Shadowing practice: 5 Smart Ways to Improve your English Speaking Skills

This clip is a British tutor speaking straight to camera, the kind of steady, clearly enunciated delivery that makes for solid british english pronunciation practice. He opens with "Listen, do you feel like you're not making progress with your spoken English?" before naming the real subject: getting unstuck from a plateaued IELTS speaking test band score.

It sits at B1 and moves at 160 words per minute, quick enough that you cannot coast through it on autopilot. That pace is exactly what makes it useful for english speaking practice: you are forced to keep up with a real teaching voice rather than a slowed down exercise recording.

Three moments here are worth repeating out loud more than once. The opening question carries a falling, concerned intonation you can copy directly: "Listen, do you feel like you're not making progress with your spoken English?" Two lines later he drops into a casual aside, "Right, okie dokie, let's begin," a spoken filler pair you will not find written anywhere, useful for shadow this line practice on informal transitions.

• "Listen, do you feel like you're not making progress with your spoken English?": a long question held on one breath, worth reading aloud for the rhythm alone.
• "it's like driving a Ferrari, it's great but": part of a student's own metaphor for thinking in English, note how the stress lands on "Ferrari" and "great."
• "then when I speak it's like a car crash": the second half of that same metaphor, flat and fast, a good contrast in pace against the line before it.
• "Right, okie dokie, let's begin": a spoken transition filler, casual and quick, nothing like how it would look written down.

Treat this as a listening and repeating exercise built around single lines, not the whole minute at once. The teaching register here, direct address, rhetorical questions, short pauses for effect, is close to what an actual IELTS speaking examiner sounds like, so matching it is not wasted effort.

• Start with line 2, "Listen, do you feel like you're not making progress with your spoken English?" Play it once, then say it back without looking, matching the falling tone on "progress."
• Move to the Ferrari and car crash pair. Say "it's like driving a Ferrari, it's great but" and "then when I speak it's like a car crash" back to back until the switch in pace between the two feels natural in your own mouth.
• Drill "Right, okie dokie, let's begin" on its own. It is short, it is casual, and it is a good test of whether you can pronounce english words the way a native speaker actually runs them together rather than the way they are spelled.
• Once single lines feel solid, string lines 2 through 22 together and speak along with the full stretch, aiming to keep up with the 160 words per minute pace rather than lag behind it.
• Repeat the set daily rather than once. Five minutes of daily practice on this same short stretch will do more for your fluency than a single long session with a new clip each time.