One of the aspects that many students overlook when speaking English is fluency. Improving speaking fluency is a journey that involves consistent practice, exposure, and the right strategies. Also, it’s important not to confuse fluency with speaking fast, which is a common mistake because being fluent in a language means mastering both the language and how you use it.
That’s why here we will give you some tips on how to be fluent in English.
Immersion
First things first. To be able to speak, we must listen first. That’s why it’s important to listen to a lot of content in English in order to grasp the way people pronounce, vocabulary, intonation, idioms, etc.; in other words, to listen to the way natives communicate for us to emulate it. Nowadays, it’s fairly easy to do this by watching videos on YouTube or social media. You should find something you like to watch regularly.
Expand your vocabulary
Once you start listening to and watching a lot of content in English, you can start building your vocabulary. You could write a glossary of words/phrases you’re interested in and start using them whenever you practice speaking or even writing.
Don’t try to be perfect
One of the things many courses and students excessively focus on when learning English is grammar. And that’s a good approach, but it will only get you so far because when people speak, they don’t necessarily follow all the grammar rules. So, in an English course, they teach you to use auxiliary verbs to make questions, but in real life, people tend not to use them very much. Also, to make matters worse, there’s the fact that English grammar has a lot of exceptions, so it is ok to make some mistakes when speaking. Additionally, when you try to be perfect when speaking, you make more pauses because you try to remember how to use the grammar rules and that affects fluency.
Use filler words
Similarly to the previous point, there are some phrases/words people tend to use when they start speaking, so it is a good idea to memorize and use some of them to sound more natural and fluent. Some filler phrases are: “I don’t know”, “you know what I mean”, “actually”, “I guess”, “totally”, “you know”, “I mean”, or “something”. Pay attention whenever you listen to some of the previous examples since sometimes they occur at the beginning, in between or in sentence endings. They are quite common and using them correctly will make you sound better overall.
Connect your sounds
There’s something called “connected speech” which basically is when we connect words when speaking. This is a very common occurrence in native speakers, and you should start practicing it as soon as possible in order to be aware of its use and to sound natural. You can do that by paying attention when watching TV shows and noticing that many words sound like if they were one. For instance, the basic question “how are you”, when you pronounce it fluently, it should sound like only one.
Tongue twisters
This last one is an old strategy but a good one, especially when you’re having problems with specific sounds. There are many tongue twisters in English, and you can easily find them on the internet and practice them simply by reading and repeating them. They can be fun and challenging, but we recommend choosing the ones that use sounds you have problems with. For instance, the “th” sound is usually challenging for Spanish speakers, so you can search one tongue twister with said sound and practice.
Finally, remember that fluency doesn’t necessarily mean to speak fast but to speak without interruptions, mistakes and connecting the right sounds. Also, becoming fluent doesn’t happen overnight, it requires time, patience, listening and practice, a lot of practice. But by following some of the tips we mentioned before, you will become more fluent sooner rather than later.