversation.

The following books can be found on the ‘Speaking’ shelf in the Multimedia Area and contain activities that you could work on individually, with a partner or group:

Advanced Conversation
Speaking 3
Pairwork
Talking in Pairs
Speaking Naturally

To improve your fluency, see Learning to Learn English (‘Learning a Language’ shelf) for thinking-time techniques (p. 77-8) or try ‘Just a minute!’ (p. 78-9).

• CD-ROMs

  You can practise on your own with the help of computer software. Small Talk covers many topics, e.g. Meeting, Home, Family, Health, Spare Time & Arrangements, etc. Real English also introduces topics for general conversation. World Talk American introduces language and concepts for that variety of English, while Traci Talk allows you to participate and interact with the characters in a fictional situation.

The WWW

While there are many sites on the web for learning English (see http://www.linguistic-funland.com/neteach.html for a list of sites that English teachers from all over the world recommend), there are not a lot of sites on the web specifically for practising speaking. The following sites may, however, interest you:

• Conversation Questions (http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/questions) – this site lists hundreds of useful questions for starting and maintaining conversations about all kinds of topics.
• English Conversations (http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/conversation/) – At this site you can read and listen to short conversations containing phrases and expressions commonly used by native speakers.

Evaluating your progress

It is very important that you regularly assess whether you are achieving your learning objectives. The following are some suggestions for evaluating the development of your speaking skills:

1. If possible, audio-tape/video-tape conversations/interactions that you participate in.
2. Use the following form to evaluate your participation in the conversation/interaction. Give yourself a grade out of 10 for each category.

It is, however, very important to also think about some of the factors that might have helped you to participate in an interaction or prevented you from taking part effectively. Think about factors such as who you were talking to (were you very nervous?), what you were talking about (did you know much about the topic?), the situation (how many people were involved in the interaction?), and your own feelings about the situation (were you feeling tired? impatient?).

Above all, don’t be too hard on yourself, and remember – if at first you’re not happy with your performance, try again!

3. See also the feedback task in Speaking Advanced (on the ‘Speaking’ shelf in the Multimedia area.)

And Now…

If you need any help or advice, or just a chat about your progress:

• see an Adviser, on duty at the Language Commons Advice Desk (for details of advisers and their availability, please go to http://lc.ust.hk/~sac/sacadviser.html)
• e-mail lccommons (lccommons@ust.hk) with your query;
• ask at the reception counter of the Language Commons — if the receptionist cannot help you directly, s/he will pass your query on to one of the Language Commons advisers

Note

The introductory leaflet in this series is the leaflet Improving Your Speaking Skills (S1).

This is part of the Speaking series of leaflets supporting independent language learning, produced by the HKUST Center for Language Education Language Commons team. This leaflet was redrafted by Melissa Megan, 2000. If you copy from this leaflet, please acknowledge the source. Thanks.