Five Strategies to Help Advanced Students Perfect Their Speaking

Teaching students who are already advanced but want to improve their speaking (even more!) is not easy. 

What can we do besides correcting their mistakes? And what advice can we leave in their lesson notes if their English already seems perfect?

Here are five strategies you can recommend that’ll help these ambitious students take their speaking to the next level.

1. Identify Role Models

First, advise the student to think about what kind of “advanced English” they want to speak. An easy way to do this is to pick some role models. For example:

• If they want to sound more persuasive, they can watch TED talks and find some speakers they like.
• If they want to be more humorous in English, they can regularly follow a stand-up comedian.
• If they want to sound more academic, they can listen to online university lectures and find a professor who speaks English the way they want to. 

Advise them to observe the vocabulary, expressions, and sentence patterns their role models use. Then encourage them to practice using these next time they book a lesson with you!

2. Expand Their Range

Advanced learners should be capable of talking about a wide range of topics. However, their fluency will still drop when they talk about stuff they’re not that familiar with. If you notice this happening with a student, encourage them to work on expanding their conversational range even more.

They can do this through Daily News. For example, if tech is not something they don’t talk about often, they can read news articles in our “Science & Technology” category and discuss them with us.

Advise them to do this for a week (or until they feel comfortable discussing this topic), and then encourage them to repeat this process for all other categories they don’t feel comfortable talking about. 

Once they’ve done this, they’ll be familiar with a lot more vocabulary needed to talk about any topic that comes their way!

3. Think More Deeply

Sometimes higher-level students want to know if there’s some way they can learn how to speak for longer durations. The key to this is realizing that speaking at great length doesn’t mean blabbering on and on. It requires having more complex thoughts.

Pearson’s Global Scale of English (GSE) recommends advanced students develop the ability to:

• “Speculate about the causes of an issue or problem”
• “Precisely express the potential consequences of actions or events”
• “Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of various options”

In other words, advanced students need to “go deeper.”  They can’t just say that something happened. They should also try to explain why it happened, what results could come of it, and what can be done about it. 

For example, let’s say a student is talking about a lack of sleep. Encourage them to follow Pearson’s advice and try to:

• Guess what might be the reasons for their lack of sleep.
• Talk about the results of their lack of sleep.
• Suggest ways this can be solved, while thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of each solution.

In other words, they shouldn’t just stop at how much sleep they get every day. If they need help thinking more deeply about certain topics, they can search Daily News for related articles and see what they discuss. 

You can also suggest they learn more academic vocabulary and relevant expressions that’ll help them structure these deeper thoughts.

4. Ask Questions

Advanced English conversation isn’t just about being able to have a conversation. It’s also about being able to lead a conversation. 

As a fellow tutor shared, “My advanced students rarely ask questions. They rely on me to come up with all the questions. At lower levels, this is okay, but advanced students should understand that conversations are a two-way street.”

This view is supported by various teaching frameworks. For example: 

• Pearson’s Global Scale of English lists “Can ask detailed questions in discussions” as an advanced skill. 
• The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) agrees, saying “Speakers at the Advanced level engage in conversation in a clearly participatory manner.”

In other words, advanced learners shouldn’t only be following the other person’s lead by answering their questions. 

So encourage them to ask their own questions next time they book a lesson. At the very least, they should know these basic questions like the back of their hand.

5. Write More

According to the ACTFL, highly advanced students should be able to “speak succinctly. At this level, oral discourse typically resembles written discourse.” In other words, your advanced learners should aim for their spoken English to:

• Be short and to the point. 
• Sound more like written English.

How does writing help with speaking? Well, writing gives learners more time to think about how they want to say something. They’ll spend more time carefully choosing the right words and even changing their wording. 

This process allows them to reach greater clarity than they would if they were speaking. And the more they write, the more practice they’ll get expressing themselves clearly, which in turn helps them speak more succinctly.

As an additional benefit of writing, you can also point out that seeing something in writing makes it easier for us as tutors to give detailed feedback. After all, it’s a lot easier to miss things when we’re listening. 

But when a piece of writing is put before us, we can swiftly identify unnecessary words, suggest clearer phrasing and smoother transitions, and pick up on other things that would be difficult to notice in speaking.

So let’s advise our advanced students to write more to speak better!

📌 Takeaways

To sum up, here’s some advice to help your advanced students take their English to greater heights:

1. Identify role models
2. Expand conversational range
3. Think more deeply
4. Ask more questions
5. Write more

Happy tutoring!