The importance of speaking. Evaluating a website dedicated to improve speaking skills.

To tell you the truth, the worst skill of my language learning abilities is definitely the speaking. I always think too much before speaking, I always hesitate whether the sentence I would like to say is correct grammatically, whether I use the appropriate words and so on. This makes difficult for me to become an easy-going, confident and fluent speaker. I know that speaking is the most important part of language learning (besides listening) since the main goal of learning a new language generally is communicating in the target language, using the language in everyday situations, conversations. And I know that I should focus on speaking fluently instead of perfectly because English speakers can understand me.

The best way to improve our English speaking skill is to talk with native speakers. But what if we have not got this option? Or what if you simply do not feel confident enough or you are too shy to speak with foreigners? Of course it is possible to develop our spoken English even without a speaking partner.

I choose the TalkEnglish.com website to evaluate in this blog entry. Using the content of the site online is totally free but the price of this is that advertisements appear constantly. If you want to study without Internet connection, you can buy the offline version as an English learning software that provides all materials from the website. The package is rather cheap it costs only $21 and contains pdf, mp3 files, plus it means no advertisements at all. This downloadable version can be found in the EXTRAS section of the site. There you can read useful articles, suggestions, methods about language learning, e. g.: '5 Rules for Speaking Fluency', 'What are Collocations', etc. Besides these extra contents, mobile phone apps can be downloaded from the site both for Android and iPhone as well.

Now let's see the ENGLISH LESSONS of the website. Learners can choose from Speaking English lessons, English Video lessons, English Listening lessons and Extra English lessons or can browse from the list of all lessons in the Full Lesson Index section. Each contains lots of expressions, sample sentences, phrases, dialogues that are useful in everyday situations. There are for example Business English lessons, Interview English lessons, Travel English lessons to help extend our vocabulary and provide relevant content. Lessons are short, easy to understand and follow, and give clear explanations and suggestions to support the learners. Although the website is designed for learners of levels from beginner to advanced, in my opinion only those people will be able to use the site who are already familiar with the basics of English. The video lessons contain animated videos with subtitles, vocabulary explanations and are dealing with various interesting topics such as 'Introducing two people' or 'Let's sell our house'.

In spite of the site is basically a site that provides lessons for improving speaking skills it also offers listening, grammar and vocabulary lessons. The listening audio lessons contains the transcripts of the dialogues and short quizzes. The grammar and the vocabulary lessons are also related to improving our speaking skills. For example, you can learn the 'Top 2000 English Vocabulary Words used in Speaking'. This is a good point because all language learning skills correlate with each other and you will be a really successful learner when you give special attention to all parts of your language leaning process.