Evaluating your progress as you study spoken English

These four suggestions will help you evaluate your progress as you study the Spoken English Learned Quickly lessons:

1. The most important evaluation of your progress in English fluency is your ability to speak English. Therefore, you must evaluate your ability by your spoken English, not by your ability to take written exams.

One reason some Spoken English Learned Quickly students fail is because they feel they are too advanced for these lessons. They confuse their understanding of grammar with their ability to speak. These lessons were designed to teach you to speak English, not just to read it. If you diligently study these spoken English lessons for a year, you will gain a great deal of fluency. With that spoken English fluency, you will have a good understanding of English grammar. If you spend the same amount of time in English grammar study, you will have limited English fluency and will have little practical understanding of English grammar.

2. A second way to evaluate your progress in English fluency is to evaluate your fluency in reading out loud. When you begin a new lesson, before you listen to the audio portion of the lesson, try reading the Lesson Text at the beginning of the lesson out loud. (For Lesson 2 this is Lesson 2.) Try to read it with good pronunciation. Because you would not have studied the lesson yet, you probably would not be able to read it as well as you want.

Then, after you have studied that lesson, read the same Lesson Text out loud again. Compare the last reading with the first reading. The difference between the two is the real progress you have made in your ability to speak English during that study time. You can go back to any earlier lesson that was difficult for you. Try doing it again in order to determine your progress in spoken English.

Some Spoken English Learned Quickly students fail because they assume that when they understand the meaning of all the sentences, and know the meaning of all of the vocabulary words for a lesson, they have finished that lesson. You will not succeed, however, until you have repeated the spoken English exercises frequently enough so that you can pronounce each sentence exactly like an American or British English speaker. That will take far more time than merely learning what each sentence means.

3. A third way to evaluate your progress is to read a newspaper written in English. Read an article out loud which you have never seen before. Read it with the best pronunciation possible. Every week, pick a different newspaper article which you have not seen before and do the same thing. You will discover that each week you are reading new articles with better pronunciation and speed. Again, that is a measure of your increasing ability to speak English.

Some U.S. newspaper websites.     www.oregonlive.com,     www.startribune.com     www.journalnow.com ,     www.oaklandtribune.com     www.seattletimes.com,     www.denverpost.com,     www.mcall.com,    www.theoutlookonline.com,     www.argusleader.com,     www.chron.com,     www.hometownnews.com,     www.dailyearth.com,     www.smalltownpapers.com,     www.50states.com,     www.usanewspapers.com.

4. You may also evaluate your progress in spoken English by your ability to understand others when they are speaking. Go to the More Spoken English website and choose an audio lesson you have not already listened to. Before you read the printed text, play the audio and try to do the exercise by listening and responding without following the written text. At first, it will be difficult for you to understand each word. The longer you study the Spoken English Learned Quickly lessons, however, the more easily you will understand what the More Spoken English speaker is saying without reading the text. How quickly you understand what is said is a measure of your increasing ability to use spoken English fluently.

It is often difficult for you to hear your own progress when you are learning to speak any new language.

You will know you are making progress when you can repeat sentences out loud that you know are correct (such as sentences from a newspaper article). However, it will take time. Try to speak English out loud at least one or two hours a day using the Spoken English Learned Quickly lessons, and you will make progress.

Lack of persistence is the main reason why you would fail to learn to speak English fluently while using the Spoken English Learned Quickly lessons. Though grammar-based study is ineffective, it is usually easier for a student to do written English grammar assignments than spoken drills. If you want to learn to speak English, you will need to practice by correctly speaking English out loud.