By Olga Smith

In this blog post, I will outline a very important area of elocution lessons: techniques for developing fluent and connected English speech. There are three main skills you need to master in order to speak fluent English:

Contractions
"Throwing away" skill, an expression used by actors.
Connected speech patterns or liaisons

1) In good fluent speech the particle “not”, verbs “to be” (“am, is, are”), “to have” (“has, had”), “will” and “would” are shortened. The shortened version of a word is called a contraction. It’s important to use contractions if you would like to sound fluent, natural and more like a native speaker of English. Contractions are not usually used in written English except in dialogues and in informal writing.
There are several types of contractions. Here are examples from our book Get Rid of your Accent for Business and our app Business English Speech, a contraction of the verb “will” becomes a contraction ”ll” :

“You’ll need to find a better way to deal with your boss.”

If you do not use contractions in your speech, you will not sound like an advanced English speaker.

2) In natural speech, it’s important not to emphasize or stress too many words in a phrase or sentence. As a general rule, English tend to pick out the words which convey the meaning and lean on them, giving them a little more vocal energy. The rest of the words, English “throwaway”, an expression used by actors. This often means neutralising vowels, increasing the pace and diminishing the volume. In other words, “throwing away” means these unimportant words are not given the same length and vocal energy. “Throwing away” is a skill and it takes time and effort to master it. We deal extensively with this skill in our book Get rid of your Accent Part Two, Advanced Level and in our app Fluent English Speech. Here is an example of “throwaway words” which are underlined:
”At the end of the day, Linda was right about that.”

As you can see from this example, unimportant words are often articles, prepositions and verbs “to be", etc. To sound fluent connect prepositions and articles to the main word and pronounce them as one word.

3)The English tend to speak in phrases, often linking the words together. To sound fluent in English, liaise words that belong together in a phrase gliding from one word to another, almost pronouncing them as one word. How to liaise? It is very simple, connect the last sound of the first word with the first sound of the next word. In our book Get rid of your Accent Part Two, Advanced Level and in our app Fluent English Speech we outline several types of liaisons that you need to master to sound fluent.
Below is an example of one:
Liaise preposition to the following word: ”in addition, from London, in town, from home, in context

In our elocution lessons, we teach students all these skills:

contractions
which words they need to “throw away”
how to connect words in a phrase or sentence
what to stress in a phrase or sentence

We have also published a video course with elocution lessons to master fluency. In conclusion, I want to stress the importance of connecting words in English speech. Quite a few of our students were under the impression that separating words in a phrase or sentence makes their speech more clear which is wrong. In order to develop clear and crisp English speech, you need to work on phrase and sentence stress and articulation and at the same time linking words.

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