What is the best way to learn day to day conversation in English? Please share ideas, tips and techniques you have used to teach or learn English conversation in daily life.
I am a learner myself but also teach adults in a rural area and my students are absolute beginners in English. I want to give them some simple daily English conversation samples which they can begin using quickly. This will improve their motivation and also help remove some hesitation in using English in simple everyday conversations.
There are books on conversation though I am not sure how useful and effective they are. More so because several of the phrases and constructs used in daily conversation are colloquial and semi-formal and their usage is best learnt by observation rather than reading – basically, you pick those details faster and more accurately if you see people use them rather than by reading in a text book.
Movies with subtitles can be a better way to acquire daily use conversation and small talk capability.
My 2 cents.
Daily use English conversation is a powerful tool of both learning and teaching.
For learners, it gives a quick victory which not only energizes them but also helps them remove their hesitation when they start practicing simple conversation sentences and dialogues.
For teachers, it is useful because it helps them get their students speaking English from the word go and though the ideas and conversation they do at this stage is very simple and rudimentary, it nevertheless helps them cross the psychological barrier of speaking in English.
Following are some ideas to use everyday English conversation as a learning tool. They are equally applicable whether you are a student or a teacher, the only difference being that if you are a learner, you might have to do a lot of planning and collection yourself.
These are also the ideas that have worked for me as an English speaking trainer:
1. Build a learning calendar for 3 months
Create weekly learning goals which means the kind of sentences you want your students to be able to speak every week. Start with very basic sentences and keep adding 7-12 new sentences every week. Aim at making the student learn 50 new sentences every month.
If you are a student yourself trying to learn English conversation, simply buy a book on conversation and mark out weekly goals on the book itself. Aim at learning 2 new sentence-types each day and try practicing with their variations throughout the day.
Also, be aware that the same sentence structure can lead to multiple sentences, for example, a simple sentence like, “This is a car” can be transformed into tens of sentences by changing the last word (car) – so, the same pattern would give us sentences like – This is a cat, this is a dog, this is a spoon, this is a glass, this is a fan and so on.
2. Build your conversation repository
Buy a conversation book, search google and pick-choose and create your own collection of conversation practice you want to give your students.
A word about google search, though it is a very good source of information, there is a lot of noise in there too and so be selective. Pick only those parts from an exercise that you like and discard everything else.
If you are a learner, simplify this step. Just buy a good book on English conversation.
3. Don’t stop practicing
The beginners will hesitate, they will feel funny while trying to speak in English and a lot of them will want to give up. The key here is to not get sidetracked by these minor psychological issues, strengthen your desire to learn this new language and practice anyway.
Build your basic vocabulary while you are learning conversations because the more words you know, the more variations of conversation patterns you will be able to discover. This will speed up your learning.
Learning through everyday English conversation is an effective method to quickly build English speaking capability as long as you (or your students) do not give up too soon.
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