3 Free Ways To Improve Your English Speaking Skills Online

The internet makes it easy to study English at home. You can practice reading with news articles, practice listening with podcasts, and practice writing on social media. 

But what about speaking? Can you practice speaking online?

The answer is, “Yes!” Here are three easy ways to improve your English speaking skills online.

1. Practice With Dialogues and Subtitles

This method is the best way to improve your speaking through self-study. To practice having conversations, you can use real dialogues with transcripts or subtitles. Luckily, these are available in most streaming services, like Netflix and Amazon Prime. 

While many learners use dialogues with subtitles to practice listening, you can use them to practice speaking as well. For example, let’s say you’re watching this video, in which a comedian interviews Bill Gates.

You can watch the video once or twice. Then, replay it and pause whenever the comedian finishes talking and then read out Bill Gates’ lines.

If you want to make this exercise more challenging, you can turn off the subtitles and try to remember Bill Gates’ part. This is a good way to see if you can use the vocabulary and grammar he used.

And for an even bigger challenge, don’t pause the video. Just mute it and try to speak at the same time as Bill Gates. This way, you’ll force yourself to speak English at a natural speed, which in turn will help you become more fluent.

2. Talk To Your Phone in English

These days, most phones come with a personal assistant app. Talking to them is a great free way to practice speaking English in your everyday life. 

On Apple devices, the personal assistant is called “Siri,” and on Android devices, it’s “Google Assistant.” If you say, “Hey Siri” or “OK Google” to your phone, they’ll ask what they can help you with.

As you may know, you can tell these personal assistants to do stuff for you. For example, you can ask them to set an alarm (“Set an alarm for 7am”) or open an app (“Open Facebook”). 

Talking to your personal assistant is a great way to check your pronunciation. After all, if you don’t pronounce something correctly, it won’t understand you!

In addition, you can ask these personal assistants lots of questions like: 

• “Do I need an umbrella today?”
• “What appointments do I have today?”
• “What’s seven divided by ten?” 
• “How do you spell ‘caterpillar’?”

For more things you can do with your personal assistant, check out this article for Siri and this one for Google Assistant. 

3. Brush Up Your Pronunciation

At the end of the day, good speaking requires good pronunciation. Did you know you can practice your pronunciation online?

For example, you can record yourself and have native speakers check your pronunciation on HiNative.

And if you’re uncomfortable with the idea of having strangers check your pronunciation, you can try ELSA Speak comes in handy. See how it works here:

In the paid version, it’ll also create a learning plan targeting your weaknesses, but you can also easily use the assessment to create a lesson plan of your own. For example, if the app notices that you confuse R’s and L’s, look up R and L minimal pair exercises online.

Or You Could Try Engoo!

At the end of the day, nothing beats talking to a real person! So we highly recommend giving 1-on-1 tutoring services like Engoo a try. We have thousands of tutors from over 100 countries, so you can improve your English speaking skills while virtually traveling the world.  

Test it out yourself with a free trial lesson!