<p>Hello,
I’m a nonnative speaker who would like to improve my oral English ability and communication skills by enrolling in Toastmasters.
Does it help? Is it worthwhile? How beneficial is it?
I’m hoping that those with Toastmaster experience can give some feedbacks on it.
Thanks!</p>
<p>yes it is a great way to improve your public speaking.</p>
<p>I’m not so sure that Toastmasters meets the need that you’ve expressed in your other posts.</p>
<p>Do you have a need to be a better public speaker? Or is your desire mainly to speak better conversationally?</p>
<p>My primary goal is to improve my conversational ability in order to be able to express myself fully, clearly, and easily, and stop feeling like I’m squeezed into a tin can the whole time during important conversations like interviews.</p>
<p>I’m assuming that any oral English program, whether its focus be on public speaking, story-telling, and so on, will help reinforce many other areas of oral communication. So I don’t care that much about Toastmasters’s main focus being on public speaking. But if there’s a better program more focused on conversation, I’m interested in hearing about it.</p>
<p>I’m not familiar with Toastmasters, but I did take public speaking from Communispond. A lot of the course was about preparing for a speech, about how to deliver a speech, about how to relate to the audience. These things sound pretty much off topic for you, though they certainly are good things. </p>
<p>I wish I could refer you to a specifically conversational program, maybe someone else can. </p>
<p>You can practice specifically for interviews. Ask someone to “interview” you, and practice as many times as you can or feel you need to. Ask your interviewer to use a variety of styles–friendly, aggressive, probing, etc. Try to make the practice realistic; don’t allow yourself a long time to make a response, since one of your goals presumably is to improve your response time. </p>
<p>Expect to make many mistakes on the way to experiencing overall improvement! :)</p>
<p>You might work with someone who wants to learn to speak your language. With you speaking only English and your other converser speaking y9our native language you may find your skills improving quickly.</p>
<p>I did this in France and had a four hour conversation in a bar with two Frenchmen who wanted to pick me up, just for sport I think or they wouldn’t have wasted four hours. They spoke in English and I in French. They may have been disappointed at the result, but I wasn’t.</p>