School 21, set up by Tony Blair's former adviser Peter Hyman, has a curriculum that focuses on developing speaking skills.
The mechanism is based on developing speaking skills in lexico-grammatical and semantic expansion of verbal information and intersemiotic translation of extralinguistic information into speech register.
We have now embarked on an exciting project with Cambridge University, working with world expert Neil Mercer, backed by an Education Endowment Foundation grant to develop the speaking skills of all children.
The Open Society Foundation, which is making the offer and is financed by the billionaire George Soros, announced last week that it hoped to help students develop public speaking skills and to engage them in policy issues.
The woman running the course explained that membership helps you develop public speaking skills, both for prepared talks and impromptu presentations.
She also encourages students to volunteer to give presentations to lay audiences at schools and at local organizations (for example, talking about research being done on a disease to a support group) to help them develop their speaking skills and minimize their nervousness.
Toastmasters International, you may know, is an organization founded by Ralph C. Smedley in 1924, to help California men develop their speaking skills.
Even more, by discussing what they see in story books, children ask questions -which also helps develop their speaking skills, a key component of literacy.
There are clubs all over the world and for very little money you can develop outstanding speaking skills in a helpful, friendly atmosphere.
One way I've developed speaking and listening skills is to have string debates.
