I want to talk about my way to learn English firstly. Very often, I would do some reading and listen to VoA news. Sometimes, I would do some translation for my job. Honestly, my listening skills have been greatly promoted as a result of constant listenings to at least three pieces of news report in a day or two. And I don't have any problems in reading professional articles or any news. Though, there are still a lot of words that I am not familiar with, I can always have close guessings to grasp the general idea. Besides, I would watch American TV series or films as long as I have spare time. Gradually, I don't feel that hard to understand what the roles say even I don't look at the subtitles. 

My real headache is that I don't know how to improve my oral English. I really don't want to complain about my English teachers, but I have to. From the middle school to postgraduate school, I have to say, only the teacher in my postgraduate school speaks real American English and for others, maybe all Chinglish. When I was in college, I always did bad in listening and speaking. One embarassing situation was that I could't understand what others said and others couldn't understand what I said. Later, I realized that I didn't even grasp the right pronunciation and all the time I was so accustomed to my own way of speaking, thus it led to poor results. Then, I found a video for American pronunciation of each phonetic and followed to practice again and again. Yeah, my pronunciation was greatly improved and sounded more American. When I was free, I would find some materials to read loudly. Like some people, I also tried to recite some good episodes. But it was not that efficient. I also learned from others to imitate, while the process was really boring and tedious, and I felt it was not that effective,either. Just some days before, I bravely participated in a English speaking contest, I really had a very good performance, however, I was trapped in the question-answer part.  When I understood what the judge said, I started to conceive what I had to say and organize the words, while I was not good at it, so all messed up. Compared with those collegues graduated from overseas universities, I felt a big gap between they and me. So, I was overwhelmed again about the way to improve oral English. 

Of course, I know, it requires the English-speaking environment. But it was a little hard for me to find one. Like what I've mentioned before, speaking English like the natives do is one of my dreams, therefore I wouldn't stop. So, here I ask for your help, could you give me some good suggestions on how to speak English more flexibly?