7 Simple (and EASY!) Habits for Better English Speaking

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

with the soundboard to our community for other students to see.

Along

Also

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.