G’day mate, how are you going? It’s been a while since I uploaded my previous English blog. I have been swamped by so much thing to do over the last month, or two. Today, I would like to elaborate the way in which your self-talk as a means of improving speaking skills could be better off. My short answer is use your inspiration incorporating with past, current and future stories. Let’s get into it, shall we?
First up, “Inspiration”
When you are talking to yourself for your speaking training, it is important to visualise what sort of conversational situation you are in, which is your starting point. It doesn’t really matter whether the situation where you are in is realistic or not. You could try to maximise the effectiveness of relying upon your inspiration. Inspiration is up to your feeling, body condition, or domicile ambience, etc. Thus, it varies pretty much every day. The thing is that you ought not to go against your inspiration or wishes. That is, you should not force yourself to change your self-talk theme or topic against them. If you just try to believe in yourself, then your self-talk will work out nicely and smoothly. It’s not metaphysical, nor is it philosophical. It is actually physical and practical. So, you shall not unnecessarily think too much, and just let your inspiration go as time elapses.
The best condition for maximising your inspiration or scintillating things, for instance, is to have a nice cuppa, put on a jazz music with a little bit of external natural noise. That’s precisely what I normally have when it comes to doing internal monologues. This is just one of the examples, so your best environment might possibly be different, depending upon circumstances. Establishing this kind of environment is, therefore, the key to doing your self-talk well.
Next, “Past, Current, and Future Stories”
Another thing is that it’s a bit difficult for you to continue to talk with just your inspiration. Although it doesn’t really matter whether you just beat about the bush or not, you would like to have, sort of, logical and cohesive contents. To this end, the easiest method or solution is to make sure that you mull over your past, current or future stories in order to broaden your horizon. Of course, you could make up imaginative stories using your inspiration, which is such an excellent way to expand your self-talk. This method really works when it comes to the IELTS speaking test, especially Part 2 (2-minute presentation). In fact, I did this way when I took the IELTS exam.
With respect to your past story, for example, you could talk about things you did in the past, like a month ago, last week, yesterday, or even an hour ago. Probably telling your real story is so much easier than your make-up one. The thing is you don’t want to feel any stress when you are talking to yourself. The key is to get away from the stresses and strains of too much unnecessary thinking. The less stress you feel in terms of thinking, the easier and smoother you can continuously talk. If you think too much, then you definitely start hesitating and have lots of odd pauses once you start talking, right? So, don’t make up, instead, you should talk whatever you actually did in the past.
How about your current story? Well, the same way applies. You don’t necessarily have to think about any transition from your past to current story. This is not a real exam or the one someone listens to your presentation, so that whenever you think you come to a piece of mini-conclusion about your past story, you start talking about current one.
Talking about future story is a bit daunting, because you presumably have to take into account the contents further, right? But nonetheless you don’t want to contemplate too much before starting talking. How should we do, then? One of the simplest ways is to integrate your real future story like what you are slated to do today or tomorrow or whenever with quasi-fake one like what you wish to do in the immediate future. But the point is that you try to reduce thinking time, which is crucially important to boost your impromptu skills. If we are allowed to have an hour to think, then everybody can do with ease, right? Just cutting time to think, but don’t restrict yourself to the use of vocabulary and sentence structure. It’s important to put at your disposal. Making mistakes is such an important process of English learning. I still do make some mistakes like slips of grammar, collocation, even pronunciation as well. Practice makes perfect, despite the fact that the practice based on a shoddy learning methodology does not make perfect at all. So, make sure you take a right one.
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading!
Have a lovely day. Cheers.