Focus on Fluency: 15 Textbooks To Help You Speak English

Choosing what textbook to use can be difficult. And if you want to improve your fluency, it's even more challenging, since most English textbooks don’t focus much on speaking. 

To make things easier, we’ve made a list of the 15 best textbooks that will help you become fluent in English. And if you’re looking for something budget friendly (i.e., free), scroll down to the bottom!

Textbooks With a Focus on Speaking

The first four are English textbooks designed specifically to get you speaking.

Practice Makes Perfect: English Conversation

Practice Makes Perfect is for intermediate students trying to improve their English conversation skills. Each chapter starts with a real-life dialogue, followed by conversation tips, expressions commonly used in American English and practice exercises. 

One advantage of this book is that it comes with recorded dialogues that you can listen to online and in its mobile app. So unlike many other options, you don’t need a CD player.

Nice Talking With You

The Nice Talking With You series is designed to get beginners speaking from day one. Each lesson will have learners work on conversation questions and strategies, which they then apply to the listening and speaking exercises.

Level 1 is designed for those who have studied English before but don’t speak it, and Level 2 is for elementary and pre-intermediate students. 

Let’s Talk

Let’s Talk is a course that helps students become fluent in American English through a variety of communication activities, while still covering grammar, vocabulary, listening and other aspects of the language. 

This series consists of Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3.

Collins Easy Learning English

The Collins Easy Learning English series includes two books on conversation: English Conversation Book 1 for beginners and English Conversation Book 2 for intermediate students.

Each book has 14 units that feature how English is used in different everyday situations. There’s also some business English for beginners.

Textbooks That Start Conversations

If you just want to get talking and don’t need exercises or explanations, the books in this section are for you.

Discussions A-Z

Discussions A-Z is a series that's filled with engaging discussion activities. Both the intermediate and advanced books have 26 units, each focusing on a different topic.

Compelling Conversations 

Compelling Conversations: Questions and Quotations on Timeless Topics is designed to encourage meaningful conversations among advanced learners. Each of the 45 chapters provides interesting questions and quotations along with a list of related vocabulary words.

1000 Conversation Questions

1000 Conversation Questions is exactly that: 1,000 questions — no more, no less. These questions are divided into 100 topics that come up in conversation, such as aging, cleanliness, family values and more.

If you like this book, you may also like another by the same author: 500 Grammar-Based Conversation Questions. This book introduces the most commonly-taught grammar patterns, followed by questions that let students practice them in conversation.

101 Conversations in English

If you want to study real-life conversations to improve your own communication abilities, then 101 Conversations is the series for you. Both 101 Conversations in Simple English and 101 Conversations in Intermediate English tell a story through 101 short dialogues set in London.

Textbooks That Teach Vocabulary

You need vocabulary if you want to have a conversation. The textbooks below teach the words and expressions that you’ll definitely hear and use in real chats.

Conversational American English: The Illustrated Guide to Everyday Expressions of American English

Conversational American English teaches 3000 American English expressions through illustrations. It also covers 350 common themes in everyday conversation, from politely leaving an event to asking someone to repeat their name.

Speak English Like An American

Speak English Like An American teaches over 300 idioms often used in American English and uses stories to show learners when and how to use them. You can try out a chapter for free in the online course.

If you find this book helpful, you may also like More Speak English Like An American or other books by the same author: Speak English Around Town and Speak Business English Like An American. 

Each of these books comes with an app you can download to listen to the audio recordings.

Shortcut to English Collocations

If you enjoy learning idioms, then you might like Shortcut to English Collocations. Published in 2017, this book introduces 2000 of the most common collocations.

What are collocations? They're words that are often used together. For example:

• “take a shower” (instead of “do a shower”) 
• “make friends” (instead of “get friends”)
• “come to an end” (instead of “reach an end”)

Knowing collocations makes you more fluent because they allow you to speak in blocks of words instead of individual words. So check out this book if you want to give your fluency a boost.

Oxford Word Skills

While Oxford Word Skills doesn’t directly help with fluency, we're mentioning it because it's one of the most highly-recommended vocabulary-learning resources available.

The three books each contain 2000 words that have been carefully selected for usefulness in real conversations. They also come with free activities that you can use for practice.

Other Textbooks

Finally, if you want a more complete learning experience, here are some textbooks that teach all four skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) but still have strong speaking exercises.

American English File

American English File takes learners from A1 to C1 level in American English. In addition to teaching vocabulary and grammar, each chapter has plenty of speaking exercises and pronunciation tips to help students speak confidently.

Cutting Edge

Cutting Edge is a British English textbook series that has students practice new vocabulary and grammar in context. Each lesson guides students toward achieving a specific communication goal.

Speakout

The Speakout series helps students develop all four language skills from A1 to C1. The books use plenty of authentic texts and photographs that will bring students out of a classroom and into the real world. 

Wrap-up 

At Engoo, we’ve helped thousands of students become fluent in English with our own “textbook.” Our lesson materials are completely free for everyone, even if you aren't a student with us.

• Our Conversation lessons will prepare you to talk about things like your favorite celebrities, countries you’d like to visit, and how often you exercise.
• Our Daily News lessons will get you talking about all sorts of topics, from health and tech to travel and sports.

These materials are great for self-study, but you’ll learn much more by studying them with one of our tutors. So sign up for a lesson today and give it a try!