Study the 7 habits of my most successful students when it comes to English speaking and improving their American accent. If you want to have better English speaking skills these are the 7 things you should do first.
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Video Transcript:
I’ve been teaching English as a Second Language since 1999. Guys, that was last century. I see students who succeed, and students who don’t ever reach their goals. In my online courses at Rachel’s English Academy, of course, we want all our students to succeed, so we often, as a team, get together and talk about what makes a student successful and how can we make all students successful.
I’m Rachel, and I would love to give you my free course, the top 3 ways to master the American Accent. Please visit Rachelsenglish.com/free to enroll.
Today I’m going to introduce you to the Seven Habits of Highly Successful students. This is what I’ve noticed from my own thousands of students: people who want to improve their spoken English, their American accent, their listening skills.
One: First, a practice schedule.
This one seems obvious but too often we make a goal, we want to reach it, but we don’t plan how we will. I actually get emails from my Academy students almost every day asking, how can I stay motivated and do this? My most successful students are the ones who make practice a part of their daily schedule. They prioritize it. It’s not an afterthought, something they will squeeze in if they can. For a lot of them, they practice at the same time everyday. Planning it in consistently removes the stress of needing to find time for it every day. I talk about my student Chao a lot, because she is just a great example of what you can get when you do a little every day.
I’ve been recommending to a lot of friends, they’ve been noticing that oh, I think you’re speaking better, more natural and stuff like that so I introduce every time I will tell, that’s Rachel’s English!
That’s awesome!
Can I ask you a question? How much time on average would you say you’ve spent working on your accent?
I think every day, 10 minutes.
That is not much guys. That is not much. I was thinking you might say like a half hour or an hour. But it’s the consistency of doing it every day.
Yeah. Well, Chao I think you’re an inspiration to a lot of students. You just sound absolutely fantastic.
I appreciate that. I always think that you as an inspiration for us. Thank you so much.
And I always think you guys are because you’re actually out there doing the work so you just sound just amazing. I see Jambo here in commenting “10 minutes a day!” He can’t believe it.
When she first joined the Academy, her speech was a little choppy and she was a little hard to understand. Not now. Now her English is so natural and easy to understand. Make a schedule right now, think of a 10-minute chunk of your day that you can set aside. Just try it for a month. Once you’re in the habit, it’s easy.
Number 2, the method. Now, if you make time to study 10, 20, 30 minutes a day, but you’re not using the right method, you won’t get too far. And the method for changing your accent involves a lot of repetition. After all, it’s not a CONCEPT you’re learning, that’s easy. But speaking, that is a physical habit. A physical skill you’re building. That takes time. Think of a classical pianist learning a new piece, or an athlete practicing a move. Over and over. This is how my student Adrian described it.
When you’re doing like a session, like let’s say you’re working on a soundboard, how many times in a row will you do the same audio file.
I try to repeat like maybe a million times.
Do you spend a month on one sentence? One soundboard?
Yeah, one soundboard usually because that would be boring.
Yeah.
It might be boring but it works.
I know! I know, that’s what I always try to tell people. I’m like there’s nothing boring about getting better. And yes it’s repetition and we kind of, we’re not used to having learn that way you know. As adults, we learn something and we know it but when it comes to your body and your accent, it is repetition. But yeah, you sound awesome and like I said, people in the class, they’re hearing it and they’re loving it so thank you for sharing how you work.
Repetition gets the sound that you want into your body. It’s how you learned your first language, and even though it’s not how we’re used to working on things as we get older, it’s very effective. So my most successful students are the ones that just repeat. Dedicate and repeat. Adrian mentioned working on a soundboard. In my Academy I have hundreds, actually maybe over a thousand at this point, of these soundboards, so you can play a phrase, say it, play it, say it, play it, say it. My students may do the same word or phrase 20 times in a row. You go through the whole soundboard, you do the same soundboard for a month. That is the method. You put in this time, and it accumulates into sounding like this.
I signed up to sound better and more natural, that was my first goal uh, right now I live in Miami so, and I use English every day so I just want to sound more natural, that’s the main goal.
Really good, smooth, easy to understand English. By the way soundboards are also a part of the free course that you can at RachelsEnglish.com/free, yet another reason to try it out.
The third habit of my most successful students is: developing the right mindset. This is one that gets ignored way too often. But as I’ve worked with students I’ve realized, they have a mindset. Whether or not they think about it. And often, it’s a negative one that makes their progress much slower. I remember a conversation I had with Tom, the head teacher here at Rachel’s English, when we were trying to figure out why some students progress so much slower than others. And we decided a lot of it has to do with mindset. Some people are more open to real change than others. Changing your accent means changing your voice, and that can be scary for some people.
So we let our students know, to sound natural in American English, they’re probably going to have to change something fundamental about their voice. One student said, I have my Spanish voice, and I have my American voice, and I thought that was brilliant. You allow yourself to develop something totally different, and you approach it positively.
Others really do want to change but in their mind they’re saying, “Oh, I can’t have this kind of conversation”, “I have a big problem with this kind of sound,” and so on. And they say this to themselves even as they practice, and the practice doesn’t work as well. Try saying this to yourself instead: “I have a wonderful American R sound. I can think quickly and express myself the way I want to.” Successful students change their image and their mindset about themselves and the improvement is great. So you have to have your method, but you have to address your mindset as well, and this what some of my most successful students do.
I have a course that helps students with their mindset and approach in my Academy, but I also have one of those lessons free here on YouTube. I’ll put a link to that video in the video description.
Fourth Okay. Now the next habit gets you so much bang for your buck. Record yourself. There are actually two different great exercises for this, and I’ll describe both for you
One: Free talk. Record yourself talking about your day. Not long, just a minute, maybe even less. Then you go back and listen to it. You’ll notice the words that were difficult for you. The more you study the American accent, the more you’ll notice things like sounds that are unclear, or flow that’s choppy. You’ll actually be able to become a pretty good coach to yourself with this practice. As you notice words or phrases or connections that need work, do them slowly. Maybe find examples of that online. You can go to Youglish, type in your word. Let’s say it’s “interesting” and you can hear lots of examples of native speakers saying this word. Maybe you start to notice that it’s not as complicated as you thought. It’s not interesting but INCH-ruh-sting. Interesting, interesting. You start to collect so much knowledge about American English then you practice it over and over. Interesting, interesting – then, before you know it, the words that were the hardest for you to pronounce are now easy.
The second recording method is to record yourself repeating with a native speaker. This allows you to hear things that might not have heard in the moment, and that’s going to get your sound closer to natural. One of the students in the Academy posted a video of her practice session
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Recording yourself and listening to it will make you an expert in your own accent, and the tweaks you can make to sound more natural.
The fifth habit of highly effective students is taking notes and tailoring studies to their own situations. This ties back to recording yourself. If you record yourself talking about your day, or talking about your favorite book, or what you think about current events, you’re going to be finding words and phrases that are relevant to YOU. Maybe you can even record yourself in conversations: a conversation with a colleague, or someone at dinner, or at a grocery store, record a voice memo. Delete it when you’re done with your lesson on it so it’s not weird that you recorded someone.
But you can use this. Listen back later and find the phrases where you struggled to express yourself. Now, you don’t have the pressure of the conversation. You can stop and think, how could you have said that better? Maybe there’s a particular English word that you didn’t know. Look it up, learn it. Or maybe there was a phrase that didn’t seem quite right grammatically. See if you can work it out, do a search on the phrase or key words from the phrase and see if you can find examples that make the grammatical structure clearer, or show you a different word choice that might be better. Memorize this phrase. Keep a list of your words and your phrases that you’re discovering you need to know because of your own conversation.
Six. The sixth habit is simply speaking, speaking with others. Trying. Don’t wait for perfection. It’s through speaking and making mistakes that we’ll make the most progress, the fastest progress. For some people, it’s just not in their personalities to speak up, or to try something out before it’s perfect. But those students who aren’t afraid to try, who aren’t waiting for perfection, are the students who make the most progress. So please, challenge yourself. You can even track this as part of your practice plan. “Today I tried speaking with John when I passed him in the hall even though I wasn’t feeling totally comfortable or confident.” And every time you find yourself writing that down, dang. Take a moment and congratulate yourself. That’s not easy to do. Challenging yourself out of your comfort zone speaking English. You did that.
Seven. The last thing my most successful students do is find a practice partner to speak with on a regular basis. Just last month I was teaching a student from the Academy in our live class and she told me, even though she lives in the US, she mostly just speaks her own native language of Thai. But she found some practice partners through the Academy’s community, and that practice has really helped
Well, on the speaking partner part on the community.
Yeah, where do those two speaking partners live?
Uh, one of them lives in Texas and I asked him to join to watch me in this live video.
Oh good, that’s awesome! I love that.
Yeah.
Uhm, who, where’s the other one?
The other one is in Canada.
Okay. That’s so great, I’m so glad you’ve connected with people and it’s just so good to practice thinking and speaking and like all at once, all at the same time
I also reached out to a student who’s actually not in the Academy anymore. He used to be, and he went through all the practice materials, and he really transformed his sound into something smooth and natural. But I remembered that he coordinated conversation meet ups and really worked hard with other students, so I asked him to share how he did that and what he got out of it.
Hi, this is Shikhar and this is a brief account of how I found my speaking partners, how we trained and what I gained from this effort. It was really about three things. Motivation, accountability and feedback. Initially, I trained by myself going through the modules and working on the feedback I got from the instructors. But eventually, it dawned on me that I don’t have to do this alone. I could accelerate my progress if I trained with other members who were just as serious as I was. So I reached out to some members who were quite active in the community. I engaged with their posts, offered some feedback and built some rapport with them. And soon, we connected on messenger but I was careful about one thing. Whenever I reached out to anyone, I made sure I knew them and approached them with a clear plan. Explaining to them what, why and how we could practice. Now, the ones who like the idea of practicing together happily joined in. There were also those who approached me in a similar way. We planned our practice routine in a way where we were training alone by ourselves on the weekdays and meeting up sometime on the weekend sharing our learning insights and progress. We mostly had our meetings on Saturdays. I used to send reminders in advance so that everyone showed up on time. We recorded our meetings which we reviewed later to figure out what mistakes we were repeating.
There were times when no one showed up and I still went ahead with the meeting recording myself, practicing alone, completing what was planned and posting it in our private group. Our key strategy was to automatize the general speech patterns. Speaking is a motor skill and we were building new speech habits. We first started with phonetics focusing on the difficult vowels and consonants, reading out lists of challenging words and phrases, paying careful attention to the stress and intonation pattern and then shifted our focus practicing conversation scripts and free talking. We rewatched our recordings from time to time to figure out what needed more work. I even documented what we covered in our practice. We focused on one topic per week but sometimes it took longer. I gained a lot from practicing groups, my speaking partners were able to spot the errors that I missed, we also reflected on the feedback from our instructors but the biggest benefit was that we kept each other accountable to our goals, checking up on each other from time to time making sure we completed our tasks that we committed to. It was truly worthwhile.
So that sums up my story, hope that helps.
Shikhar, thank you so much for sharing your experience here. Congratulations on the dedication you made to yourself, you sound just amazing.
And thank you for watching this video. Can you pick up all 7 of these habits of my most successful students? It takes some work and dedication, but to reach our goals, it’s worth it! Keep your learning going now with this video and don’t forget to subscribe with notifications on, I absolutely love being your English teacher. That’s it and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.
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