Today, knowledge of spoken English is particularly important alongside one's native language. European partners, colleagues, and even acquaintances easily build both business and personal relationships using English, and often some other foreign languages as well.
Such people do not feel discomfort in communication; they are unfamiliar with a lack of vocabulary and mutual understanding, even when switching between several languages. This creates a completely successful communication atmosphere and provides an effective basis for relationships between people.
What unites these people and their skills? What is the secret that their speech literally flows like a brook? It is fluency of speech. A certain trait that many students chase like a phantom, yet it is born in the most unexpectedly simple exercises.
So, fluent speech. Let's peek behind the door of any classroom where students are studying English. What do we hear there?
Often I witness how even at fairly high levels, students 'chop' words: even at a rather fast pace of speech, they manage to 'cut off' words from one another, pronouncing each separately. To understand how this looks from the outside, let me give an example of my student who was studying Russian.
When we first started, she first learned a few names of surrounding objects, and then we began studying locations like 'above', 'below', and so on. One expression was 'v uglu' (in the corner), which we naturally pronounce in one breath, almost as a single word. She managed that too, but only at first. As soon as we wrote down the phrase and the girl tried to read it, she produced something like: 'Vee-ee-ee... oog-lyu-oo-oo.' That is, while she simply repeated after me by ear, everything was fine, but as soon as she tried to reproduce the written symbols, the connection with the previous, still fresh experience was immediately lost. The same often happens to us when we try to speak English or any other foreign language.
On the other hand, students most often complain that it is so difficult to understand foreign speech by ear, precisely because everything blends into a homogeneous 'mush' from which it is so hard to pick out any words!
Do you see the connection? It lies in mutually exclusive factors that form a vicious circle! A person experiences difficulties and discomfort when perceiving someone else's connected speech, and what do they do? Naturally, they exclude, eradicate the 'hindering' factor from their own speech, subconsciously trying to make their speech 'more understandable' to the listener. But in doing so, this speech acquires an unnatural, artificial sound. And understanding of foreign speech still does not come; moreover, over time the gap between these types of language activity (listening comprehension and speaking) only widens!
What to do? There is only one answer: break this vicious closed circle! And, of course, start with one's own speech.
Ask yourself the following question: why do you literally 'stumble' on certain places when reading in a foreign language, tripping over some phrases? It's obvious: these sound combinations are most alien to our speech apparatus, accustomed all life to working in the mode of a Slavic language. What happens at such moments? From the discomfort we feel, we want to finish this process of alien sound formation as quickly as possible, that is, urgently switch to something else – we jump to the next sentence, exercise, type of activity, etc., often 'swallowing' the indigestible phrase, lowering the volume and speeding up speech.
But tell me, please, what will happen if you are driving a car and instead of slowing down before a bump on the road, you accelerate and try to go over the bump at full speed? I think even those who do not drive can guess what that leads to. In the same way, your attempts to 'skip' a phrase that causes discomfort will lead to nothing constructive. You need, as they say, to take the bull by the horns! That is, slowly, smoothly, and purposefully read and speak aloud all problematic sound combinations until you achieve that cherished smooth sound. And speed – it will come automatically over time.
This way, step by step, leveling your own speech, carefully watching the smoothing of words in phrases, you will eventually notice that understanding someone else's connected speech becomes much easier!
Well, it is even more effective to repeat live phrases directly after a native speaker as much as possible. For this purpose, in our school, in addition to regular classes, conversation clubs are also held. So you cannot avoid practice! Welcome!
Yulia ARSLANOVA,
English teacher
at the 'Business and Career' center.