Fluency, Confidence and Music

A lot of people speak English well but are often frustrated by the fact that their fluency isn’t as good as they would like to. Confidence plays a big part in English fluency .

How can we improve fluency?

First I would like to clarify that fluency isn’t only the knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Fluency is mainly obtained by speaking without “stops” while connecting last and first syllables of words in sentences. I will focus on word connection in this blog entry.

Let’s take a fairly common sentence in English: What are you going to do this weekend?

English speakers will not pronounce every letter/sound of every word in this question. However, when non-native English speakers say that, they tend to emphasize every single sound of every word. It is a fairly common thing which can be explained by the fact that since English is not the first language it “feels” very important to emphasize we “know how to say it correctly” and consequently pronounce every sound. An other explanation could be that we actually pronounce the word the same way we originally remember the letters and know how to write it.

A native speaker will prefer to use contractions (e.g: are you going to do - you gonna do) and also connect words without having “stops”.

We can improve fluency on our own with simple things. Music plays a big part in my approach to teaching and I believe that since everyone listens to music at least 5 minutes a day, it is the perfect tool to help us with fluency.

The concept is to choose a list of 5 to 10 songs you really enjoy listening to in English and create a playlist with them. You should look for the songs played with lyrics on Youtube or any platform you like to use. Listen to at least one song each day. I am sure there is one or more sentences you connect to, specifically like or know from the song. Take that sentence and repeat it aloud while listening to the song. This repetition will make you say the sentence more fluently and with the “proficiency” of an English speaker. In songs, the singer “can’t afford to make full pauses before or after words” therefore the fluency is natural.

I am an eternal GenX (or Xenial) so I will take an example from “my timeline”; Smash Mouth - All stars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9aW_0hkoYo). There is a sentence in this song that I have always liked and it is “Didn’t make sense not to live for fun”. Now this is “my sentence”. I learned the words, then tried saying them aloud. I sounded quite weird and I would say them so “correctly” it was never fast enough to sing along. As time passed, I tried again and again to sing along. I started saying it the same way the singer did which meant, fast and differently, and finally I managed. I went on to do this with a number of the songs I liked and I have been doing it to this day.

I hope that this small tip can help you improve your fluency and pronunciation and if you have questions please contact us for more information on our variety of services.