Improve Your English Speaking Skills with Emphasis and Vocal Variety

In English, we have an expression, “It’s not what you say but how you say it.” 

In other words, not only are the words you choose important – along with accurate grammatical structures – but also the way you use your voice to express yourself is important.

Your voice can carry meaning. It can express emotion and depth. Doing so requires vocal variety – the ability to volume, pitch, and tone, for example, to add variation to your voice.

In this Confident English lesson, you’ll learn 3 ways to add emphasis when speaking English for improved vocal variety.

👉 Improve Your English Speaking Skills with Emphasis and Vocal Variety

Small Talk About Travel, Vacations, and Holidays in English

When you get back into your daily work routine after a holiday season, what are the best small talk questions you can use to reconnect with your colleagues?

Or when your coworker is back from a long weekend getaway, what are the best questions to ask for friendly small talk conversations in English?

“Is it polite to ask how was someone’s holiday? Is it a superficial question? Is it okay to be curious about someone’s long weekend and ask about it?”

These are questions one of my students recently asked. You might be curious too. 

In this Confident English lesson, you’ll learn how to have successful small talk about travel, vacations, and holidays. 

👉 Small Talk About Travel, Vacations, and Holidays in English

4 Steps to Find Flow & Enjoy Your English Practice

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” — Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

According to positive psychology, you’re in flow when you are absorbed in an activity. You have a feeling of energized focus, complete involvement, and enjoyment of the process.

And it’s when we’re at our happiest.

In this lesson, you’ll get 4 practical steps to find flow so you enjoy your English learning practice. 

👉 4 Steps to Find Flow & Enjoy Your English Practice

18 Phrasal Verbs to Express Ideas in English

Idea-generation conversations in English are full of phrasal verbs – those idiomatic phrases that include a verb and adverb or a preposition. 

To easily learn and remember new phrasal verbs, I recommend using a theme – such as phrasal verbs to express ideas in English. 

Doing so highlights similarities, helps to make connections between the phrasal verbs, and makes them relevant to your daily life and conversations.

In this Confident English lesson, we’ll explore three key phases in idea activation and expression. Along the way, you’ll learn 18 essential phrasal verbs to express ideas in English.

👉 18 Phrasal Verbs to Express Ideas in English

21 Common English Words & Phrases on Time Management [from Laura Vanderkam’s TED Talk]

There are many ways to boost your English vocabulary. And in this Confident English today, I want to share one of my favorites. And most effective.

When I help students build vocabulary, I ask them to select a TED Talk or podcast on a topic they enjoy. 

Then we explore it in-depth. We highlight all the new vocabulary – idioms, collocations, phrasal verbs, and more. 

We listen carefully to how the speaker uses the words, using context clues to understand. 

From there we work out the meaning and create our own example sentences. I do this so my students can see how to use those words in their own lives and in their own English conversations. 

👉 21 Common English Words & Phrases on Time Management [from Laura Vanderkam’s TED Talk]