In this video, Vicky talks about the difficulties she faced when she first moved away from Spain.

In the video, Vicky is asked about her experiences moving to the UK and if she had any problems communicating in English. 

Vicky admitted that she’d had problems when she first left Spain.

Vicky said:

I had to learn English.

We use the phrasal modal have to to talk about an obligation. This is something that you do because you don’t have a choice. In the present forms, there are two ways to talk about obligations: must and have to

Normally, we use must to talk about moral obligations, to talk about things you do because they are right and have to to talk about more practical obligations; things you do because of laws and rules or because something bad will happen if you don’t.

In past forms, we only use had to. There is no past form of must.

If you move to a new country and need to communicate with people there, you will probably need to learn the local language.

What do you think would be the best way to learn English if you were living in the UK?

What did Vicky do?

Vicky said:

What helped me the most was … sharing moments with my teammates.

The phrase ‘what helped me the most was’ is an example of a discourse marker or a phrase that you can use to organise your ideas. There’s a really good activity book for teachers that calls phrases like these conversation gambits.  Practicing using these phrases can make you sound more natural and fluent when you are speaking.

Look at these examples:

• The best thing was …
• The funny thing was …
• The scary thing was …
• The most important thing was …

Vicky said that going out and spending time with her teammates was the most helpful for her English and that she made progress over a year, little by little, until she found that she had learnt a lot and her English was much better.

When I talk to students, I always try to encourage them to find ways to improve their English outside the classroom. There are lots of things that you can do. For example, you can watch films and listen to music and podcasts, you can use online resources like this website or you could read books and magazines. However, for most people, it will also be important to find opportunities to practise speaking.

For Vicky, spending time with her teammates was the best way for her to practise using English and this really helped her learn. If you moved to the UK, unless you are an amazing footballer, you probably won’t be moving to join a team and won’t have teammates to practise speaking with. So what could you do?

Your turn

Share some advice for finding ways to practise speaking English in the comments at the bottom of this page.