Practical exercise to boost your fluency

Practical exercise to boost your fluency

For improving fluency and sounding more like a native English speaker, you can do the following exercise everyday. It will only take you ten minutes but the improvement will be remarkable.

My recommendation is doing JAMs. JAM stands for Just A Minute. Doing three JAMs every day on just random topics will help you get much more fluent with time.

The rules for JAMs are that you cannot stop for a minute, even if you run out of ideas for the topic. If you do, you can stray away a little from the topic but your extemporary should still be related. If you can, you may go over a minute. Basically your aim is not stopping, while not stray away much.

• Set a timer and just start speaking on any topic in your mind right now.

• Stop after a minute.

• Then collect some ideas on the topic you just talked about and go again. It will certainly go better this time.

• Now to take this one step further, branch out even more and write down three points you’ll touch on for each of the ideas you thought on the last time.

• Set a timer and go again. You’ll see the difference for yourself. This final attempt would be so much better than the first and second attempts.

For getting fluent even faster, it is advisable to record yourself each time and see the difference.Listen to your recording from a month back and look how far you’ve come.The results will be motivating and will accelerate your journey to being a more fluent English speaker.

(Source: The No-BS guide to English Vocabulary and Effective Communication by Jason Durham and Alshon Tye)