ESL Blogs

Greetings to all MyEC friends!

First, I’d like to ask something to you my dear friends who are serious in their want to improve their spoken English. How do you spend your time studying and improving your speaking skills? What are your learning plans daily to achieve fluency?

Hmm…I know… I know these are very common questions. We have read and discussed this kind of questions for thousand times here in our site. But what I’m appealing to you here my dear friends is that please hear me out my humble suggestions and let me share how I spend my learning time here in MyEC.

Would you agree to me if I say, the best way to learn Spoken English is to speak it? Well, I just read it from somewhere else but I feel this really influences me now and have a huge impact in achieving my goal: to improve my pronunciation and eventually be a fantastic speaker someday! But the big question is how?...I think the key is repetition, my friends. My method now is listening, listening and one more time listening...Then repeating, repeating and one more time, repeating what I’ve listened…

Can you guess what and how I do it? Tan tararan taran! Newscasting!!! Yes, it is. The simple news reading every week in our Audio Speaking Group. It is posted by our kind teacher Tara every Tuesday. Hmmm.Ok, let me share why I chose this activity to be included in my daily learning plan.

First, it is very easy because it’s not time consuming. Only a less than a minute reading won’t hurt my daily routine. I download it to my mp3, so that anywhere I go and every time I have the chance, I could listen to it. So very handy, isn’t it?! I can listen and practice to it up to more than 10 times a day for 2 to 3 days before I submit my own recordings. And because it’s very short you can focus for every bit and details of the readings without exhaustion. You can study how Tara stresses the syllables in each word, how she links some words, the intonation etc,etc. Isn’t it amazing! It’s already a completo recardos (ingredients) you can find here.

My second reason is that I know that I need to have someone to look up to as my model, native speaker whom I could visioned to be like him/her someday. And Ms. Tara has a perfect voice. She has a very lovely and very clear, understandable voice to say the least. So that’s why I’ve been magnetized and keep coming back there every week. And of course also, because of our kind,friendly, supportive friends there, too.

And the last reason is that…you have an instant feedback to yourself. What do I mean by that? When you keep listening and keep repeating the news report (maybe in a 10th times) with a loud voice even yourself can know what’s wrong with your voice, your stressing pattern and pronunciation. You can easily detect it because you can do comparison to your own voice to Ms. Tara who is native speaker and you will know what’s missing or error in your speaking. and now you can correct them. Isn’t it wonderful? to know your mistakes and know that you are now doing the right thing to undo and remedy them? Plus a big bonus from Ms. Tara because she is always there to assist the members in their issues.


So, my dear friend why don’t we take newsreading and record it to be included in our daily learning plan? A short daily dose of practicing our ears and tongue in repetition manner will surely gives us confidence in speaking, right? What do you think?

Ps: this is the link in our group discussions