This will improve your speaking skills for the CELPIP

Hey, my friend, if you've been wondering, like, what is the best way that I can go about improving my speaking skills, then you need to listen to this episode because, well, I'm going to be answering that question.

And I'm also going to be answering the question that a reader passed on to me about how long you need to be studying, like consistently studying day by day in order to obtain the score that you need on the CELPIP exam.

If you if you've been wondering that, then please stick around and listen to today's episode because I am going to be answering those questions today.

Hi, I'm Aaron.

Welcome to the Speak English Fearlessly Podcast.

This is the podcast where motivated English learners just like you learn how to speak English fearlessly and learn practical tips and strategies to conquer the CELPIP exam.

On Saturday, I led a Celebration of Life service.

Or if you're not sure what a Celebration of life is, it's kind of like a memorial service for someone who has passed away.

And if you're a new listener to my podcast, I have a full time day job from Monday to Friday as a chaplain for senior citizens.

Now, most of the time, I absolutely love my job.

I get to meet so many interesting people and build relationships with them and journey with them through the ups and downs of their lives.

It's those often close and deep relationships that leads to the part that I don't like about my job when one of my residents passes away.

Sometimes when a resident dies, the family asks me to help them with the memorial or Celebration of Life service.

These services are the hardest part of what I do, and this last weekend I had the opportunity to lead one.

Oh man, I was so nervous.

In fact, that's kind of normal for me.

I usually get nervous when I know I need to speak in front of a large group of people, like during a chapel service or a memorial service like the one I did last Saturday.

But memorial services are, for me, next level difficult.

It's where family and friends come together to remember their loved one, which feels like a very, very important occasion for me.

I want the service to be meaningful for them and I want it to be in some way comforting.

In short, I just want to do my best to do a great job for them.

A Celebration of Life or memorial service is challenging for me because I often don't know a lot of the people who will be there, like extended family and friends, and this service was no exception to that.

The room had a lot of people that I had never met before and boy did it feel hard to get started.

As we sang a few hymns together, I struggled to find the right notes.

This was made worse because I happened to be standing pretty close to one of the speakers, and my microphone seemed to be picking up, well, at least to my ears, every single little note mistake that I made.

Oh, that first song was so hard, and it seemed like somehow way higher than what I remember it being.

I was struggling to hit some of those notes, and it got so bad, there were a few times that I just had to pull the mic away from my mouth so that it wouldn't pick up the mistakes that I knew I was making.

And then once we got through the songs, came the most important part, when I would read the eulogy.

And if you're not sure what a eulogy is, you can think of it as kind of like trying to tell some of the story of the person who passed away, highlighting the good things you know or learned about them from talking with their friends or family, or from your own experience of knowing them yourself.

Well, I was so nervous as I began to share that my voice felt all shaky and I struggled to breathe normally, which made it harder for me to get each sentence out correctly.

Man, those first five minutes were so hard.

And I realized something as I stood there.

Thankfully, it had been a long time since I had been asked to lead a celebration of life service.

The last one was over a year or so ago.

And that's a good thing.

It means we haven't had many people pass away in that time.

But I didn't like feeling that sense of being rusty or out of practice.

What's crazy is that I had been rehearsing and reading through my notes for days before the memorial service.

I knew what I needed to talk about, and I knew the order of service.

I knew what to expect, but I still struggled at the start.

Thankfully, I warmed up as I went along, and my nerves calmed and I started to feel way more comfortable with the room.

And most important of all, I know that God helped me through, and the service turned out really well.

But here's what this experience showed me that I think might help you, too.

Notes on a page are one thing, and I had five pages of notes.

But speaking those notes for and with others is another thing altogether.

All my study and preparation helped me know what I would speak about.

But something happens when you're actually in the moment and using the words you plan to say.

Your words change as you get a feel for the room.

Your words change as you feed off of what other people say, and they change as you make mistakes or say something differently than what you had thought you would say.

Yeah, there's something powerful about connecting with others that no amount of notes or study or rehearsing can prepare you 100% for.

And if you're learning English or preparing for the CELPIP exam, this is especially true for you too.

Like in my experience last weekend with the memorial service, I knew my notes well.

I'd spend hours preparing and practicing them.

But but so much changes when you actually use what you've been preparing with real people.

And that's the most powerful thing that you can be doing for your English and CELPIP skills today.

Lean into using your English by getting involved in the English conversations happening all around you.

It's that connecting that helps you become a better speaker.

It's not more time spent with your notes.

It's not more time trying to read books and books about getting ready for the exam.

It's not more time trying to consume more courses.

It's not about spending more time trying to consume more webinars on the Celpip YouTube channel.

While all those things help, they can't replace what happens when you actually get out there and use your English with real people.

Earlier this week I had an interesting question come in on one of my posts on LinkedIn.

A reader asked me, with consistent daily practice, how much progress do you usually see in, say, one or two months when someone's preparing for the SOPIP exam?

I know results vary, but are there any rough benchmarks or patterns that you've noticed?

I think that's a great question, and I think there's a lot of misunderstanding around what the CELPIP exam actually measures and what preparing for the CELPIP exam can actually do for you.

I think a lot of people have the idea that the CELPIP exam works the same way as your exams or your tests did when you were in high school or in university, where if you put in lots of hours of study and prepare, preparation and practice, you had a very good chance of scoring high on the exam.

There is a definite connection between studying hard and usually scoring well, but the CELPIP is a little bit different than that.

The CELPIP exam measures your current level of English.

Here's what I mean by that.

If you are a lower intermediate level English speaker, you're likely going to score a seven every single time you take the test.

Even if you take the test 10 times and your current level of English is still lower intermediate, you're probably always going to score around a seven no matter how hard you study for the exam.

You see, a CELPIP prep course is designed to help you know what to expect on the exam.

It's designed to help you to be ready for the exam.

Like to not be surprised by the style of questions that you're going to face.

For example, that's what they're built for.

That's what they're designed to help you to do to take the exam.

Well, they are not designed to boost your fluency level or your skill level in English.

I mean, you will improve some for sure, but it's not going to be in the way that you're hoping it will.

By spending hours and hours of preparing for the exam, you're just not going to be able to take a pre intermediate level of English and transform it into a proficient or an advanced level in just a few weeks or just a few months of study.

That's just not going to happen.

But unfortunately a lot of people think that that's what will happen.

You know what I mean?

Like they think that by enrolling in a CELPIP prep course, they're going to somehow transform their English skills to a way higher level than what they currently have, which is really unfair for you.

You're expecting way too much from yourself that the course is not designed to do.

What you should expect from the course from a CELPIP prep course is that it will help you to know what is going to happen in each section of the exam.

And what a good CELPIP prep course will also do is to help you simulate the kinds of questions that you're going to face and provide you with helpful feedback that will strengthen your answers for each, for example, of the speaking questions or each of the writing questions that you'll face.

And a strong CELPIP prep course will also help you build confidence, especially for speaking and writing skills, because they should be giving you feedback from an experienced test trainer and English teacher who can help you improve your answers and learn helpful strategies to strengthen your responses.

But hear me say this again.

A CELPIP prep course won't move you from a 7 to a 10.

Only likely years of study and practice will do that for you.

Now, how long should you commit to preparing for the exam?

That's another common question, and that's actually part of the question that was asked today.

How long should I be practicing before I take the exam?

And this is something that I found.

Students who take two to three months to get ready for the exam give themselves enough time to experience all the different kinds of questions that the exam will throw your way.

Some people need much less than that and other people need a little bit more.

But two to three months on average is what I've seen test takers or test preppers need.

All right, have you noticed your progress towards your self up goals this week?

Like, have you taken the time to actually see how far you've come so far?

If you haven't, this is the time that we're going to do it together.

Let's take a moment and pay attention to how far we've come or what we've accomplished in the past week.

Because doing this is such an important thing to practice.

We're so good at noticing what we've done wrong.

We're so good at noticing how far we have left to go and how far away achieving our goals can sometimes feel that we fail to notice how far we've actually come and how much we've grown or how much we've used our English in the week.

We need to notice those things because like I said a moment ago, and I've said this in other podcast episodes, we are experts at noticing our mistakes.

Our shortcomings are how far we need to be going and how far away that seems to be that we don't pay attention to the good things that we are achieving.

So that's the idea of this little mini section.

I want to help you notice what you're doing well, and to do that, all I'm going to ask you to do is to grab a pen and a journal.

And if you're driving right now, just do this in your mind.

Okay?

But if you can, I really suggest that when you get to a place where you can write, remember to do this activity with me.

It will encourage you.

It will hopefully give you a more positive outlook on what you're doing and how you are growing with your English skills.

All right, so let's get started.

The first thing that I want to challenge you to write about and when I say to write about, I'm not saying that you have to write a book.

Let's just use a few simple bullet point sentences.

The first thing that I want you to notice is what you did this week.

Maybe make a header in your journal what I did this week in English, if you want, definitely write it in English.

But what I'm trying to get you to write about is the things that you accomplished this week using English.

Like I said a moment ago, can you write a few bullet point accomplishments that you achieved this week?

Try your best to think about what you've done, how those English conversations at work went.

Were you able to engage in a few Were you able to answer the phone in English?

Were you able to participate in a meeting that was only in English?

Did you sit down with somebody at coffee time or break time or lunchtime and have a conversation in English?

All of those things count.

Write them down.

Take note of your accomplishments in English using English during this week.

Alright?

Number two, what will you do this week?

Create a few bullet point plans of how you'll use your English skills this week, what you will do, where you will do it and when.

Make a plan.

And finally, number three, write one idea that you would like to try next week that is outside of your English comfort zone.

That's outside of your comfort zone in general.

Because what I think you'll find is the more you step out of your comfort zone, the more you're going to learn, the more risks you take, the more chances you give yourself to grow and develop your English skills.

So those three things again.

Number one, take a few minutes to notice what you did, what you accomplished using your English skills in the past week.

Number two, what will you be doing this week to help you to use your English skills?

Write that down and finally think outside of the box.

What is one innovative idea or one outside of your comfort zone thing that you can attempt in the week to come that will help you to work on your English?

Well, my friend, thank you so much for listening to today's episode of the Speak English Fearlessly podcast.

I hope that it has been helpful and encouraging for you and that you will come back and join me again next week.

Bye Bye.