CHENNAI: Recently, I had a pleasant encounter with a businessman who shared the success stories of his career and also expressed the need to speak fluently in English. He holds important positions in different organisations. He is required to speak English in public in many different social situations and forums. The key functions include giving welcome speeches, introducing guests/speakers, delivering felicitation speeches and proposing vote of thanks among others.
He has many strengths. He is an excellent orator in his mother tongue, Tamil. His confidence level is high. He has a burning desire to deliver speeches in English. His positives reflected in the way he expressed his passion to excel. He admitted that he lacked fluency in English as the necessity to speak the language didn’t arise till recently. He made me believe that he had inner strength to defeat his negatives regarding English communication abilities with his positives. When I told him that confidence leads to competence, he felt very encouraged.
As he asked me to assess his English speaking skills, I wrote a short felicitation speech and asked him to read it. But for some incorrect groupings of words and mispronunciation of a few words, he was able to complete the task well. I told him that he should learn from an expert how to group words while reading a text and how to pronounce words correctly. Later, seeking my advice and suggestions he posed these questions to me: What steps should I take to improve my English and public speaking? Is it a good idea to join any public speaking course? What about a Toast Masters Club?
Here are the tips that I gave him:
1) A speech should be spoken and not read. But at the same time, it is not always necessary that one should speak in public without notes or a written text. If you are not able to speak without the support of notes, you can write your speech and just read it. Even professionals read their speeches. One or two rehearsals before the actual delivery of the speech help you read your speech confidently.
2) The speech should be written in plain English and there should be no hard words (words that are unfamiliar to you or to your audience and words that are long and thus difficult to pronounce). The sentences should be short.
3) It is important to know how to read a speech well. Be familiar with the text by reading it at least two or three times. Read your speech aloud. Only when you read aloud, will you get a feel for the language and know the difficulty level in reading. This practice of reading aloud helps you make the required changes to the content.
4) Do you want to know how to read a written text? Visit the VOA Special English website at www.voaspecialenglish.blogspot.in and www.learningenglish.voanews.com. These sites have many downloadable audio and video files. The transcripts are also available. You can follow the transcripts while listening to the audio files.
5) Listen to some good speeches. Numerous speeches of several types, such as welcome speech, vote of thanks, felicitation speech, and farewell speech are available on the internet. Such audio and video files can be easily downloaded.
The second part of the article will appear next week.
— rayanal@yahoo.co.uk