I want to explain something about speaking and that is that it is an organic, active and necessary human activity which requires more than one person.
We all learn to speak from babyhood and it is something that parents support and teach and indeed become anxious about if their child is not speaking when they reach around a year old. My own daughter did not speak for the first 4 years of her life and I was very worried about this. Once she started nursery, however, there was no problem and she began to converse very fluently and had by-passed all the ‘baby-talk’.
Speaking for human beings is a very important activity and it is one that cannot happen unless there are other people who are able and willing to communicate with us regularly. If you have ever been away from your home country for a while and had to speak in a different language you will know that you easily forget words and expressions in your own native language. This happened to me. I lived in Indonesia for 11 years and when I returned to the UK I kept hearing words and expressions that I had completely forgotten. If you can easily forget your mother-tongue then how much more important is it that you keep practising a language that you are learning.
I know that many of you like to use YouTube for your IELTS practice (indeed I have a channel myself) and while it is an excellent platform to learn how to do things and what to do it completely misses the 3rd element of learning which is ‘Am I doing this correctly?’ namely correction and feedback. This is why students often underestimate their writing and speaking ability and believe that because they follow the instructions to the letter, they are achieving band 7. The result of this is that the result in the exam can often fall well below their expectation. They never thought to check and see if they were actually applying the information (or some didn’t even try to apply it) correctly.
So, going back to my assertion that speaking a language is both organic and active, it stands to reason that to speak well you must participate.
Imagine for a moment, reading a manual on how to drive a car, or even watching a video on how to drive a car – how confident would you be about getting into a car after this and driving off down a busy road!
A car is mechanical and the system doesn’t change – language is ever-changing and unpredictable so how is it even possible to go into your IELTS speaking exam after watching a few ‘how-to’ videos?
To speak well you must speak – regularly. You have to learn how to be spontaneous, how to build your fluency, how to expand your vocabulary and present your ideas in a short ‘talk’. It is impossible to do this without doing it!
IELTS is an expensive business so it’s important not to waste money on exams when you are not ready.
Speaking needs practice, feedback and further practice. Like writing it needs time for development. The more you do it the better you will become. Confidence also builds with practice and this then improves your overall skill.
However none of this will happen unless you are actively involved in speaking with other people.