Reading & Listening & Writing. Will be speaking progressing?

[Ольга]

The question is: If I mostly read and listen, sometimes write something, but quite rarely speak, will be speaking progressing?
Can Reading & Listening & Writing improve my speaking or influence somehow? I am quite shy and I really don't like speaking.

[tarvos]

They can influence your speaking skill, but eventually you do have to speak. Sounds like you need to get over a few hang-ups and need to find a way to make speaking work if you want to become good at that.

[reineke]

Push. You need to push.

[leosmith]

Can Reading & Listening & Writing improve my speaking or influence somehow?

Yes, all skills reinforce each other. For example, reading improves vocabulary and grammar. And if you read out loud, it improves pronunciation. These things will in turn improve your conversation.

[Theodisce]

They can influence your speaking skill, but eventually you do have to speak. Sounds like you need to get over a few hang-ups and need to find a way to make speaking work if you want to become good at that.

Ditto. As Steve Kaufmann likes to put it: in order to speak well you have to speak a lot.

[Cavesa]

Yes, the other skills can improve speaking significantly. But you need to spend a lot of time on them. A lot.

Between my weak B2 French speaking and my solid C2 speaking, there were almost no speaking opportunities. There were hundreds of hours spent on the other activities, especially listening and reading. The usual "you need to speak in order to learn to speak" and other learning stereotypes got me to the very weak B2 after far too many years, so nothing to be excited about.

My writing was (and still is) significantly weaker and that is where a tutor was mcuh more useful, than with speaking. I wasn't improving my speaking during the last few months before the exam (almost no corrections, no noticeable improvement after the first meeting), I am grateful to the years of input for that. I would say writing may affect speaking, but I am not sure about the extent. On my own example, it is clear the gap between the two can be pretty wide. And my English is a proof of the same gap, just in the opposite sense, my writing is much better than my speaking. So, while there surely is some relation, I wouldn't say these two are likely to improve at the same speed or one to improve by doing the other that much.

Most people make the simple mistake of underestimating the amount of exposure (especially listening) needed, that is where most "you cannot improve just by watching tv" opinions come from, most people expressing them simply haven't really tried.

Talking to at least oneself of doing the exercises in a course out loud is very helpful, from my experience, even though I was doing nothing like that during my five years of huge French improvement and it still worked. If you have speaking opportunities, good for you. But I think the idea of speaking being impossible to improve without speaking to others for many hours is simply not true. Not having such opportunities should in no way become an excuse to give up.

[PeterMollenburg]

I absolutely agree with Cavesa.

It is only in the last couple of weeks that I have pushed my speaking like never before, but for the most part my French speaking has been pretty good, due to the fact I have read aloud, and shadow most of my course material (I also speak French to my daughter- to teach her). To consider I've been studying for years with literally a French conversation on average once every 2 or 3 months at most with another French speaker (rough guess), yet i'm able to hold a conversation at the B2/C1 level (according to some French native tutors) with an error here an error there.

So if you are reluctant to speak, at least read aloud at any chance you can while studying. That's what I have done. Still, I must add that my French speaking would be much more confident had I spoken earlier that I have chosen to do- but I didn't want to, and I do not regret that. And as Cavesa states, you need a massive amount of exposure to the language via the other avenues (particularly listening).

[neofight78]

They can influence your speaking skill, but eventually you do have to speak. Sounds like you need to get over a few hang-ups and need to find a way to make speaking work if you want to become good at that.

Others on this thread have given some ideas on how speaking might be improved via other activities. However, I like Tarvos, get the feeling there are some hang ups that need to be dealt with rather than avoided. Your question is not a neutral enquiry about methodology. It's hard to find a native with whom you can regularly speak, but you need to make it happen because it's what you need. Otherwise your problems will remain unresolved.

[norgeka]

.

[blaurebell]

I have made the experience that all these skills do a great deal to help with speaking, but they can't replace speaking altogether. Reading is great to gain vocabulary and keep it active. The more I read, the less I hunt for vocabulary when speaking. Listening helps to improve fluency because you get exposed to formulaic responses and common fill words, that simply start to tumble out of your mouth at some point when you hear them all the time. Writing is a great help to be able to produce spontaneous eloquent speech.

I started speaking English very late and got very little practice until I moved to England. My writing was far ahead of my speaking, but being immersed for 2 weeks was enough to go from halting speech to a rather fluent half-colloquial register. So basically, keep going with what you're doing, but at some point you will simply have to speak to improve. Since my English was already at a very good level when I arrived in England I had the feeling that my speaking wasn't progressing beyond this initial improvement in the first 2 weeks. The lack of progress frustrated me sometimes, since I felt that I couldn't trust myself with a more educated / sophisticated register, even though I could talk about complex subjects in general. The reason was simply that I hadn't written enough in this register and hadn't listened to enough lectures to feel entirely comfortable to use certain lower frequency vocabulary or expressions that are only used in academic contexts. At some point I actually surprised myself with rather elegant expressions in spoken language although I didn't even try to speak in this register at all! I think it took 2 years to get there too and the progress was so gradual that it was totally invisible. It just happened automatically from listening to many lectures and writing essays, and every now and then speaking in this register when I couldn't get around it. If I had actively tried to push myself further by only speaking in this register, I'm sure my progress would have been faster. So basically, you have to practice speaking to improve speaking, even though the other skills have an undeniable influence.

Here is a tip that you might find useful though: A few years ago I lost my ability to speak fluently in Spanish, because I hadn't used the language actively in a few years. You know what helped me to get my speaking fluency back? Duolingo timed practice! I'm not a big fan of Duolingo and only use it as an additional resource, but that specific feature is really great! Duolingo doesn't really allow for mistakes beyond typos so you have to produce correct language and the timed practice means that you have to produce it quickly, like in speech. It's still not quite natural, since I don't translate when I speak, but it's close enough. If you speak as you write the answers, it helps even more. Of course most answers that you have to produce for Duolingo are in your native language, so you will have to use a reverse tree to get the most practice: Instead of learning English from Russian, try the Russian for English speakers course and use the timed practice a lot. Be careful though, this course is only useful up to the last checkpoint: After that there are some mistakes and unnatural translations in the English and it also practices a lot of very useless vocabulary. It doesn't quite replace actual speaking practice, but you can use it to gain confidence. After a lot of timed practice I took an immersion course of 3h a day for 3 weeks, about 60h of speaking, and at the end of it my level of speaking was actually a little better than what I had lost a few years before.