Some ways to improve your English speaking skills:
1. International online meetings.
So how can your organization make its meetings more productive? Following are three ways high-performing organizations make meetings better.
- Set Clear Expectations - Meeting norms, ground rules and guidelines set the foundation for building an effective meeting habit. These norms often include things like use of an agenda and keeping meetings on time. Whatever your rules, the leadership team must follow them. The way the leadership group meets sets the real standard everyone else follows.
- Document and Share Results - Fear of missing out (FOMO) compels people to attend meetings they shouldn't. Organizers don't want to leave people out, so they invite everyone who might possibly want to weigh in. Yet having irrelevant people in the room de-energizes the conversation and disrupts productivity.
Before the meeting, document the overall purpose of the event and the desired outcomes clearly. Then, send out written meeting results afterwards. When people can see in advance what a meeting is for, then see afterwards what happened, they can decide whether or not it would benefit them to attend. This keeps meetings more focused, and it keeps everyone more productive.
- Define "the Way" to Meet
There are 16 different types of business meetings, and each has a purpose. A regular team meeting is good for confirming progress and identifying problems, but it's a lousy place to make a big decision. Big decisions demand a dedicated decision-making meeting. Similarly, the initial meeting with a prospective client (or funder) should look very different from the meeting where you ink the deal. Each of these pivotal meetings can be optimized to drive the results your company needs.
High-performance organizations know the type of meetings they need to run and how to run each one well. Each meeting gets a name and becomes "the way" that kind of work gets done. For example, the team's check-in meeting becomes "the huddle." The meeting to impress prospective clients early in the sales cycle becomes a "services briefing." Anything called simply a "meeting" isn't specific enough.
2. Read aloud
One of the best ways to improve your English
speaking at home is to read aloud from your favourite book.
When you read aloud instead of reading in your
mind, you can hear what you are saying and take note of which words are
tripping you up or simply sound wrong.
Download mobile apps from good companies such as
British Council and Macmillan Education such as Sound Pronunciation App and
Learn English Sounds Right and type in the words that you aren’t sure how to
pronounce. Listen to the pronunciation on the app and try to replicate it when
you are speaking them aloud.
You
can also keep a notebook at hand and note down the words that are problematic
for you to pronounce. Keep adding to the list every day.
So, pick up your favourite Harry Potter or any
other good English book and read it aloud every day for just half an hour to
improve your English speaking skills.
Many good media websites now also host podcasts where they hold interviews or talk about various things happening around the world. You can check out the top podcasts available around the world. You can go for BBC podcasts and listen to them for half-an-hour every day to get a good idea of what good spoken English sounds like.
Not only will you get to know about what all is
going on around the world during the Covid-19 lockdown but also better your
English speaking sitting at home.
4. Play games with English instructions
ou can pick up your old board games
with English instructions and play them with your family to improve your
English speaking skills.
In games like Monopoly, the instructions are
written in English. While playing, you can read them aloud to practice English
speaking at home.
You can also go for computer games or mobile games
that you play alone which are text-based. You can read out the stories written
in English as the game progresses, but this is sure to be more fun if you are
playing something in a group.
One of the most exciting ways to learn English
speaking at home is to listen to great audiobooks and audio drama.
You can download free audiobooks from torrent
websites or look up the many audiobook websites where you can find some of
their collections for free.
Some
famous audiobooks like the Harry Potter series and the Lord of the Rings series
are very popular and are narrated by famous actors or spoken-voice artists.
You can pop in your headphones and lose yourself in
a virtual world of fiction with these audiobooks during the Covid-19 lockdown!
Listen closely to how the narrators are speaking to improve your own English
speaking skills.
BBC also hosts radio drama series that are highly
engaging. You can find some amazing collections online to download or stream on
YouTube or other websites. Save them all on your phone to create your own
collection and enjoy!
This is the time when
most people are watching a lot of TV series and movies at home because of the
Covid-19 lockdown.
So choose
your favourite British TV series or movies and watch them closely with the
subtitles on.
Read aloud the lines
in the same way the actors are speaking them onscreen to improve your English
speaking skills while also enjoying a good show.
7. Put your GPS / WAZE in English.
Getting directions in English can be very useful to practice English for finding your way to your destination BUT make sure you choose a voice you can understand well otherwise you will undoubtedly get lost 😊9. Karaoke
You don’t only need to stock to books and podcasts to learn English at home. You can even improve your English speaking while having fun singing karaoke at home! Download any of the karaoke apps on your phone such as Karaoke, Smule, and WeSing and sing away! The lyrics of the song will come on your phone and you can sing aloud your favourite English music titles.
Record yourself while you are at it so you can play it back and listen to yourself to identify which words you are pronouncing wrong.
Note down the difficult words in your notebook so you can check out how to speak them correctly using the pronunciation apps.
8. Call a customer support hotline.
If you have anything to know about some home appliance or beauty product or even new services being provided by your mobile network provider during this Covid-19 lockdown, call up their hotline and have a chat with a customer service representative.
Since customer service personnel receive training classes in English speaking, their pronunciation would usually be flawless and you can learn a lot by conversing with someone like that in English.