ずーっと前に書いたスピーチ
四年前に書いたスピーチですHello, everyone. My name is Haruka. I live in Osaka and I am a mother of a one-year-old-boy.I lived in Australia for 10 months and in Canada for 3 months. I have been studying English over 10 years. I teach English to kids at home twice a week and I talk to my son in English when my husband is at work. Today I would like to introduce two ways to improve your English, especially speaking.I used to take a lesson from a tutor at a cafe every week before pregnancy, and this was how I motivated myself to be a better English speaker. However after childbirth, my son needs me 24/7 so I gave up taking private lessons at a cafe.But I didn’t want to be just a stay-at-home mom so I started up an English circle for moms and kids at home.To make it unique, I required participants to speak only English during the circle. In order to promote my circle I used my blog and put up a video of what we are doing during the circle. I also mentioned that I am looking for mothers who have a big passion and are hungry to speak English. Thanks to that, I have received several emails and I always have two to four members at the circle every week. For more fun, I invite a native English speaker to my circle every month. Mothers love the opportunity.There are lots of pros and cons about social media but one of the good things about SNS is that I don’t need to spend money to put an ad on the newspaper or hand out leaflets of my circle at the station, potential participants google and they’ll contact me. So I assume that it is possible to find a friend who you can practice speaking with via instagram or a blog, but of course please be careful not to get involved in any incidents.During the circle we sing, dance, eat and play with kids in English and also mothers talk about some topics. I often pick out the topics from Jun's book “Hip talk LA” such as “what’s the most money you’ve ever spent on one item?” and “where do you see yourself in 10 years?”.All the members are really happy to have a grown-up conversation during the circle. So all I have to prepare is a few questions to begin the conversation with. We can expand our conversation by asking each other more questions to elicit more details.Time really flies while we are having fun. English comes out from our mouth naturally while we are relaxing and having fun.I feel that this English circle gives me a similar environment to a language school when I was in Australia. Everyone is having fun speaking English!Now let me tell you about how I study English by myself. My target is to improve my pronunciation, to be able to talk about a variety of topics and to use the expressions that natives use.When I analyzed my English I found out that the vocabulary I use is simple and easy to understand, which is good, but sometimes it is a bit childish and not natural. There are a lot of words that I understand when I hear them during a conversation but I am not ready to use these words when I speak.So I wanted to learn some phrases to add more information to what I am saying. Moreover I wanted to use the phrases that natives use, and what I was looking for was in that book.Since I don’t have much time to study, I usually listen to the CD from Hip Talk LA when I cook, or clean my house or when I drive my car. I don’t hesitate to check the Japanese translation when I can’t get what the sentence means. I don’t just listen to the sound coming from the CD. I make sure to always follow and imagine what they are discussing. So when I listen to the CD, simple Japanese translations come to mind. I have been listening to the CD about 20 mins a day over 6months and I can guess what the CD is going to say next and I am getting use to speaking along with the CD. That helps me a lot to pronounce English with natural intonation.But most of the time when I speak English, I still need to think in Japanese and I make lots of speaking errors. I started learning how to speak English in college so I assume that it is normal that I have to think in Japanese first when the conversation is difficult.When I can’t explain what I want to say, all I do is practice saying the sentence when I’m alone until I can say it naturally. Mastering English takes lots of time and effort. But My English is much much better than when I started learning. I think I have to keep on studying in my spare time until my son gets a little more older and I can spend some time alone.My advice to you is you have to use what you have learned. Finding friends to practice English with hopefully works for you!Thank you for listening.
