This is the first post from a series of my articles devoted to finding speaking partner. If you want to know about my small experiment, then keep reading. I’ll be sharing my experience as I’m trying to find speaking partner in order to have regular speaking practice in English.

I’m really short on free time so it’s going to be quite challenging for me to find someone to have regular online conversations. However, I believe along with problems there are always solutions. It’s only a matter of how bad you want it, right?

Goal

That said,my goal for this week was to test Skype call an try too figure out:

• is it real to find partner  using Skype?
• What is the best strategy to do it?
• What are mistakes  to avoid?

The desired  outcome for me was to have at least 5 short conversations via Skype over this week. Interested?  Let’s dive into what happened 🙂

Strategy

The strategy was quite straightforward. I went to two well known websites about  IELTS preparation to find requests from other people looking for speaking partners. You probably know them very well: ielts-simon.com and ieltsbuddy.com.

I entered speaking section and immediately found a lot of people and their contacts. So, what I did next is I took their Skype contacts and found them in Skype. It was quite easy and took me 20-30 min. Let’s see the results by the end of this week

Results

Number of people contacted:

19

Number of people who accepted my request:

6

Number of people who replied to me in chat:

4

Number of conversations (per week)

1

The sad thing is that no-one was online at the time I suggested for group call. So I wasn’t able to join people together  using this approach. I wanted to give the opportunity to meet each other and find speaking partner.

However, there was a small success. I managed to have a small talk with one person. She were online and agreed to talk with me.

I wanted to make a record of our conversation and tried to set up my devices to do it. I still don’t have good software of recording group Skype Calls. As a result something went wrong and sound quality from other and was really bad (a lot of background noise and echo).

Conclusion and Lessons

Well , that’s better than nothing. Now I can s break down results and try to solve separate  problems:

• It is possible to find contacts of other people on the web, but response rate is quite low (around 20%)
• I need to figure it out how to find suitable time for other people and organize properly online meetings
• I need more people to involve
• I need to manage my own time more efficiency, because I wasn’t  able to be online as often as it needed

Plans for the next Week

• Invite more people
• Try to research and find some kind of tool to organize online group calls
• To be more time efficient

I hope you find this article of some help. Feel free to leave comments and share you thoughts. Don’t be too strict to me and my English. I know there’s  a lot of work to do!