Yes, in a high-pressure, stressful situation, it will be harder to find your words when speaking in English.

In a way, you should think of how you perform in English when speaking in these stressful situations as your base level.

Watch the full video here:

What you need to overcome is your fear of actually speaking English. The more you get into high-pressure situations, the more you’re going to learn to deal with them. The less you’re going to get stressed, the less you will panic.

One of the big mistakes that people make when learning English is learning in comfortable situations. Things like, for example, language exchange conversations or talking with a trained teacher. You become very comfortable in that situation and there’s no stress involved.

Then when you go out in the real world, doing real things, stress is applied because it’s not comfortable anymore and your performance ability drops to almost nothing. You suddenly think “oh my god I’m no good” but actually it’s that you learned in a situation that’s kind of like a game on cheat mode when you’re practising.

So what you need to do is stop learning in comfortable situations and learn in high-pressure, stressful situations instead.

If you need some help in doing this, you can start with the one-hour free training that I created. You’ll learn the 5 key changes my best clients make to improve their English as higher-level English learners. You can go to this link if this interests you.

Hope that helps.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook