This video guide provides comprehensive instruction on achieving a high score on the IELTS speaking test. It contrasts the strategies of high-scoring (band 7-9) and low-scoring (band 5-6.5) candidates, highlighting common mistakes like memorized answers and overly formal speech. The guide emphasizes natural, fluent communication over complex vocabulary or grammar structures, advocating for simple, accurate responses tailored to each part of the test. Specific examples of successful and unsuccessful responses are analyzed, and a practical, step-by-step practice method is outlined to improve performance. Finally, a mock test with a student demonstrates the effectiveness of the techniques.

IELTS Speaking Mastery Guide

Quiz

Instructions: Answer each question in 2-3 sentences.

1. In Part 1 of the IELTS Speaking test, what is the primary focus of your responses beyond simply answering the question?
2. What is a common mistake average students make when responding to bullet points in Part 2 of the Speaking test?
3. According to the source, how do Band 7, 8, and 9 students use bullet points in Part 2?
4. Why does the source discourage using a rigid “past, present, future” template in Part 2 of the speaking test?
5. In Part 3 of the Speaking test, what does the examiner use increasingly difficult questions to determine?
6. According to the source, why is giving a very short answer in Part 1 considered a problem?
7. What is meant by “robotic delivery” and why is it detrimental to your speaking score?
8. What is the danger of trying to impress the examiner by using overly complex vocabulary?
9. What is the main thing to focus on in Part 1 of the speaking exam beyond having great ideas?
10. According to the source, why is memorizing answers for the speaking test a bad strategy?

Quiz Answer Key

1. The primary focus should be on providing an explanation, an example, or additional detail to develop the answer naturally, rather than just giving a minimal one-sentence response. It is more like having a normal conversation.
2. Average students often rigidly stick to the bullet points, addressing each one separately without connecting them or expanding on the main topic, leading to short, disjointed answers and running out of things to say.
3. Band 7, 8, and 9 students use bullet points as guides to help them speak naturally. They refer to them when appropriate to aid their flow of ideas but do not feel obligated to directly address each point in order.
4. The “past, present, future” template can lead to unnatural and overly complicated answers, as it is not how people typically structure responses in everyday conversations. It also may not apply to the question at all.
5. In Part 3, increasingly difficult questions are used to distinguish between the higher band levels. These more challenging questions determine if you can cope with more complex topics and grammar structures.
6. Giving a very short answer does not provide the examiner with enough information to evaluate your language abilities. This can lead to follow-up questions that create added stress.
7. “Robotic delivery” is speaking in an overly formal and unnatural way, as if reading from a script. This decreases fluency and can lead to mistakes in grammar and pronunciation due to stress.
8. Focusing solely on using impressive vocabulary can cause you to ignore the overall coherence of your answer. It is important to focus on answering the question naturally.
9. The primary thing to focus on in Part 1 is answering questions naturally and honestly. It is about you and your life.
10. Memorizing answers can affect coherence and can signal to the examiner that your speaking ability is not natural. Examiners can then ask more difficult questions that test real speaking ability.

Essay Questions

Instructions: Write a full essay response addressing the following prompts.

1. Discuss the differences in approach between lower-level and higher-level students in Part 2 of the IELTS speaking test, based on the provided source material. What specific strategies do higher-level students employ to achieve fluency and coherence?
2. Analyze the common mistakes made by IELTS test takers in the speaking section, as outlined in the source. What are the underlying reasons for these mistakes, and how can students effectively avoid them?
3. Describe how the use of natural language and personal experience can lead to a higher score in the IELTS speaking test. How can a student balance this with the need to show a range of vocabulary and grammar?
4. Discuss the importance of topic-specific vocabulary in the IELTS speaking test. How does the ability to use simple, topic-specific language contribute to a higher score compared to relying on complex, but generic, vocabulary?
5. Explore how understanding the testing methods and underlying purposes of the IELTS speaking test can help students avoid common pitfalls and traps. How does an understanding of these purposes help students become more effective test-takers?

Glossary of Key Terms

Fluency: The ability to speak smoothly and easily, without unnatural pauses or hesitations.

Coherence: The quality of being logical and consistent, where ideas are clearly connected and the response makes sense as a whole.

Monologue: A long speech by one person, as opposed to a dialogue between two or more.

Bullet Points: Items in a list, often used as prompts to guide the speaker in Part 2 of the IELTS test.

Topic Specific Vocabulary: Words and phrases that are related to a particular subject or area.

Robotic Delivery: Speaking in a stiff, unnatural, or overly formal way, like a robot.

Range (Grammar/Vocabulary): The variety and scope of grammatical structures and vocabulary the test-taker uses.

Idiom: A phrase or expression whose meaning cannot be understood from the literal meaning of the individual words (e.g., “bite the bullet”).

Collocation: Words that often occur together or in a specific sequence.

Intonation: The rise and fall of the voice in speaking, which can convey meaning and emotions.

IELTS Speaking Mastery

Okay, here is a detailed briefing document summarizing the key themes and ideas from the provided text:

Briefing Document: IELTS Speaking Test Analysis

Introduction

This document analyzes a transcript of a detailed video discussing strategies for improving performance on the IELTS speaking test. The video covers common mistakes, best practices, and specific techniques for all three parts of the speaking test. It also provides advice on using vocabulary effectively, and avoiding common traps. The target audience is test takers who are looking to improve their band scores, especially those aiming for band 7 or higher.

Main Themes and Ideas

1. Natural Communication is Key:

• The overarching theme is that the IELTS speaking test is a test of communication, not rote memorization or showcasing complex language. The video stresses the importance of sounding natural and conversational, as if talking to a friend or colleague.
• Quote: “You’re not going to speak in that overly formal overly academic robotic way because that’s not how you would speak to someone like imagine if if Justin and I were having a meeting and I said like how is thing how how is your weekend my weekend was good I went like he wouldn’t really talk like that.”

1. Avoiding Common Mistakes:

• The video identifies several common mistakes that lower scores:
• Too short answers in Part 1, not providing enough information or context.
• Quote: “if you give a really really really short answer to a question um and they’re going to be they might ask you follow-up questions like why or can you you know asking you to develop your answer a little bit more that might put you off it might be like oh is am I am I doing something wrong it’ll cause extra stress”
• Robotic delivery, stemming from stress or a misconception that the test requires formal, academic language.
• Trying to impress the examiner with overly complex vocabulary, idioms, or grammar, instead of focusing on answering the question clearly and naturally.
• Memorized answers that do not address the specific question and that examiners can easily identify, leading to more difficult follow-up questions.
• Rigidly sticking to bullet points in Part 2, instead of using them as a guide to naturally develop a topic, and running out of things to say.
• Quote: “they rigidly stick to bullet points so it’s important that you understand the bullet points there are there to help you they’re not there to hinder you”Not answering the question, focusing on vocabulary instead of coherence.
• Quote: “when you’re focusing just on vocabulary then you’re not really focusing on being coherent and answering the question”

1. Part-Specific Strategies:

• Part 1: Answer questions directly, then add brief explanations, examples or details. The goal is not to use a set number of sentences or words, but to sound like a “normal human being.”
• Part 2: Focus on the main topic, rather than rigidly sticking to bullet points. The bullet points are there to help guide, not hinder. Avoid memorized structures or templates. Speaking should sound natural and flow easily.
• Quote: “by just focusing on the main topic this gives you a lot more freedom to speak fluently and naturally rather than trying to do bullet point 1 2 3 4 so again it sounds like a natural conversation”
• Part 3: Expect more challenging questions that require a broader range of grammar and vocabulary. Examiners ask more difficult questions to differentiate higher-scoring students. Students should not refuse to answer difficult questions or give very short answers. It’s important to use different tenses or grammar structures naturally.

1. Best Practices & Techniques:

• Develop answers naturally: Expand beyond simple, one-sentence responses, adding explanations and examples to provide depth.
• Focus on the question: Ensure the answer directly relates to the question asked.
• Natural Fluency: Do not feel pressure to speak without pausing, as it is okay to take a moment to think. Fluency is about avoiding unnatural or lengthy pauses.
• Quote: “fluency does not mean speaking without pausing ever you do need to think all right um it is better to think for a couple of seconds and then give your answer than to immediately begin talking and then get lost and you know uh uh uh”
• Simplicity is Key: Aim for clear, accurate, and simple language rather than complex constructions.
• Use the bullet points naturally: Use them as guides when appropriate, and not by trying to follow them strictly.
• Do not focus on idea generation: The speaking test is about you and your experiences, it is about speaking truthfully, rather than trying to generate an ‘idea’.
• Honesty: The questions are about you, talk honestly about your own experience, which is much easier and natural than trying to fabricate an answer.
• Quote: “these are about me there are questions they’re asking about me they’re when you are in the test they’re asking about you so just ask them naturally or answer them naturally and that is going to help your fluency”

1. Vocabulary and Idioms

• Topic Specific Vocabulary: Use vocabulary that is specific to the topic, as it is more effective than simply using very complex words that aren’t appropriate.
• Avoid Overuse of Idioms: Don’t force idioms into every answer. It’s better to use them naturally and accurately and not to over use them. The goal is to use idiomatic language, which means natural and correct English, and while it includes idioms, it isn’t only about them.
• Quote: “the definition of idiomatic is containing Expressions that are natural and correct”

1. Importance of Practice and Feedback

• Self-Analysis: Students should record themselves, transcribe their answers, and analyze their performance based on the official IELTS marking criteria. Pay special attention to mistakes in grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation that you are unaware of during the test.
• Practice with simple answers: Prioritise simple ideas to improve fluency.
• Focus on accuracy: Prioritise grammar accuracy. 50% of sentences must have zero grammatical errors for band 7 or above.
• Correct pronunciation: Focus on clarity rather than a particular accent.

1. Avoiding Traps

• Unusual Questions: Examiners will ask unusual questions to identify memorized answers.
• Difficult Questions: The examiner will ask more difficult questions to differentiate band levels. Attempt to answer even if you don’t know the topic.
• Topic-Specific Vocabulary: Examiners will test your vocabulary by asking a range of different topics, testing your topic specific vocabulary and your range of vocabulary.
• Cheating: Avoid memorizing answers or focusing only on very complex grammar.

1. Case Study: Priyanka

• The video uses the story of Priyanka, who improved from band 6 to band 8 in two weeks by focusing on four key things:
• Using simple ideas to improve her fluency,
• Using simple grammar tenses to increase accuracy.
• Not worrying about complex vocabulary or a perfect accent.
• Quote: “if you’re trying to use complex ideas in the speaking test you’re making your life 10 times more difficult for no gain at all.”

1. Key Takeaway: The Catch Me If You Can Secret

• The video draws an analogy from the movie Catch Me If You Can, suggesting that students shouldn’t try to “cheat” by memorizing answers. Instead, they should focus on being genuinely proficient in English, as the character in the movie was proficient enough to pass all the tests without cheating.
• Quote: “he didn’t need to fake becoming a doctor or a lawyer or an airline pilot he didn’t need to steal money to become rich he was already talented and smart and intelligent enough to do all of these things without cheating without stealing”

Conclusion

This video emphasizes a holistic approach to the IELTS speaking test, focusing on clear communication, natural language use, and self-awareness. By understanding the common mistakes and implementing the best practices, test-takers can significantly improve their performance and achieve higher band scores. The focus is on becoming a genuine communicator and test taking skills such as managing stress and being able to think naturally on your feet, rather than trying to memorize or fake proficiency.

IELTS Speaking Test Strategies

IELTS Speaking FAQ

1. How should I approach answering questions in Part 1 of the IELTS Speaking test?
2. In Part 1, you should aim to answer questions naturally, as you would in a normal conversation. Don’t overthink the number of sentences or whether to include examples. Start with a direct answer to the question, and then elaborate with some additional detail, explanations, or a short story. The key is to respond as a normal human being would, avoiding overly short or formulaic responses. For example, if asked “Where do you live?”, don’t just say “London”. Instead say something like “I’ve recently moved to London, to an area called Wandsworth. It’s quite nice, especially because it is close to the river”.
3. What is the main focus of Part 2 of the IELTS Speaking test, and what are some common mistakes students make?
4. Part 2 is a monologue where you speak for up to 2 minutes after a minute of preparation. The examiner listens to your fluency, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and ability to answer the given topic. Common mistakes include rigidly sticking to the bullet points provided in the Q card, which can lead to a lack of ideas and a choppy delivery. Students also sometimes try to use overly complicated memorized structures like “PPF” (past, present, future), making the response sound unnatural. A better approach is to focus on the main topic at the top of the Q card, and use the bullet points as support or prompts when appropriate, not as a rigid framework.
5. How do high-scoring students approach Part 2 of the IELTS Speaking test differently?
6. High-scoring students in Part 2 focus on the main topic of the Q card, which allows them to speak more naturally and fluently. They utilize bullet points to support their answers rather than rigidly adhering to them. They avoid using memorized templates and speak like they are having a natural conversation, using their answers to tell a story. Instead of trying to incorporate sophisticated grammar structures and a wide range of vocabulary, they prioritize answering the question with clear explanations and examples.
7. What should I avoid doing in Part 3 of the IELTS Speaking test?
8. In Part 3, it’s crucial to avoid giving very short answers or saying “I don’t know,” as this signals to the examiner that you may be a lower-band candidate. Do not let the stress of a long exam lead you into providing short, limited responses or giving up on more challenging questions. Examiners will ask increasingly difficult questions in order to differentiate between candidates, and you should engage with those questions instead of attempting to avoid them.
9. What are common mistakes students make regarding pronunciation in the IELTS speaking test?
10. Common pronunciation problems include speaking in a monotone, very quietly, or “inside their mouth”. Stress and a lack of relaxation can lead to a robotic delivery and can cause issues with fluency, grammar and vocabulary. Some students can confuse the speaking test with a formal academic one, which can also lead to a robotic style. The test is testing your conversational English in a normal setting and should be treated as such. It’s important to project your voice, and be clear and natural in your delivery.
11. How should I balance fluency, grammar, and vocabulary in the IELTS Speaking test?
12. It is important to recognize that these three areas are all interdependent, rather than separate elements to be focused on. Focusing too much on one element at the expense of another will bring down your overall score. For example, focusing too much on perfect grammar will decrease your fluency as you will be trying to think of every tense while speaking. Likewise, focusing too much on vocabulary will affect your coherence and fluency, as it can make you stray away from the topic and hinder your flow. Prioritize speaking naturally while attempting to incorporate your knowledge of these three elements of the speaking test.
13. What’s more important in the IELTS Speaking test: the complexity of ideas or the clarity of communication?
14. The IELTS Speaking test assesses your ability to communicate clearly and effectively in English, rather than the complexity of your ideas. If you focus too much on impressive ideas or complex structures, your speech can become unnatural and less fluent. Simpler ideas, if communicated clearly and accurately, can score much higher than complex ideas that are expressed poorly. In the official marking criteria there is no focus on “complexity of ideas”.
15. What strategies can I use to improve my IELTS Speaking score by practicing at home?
16. To improve your speaking at home, you can record your answers using your phone or laptop, then transcribe the recording using a transcription app. Listen back to your recording and identify your main weaknesses while comparing it to the official marking criteria. Analyze the transcript, looking for errors in grammar and vocabulary and assess whether you actually answered the questions. Finally, use a grammar tool to highlight any grammar mistakes, learn from these, and repeat this practice process on a regular basis.

Mastering the IELTS Speaking Test

Okay, here is the timeline and cast of characters based on the provided text:

Timeline of Main Events/Concepts

• General IELTS Speaking Test Structure: The source begins by outlining the three parts of the IELTS speaking test:
• Part 1: General questions; emphasis on natural conversation, not formulaic responses.
• Part 2: A monologue based on a cue card with bullet points, with preparation time and up to two minutes of speaking time. The goal is natural, fluent speaking, not just a rigid reading of bullet points.
• Part 3: Discussion with the examiner, with increasingly complex questions aimed at discerning the test taker’s language level.
• Common Mistakes of Lower-Level Students
• Part 1: Giving very short answers, lacking detail or explanation.
• Part 2: Rigidly sticking to bullet points, running out of ideas quickly, and using memorized structures (like “past, present, future”).
• Part 3: Giving short answers, failing to engage with more difficult questions, and demonstrating a limited range of grammar and vocabulary.
• General issues: Robotic, overly formal delivery; trying to impress the examiner with complex vocabulary or grammar; memorizing answers, which leads to incoherence.
• Strategies of High-Scoring Students:
• Part 1: Focus on answering the questions naturally, as in a normal conversation. Add detail, explanations, and examples as needed, but not formulaically.
• Part 2: Focus on the main topic of the cue card, use bullet points to aid natural speaking, and avoid complex structures or rigid planning. Focus on telling a story/having a conversational flow.
• Part 3: Answer complex questions naturally; not being afraid to say “I don’t know,” and offering educated guesses instead of silence. This shows engagement. Demonstrating a broad range of grammar, vocabulary, and comprehension by being flexible on different topics and grammatical structures.
• General Strategies: Answering questions naturally, developing ideas with detail, avoiding the desire to impress the examiner, not relying on memorized structures, not rushing.
• Specific Examples
• A sample Part 2 response is given, with a student talking about meeting a new friend in kindergarten.
• A student’s answer to “What’s your favourite website” is examined and critiqued (too short).
• Several more sample responses are given, highlighting issues of robotic delivery, trying too hard to impress, and memorized answers.
• Positive examples of native-speaker-level responses are given for favorite food, TV, and apps (focus on natural, detailed, conversation-like answers).
• Best Practices
• Speak naturally. Use explanations, and examples.
• Don’t focus on length or number of sentences.
• Answer questions specifically.
• Fluency does not mean no pauses but rather the absence of unnatural pauses.
• Do not try to think of complicated ideas – simple ideas are better.
• Additional Topics Covered:
• Several mock Part 2 and Part 3 questions are posed, with sample answers highlighting how to use these best practices. These cover diverse topics such as passport news, a snorkeling experience, a cancelled flight, a dream job, childhood money, copyright law, a memorable meal, hiking, travel, and a chance meeting.
• Priyanka’s Story: The story of Priyanka, a student who failed four times, is presented.
• The emphasis is that she changed her behaviour by focusing on only four key issues:
• Fluency: Pauses while searching for ideas, can be improved by sticking to simple ideas.
• Grammar: Using complex grammar leads to error, use simple grammar for accuracy.
• Vocabulary: Complex vocabulary will not improve your score, but a focus on clear, precise wording will.
• Pronunciation: Accent is not the problem, clarity and appropriate delivery are.
• Idioms & Vocabulary: The document stresses that the use of idioms, phrasal verbs, informal words, etc, should be idiomatic, that is they should be used correctly, naturally and appropriately. Using lots of idioms and using them incorrectly will not improve your score. It offers a series of common idioms used by band 9 students with explanations of their origin, usage, and common mistakes: bite the bullet, a piece of cake, kill two birds with one stone, let the cat out of the bag, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, once in a blue moon, burn the midnight oil/burn the candle at both ends, at the drop of a hat, cry over spilled milk, don’t judge a book by its cover, don’t count your chickens before they hatch, go the extra mile, raining cats and dogs, throw in the towel, cross that bridge when you come to it, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and when in Rome.
• The key takeaway about vocabulary is the “birthday cake analogy,” where the bulk of the “cake” is simple, accurate everyday words, with some “sprinkles” of high-level vocab (idioms, etc). Using an excessive amount of “sprinkles” will result in a bad-tasting “cake”.
• Avoiding “Traps”:
• Memorized Answers: Examiners identify memorized answers and will target areas where you don’t have memorized responses.
• “Unusual Topics:” Examiners test you by asking about topics you are not prepared for.
• Part 3 Difficult Questions: Examiners will escalate the difficulty of questions to see if you can cope.
• Topic-Specific Vocabulary: Examiners test you by presenting different topics in the hope you will have vocabulary specific to that topic.
• Self-Practice Technique: The document advises on a self-practice technique to focus on areas of weakness:
• Record yourself and transcribe your answers.
• Use the official marking criteria to identify areas for improvement.
• Analyze answers for structure, fluency, accuracy, and development.
• A Mock Test: A full mock speaking test is performed and scored in a live setting to illustrate the concepts taught.

Cast of Characters

• The Narrator/Teacher: The main voice throughout the text. A teacher and expert in IELTS preparation, likely the author or presenter of the content. Provides explanations, examples, and advice on how to approach the IELTS speaking test.
• Justin: The teacher’s “glamorous assistant” who poses questions in the mock test scenarios.
• Amanprit: The speaker in the example Part 2 response. She met her new friend in kindergarten.
• Priyanka: A student who failed the speaking test four times. Her story is used as an example of how a few key changes in approach can greatly improve performance.
• Tom: The teacher’s 8 year old son who is used in an example related to a desire to go to Istanbul for a Champions League final.

This detailed breakdown should provide you with a good understanding of the content of the provided sources. Let me know if you have other questions!

IELTS Speaking Mastery

The sources provide a comprehensive overview of the IELTS speaking test, including its structure, common mistakes, best practices, and strategies for achieving a high score. Here’s a breakdown of key information:

IELTS Speaking Test Format

• The speaking test has three parts [1].
• Part 1 is the easiest, consisting of predictable, everyday questions [1].
• Part 2 involves a monologue based on a cue card, where you speak for up to 2 minutes after a one-minute preparation period [2]. The examiner will not ask questions or interact with you [2].
• Part 3 includes more abstract, academic-style questions that require more developed answers [3].

Common Mistakes Made by Lower-Band Students

• Part 1:Giving memorized answers [1].
• Providing overly long responses [4].
• Going off-topic [4].
• Sounding robotic or overly formal [4].
• Giving very short answers [5].
• Part 2:Rigidly sticking to bullet points on the cue card [2].
• Part 3:Giving very short answers [3].
• Saying “I don’t know” or not attempting an answer [3].
• Showing a limited range of grammar and vocabulary [6].
• Appearing as though you want the exam to be over [6].
• Other mistakes include trying to impress the examiner with fancy vocabulary or grammar [7], focusing too much on grammar or vocabulary at the expense of fluency and coherence [8].

Characteristics of High-Band (7, 8, and 9) Students

• They do not sound memorized and keep answers concise [9].
• They stay on topic and have a natural conversational tone [9].
• They answer questions directly and develop answers with explanations, examples, or stories [2, 9].
• They speak naturally, as if talking to a friend or colleague [9, 10].
• They attempt every question, even if they don’t know much about the topic [11].
• They show different sides of an argument, not just their own opinion [11].
• They have a wide range of grammar and vocabulary [12].
• They use simple, accurate language [13].

Best Practices

• Answer questions naturally, as you would in a normal conversation [2, 10].
• Develop answers with explanations, examples, or details [9, 14].
• Focus on clear communication rather than trying to impress [10].
• Do not be afraid to pause for a few seconds to think before answering [15].
• For Part 2, pick topics you are comfortable discussing, and don’t rigidly stick to the bullet points [2].
• For Part 3, attempt to answer every question and develop your answers [11].

Key Strategies

• Fluency: Don’t try to use complex ideas, as simple ideas can increase your score [16]. Do not speak too quickly [17].
• Grammar: Focus on accuracy. Use simpler sentence structures with zero errors [18]. The examiner tests range by asking different questions, and by answering naturally, you will use a range of tenses [18].
• Vocabulary: Use vocabulary as a tool, and choose words that help you discuss different topics [19]. Use simple, topic-specific words rather than complex words [20].
• Pronunciation: Clarity is most important. Use intonation and connected speech naturally [21].
• Idioms: Use idioms appropriately and accurately, but do not force them. Natural idiomatic expressions are important, including phrasal verbs and colloquialisms [22, 23].
• Practice: Use practice questions to understand the marking criteria and identify your weaknesses. Record yourself, transcribe your answers, and analyze them for fluency, pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary [24-26].

Traps to Avoid

• Don’t rely on memorized answers, as examiners can spot them [27, 28].
• Don’t be thrown by unusual questions; answer them to the best of your ability [28].
• Don’t get overwhelmed by the difficulty of the questions or topics, particularly in Part 3 [28, 29].
• Don’t try to trick the examiner or cheat the test, focus on demonstrating your genuine English level [20, 30].
• Don’t compare yourself to others on YouTube, many of these videos are not accurate [31].
• Don’t seek too much feedback, but work on specific weaknesses once they have been identified [31].

By avoiding these traps and focusing on clear communication, natural delivery, and a solid command of English, you can significantly increase your score on the IELTS speaking test [20].

IELTS Speaking Band 7-9 Strategies

To achieve a Band 7, 8, or 9 on the IELTS speaking test, it’s crucial to understand the specific strategies and approaches that differentiate high-scoring candidates from those in lower bands [1]. These strategies go beyond simply having a good command of English; they involve a specific way of approaching the test and demonstrating your communication skills [2].

Key Characteristics of Band 7-9 Candidates:

• Natural and Conversational Tone: High-band students speak naturally, as if they are talking to a friend or colleague, rather than sounding robotic or overly formal [3, 4]. They avoid memorized responses and instead engage in genuine conversation [1].
• Direct and Developed Answers: They answer questions directly and then develop their responses with explanations, examples, details, and stories [4, 5]. They don’t give very short answers; instead, they provide enough information for the examiner to assess their language ability [4, 6].
• Fluency and Coherence: They speak fluently without unnatural pauses and with good coherence by making sure that their responses are always relevant to the questions, showing a clear train of thought [7].
• Flexibility with Bullet Points: In Part 2, they don’t rigidly stick to the bullet points on the cue card, but rather use them as a guide to help them speak naturally [8, 9]. They focus on the main topic and use the bullet points to help them expand on that topic naturally [9].
• Confidence in Handling Difficult Questions: They attempt every question, even if they don’t know much about the topic [10]. They don’t say “I don’t know” or refuse to answer; instead, they make an effort to communicate in English [2].
• Exploration of Different Perspectives: In Part 3, they show different sides of an argument, not just their own opinion [10]. They explore the topic fully, showing that they can consider various viewpoints [10].
• Appropriate Use of Simple Language: They use simple, accurate, and topic-specific vocabulary rather than trying to impress with complex words [11, 12]. They use simple language to clearly express their ideas [13].

Strategies for Achieving High Scores:

• Focus on Communication, Not Memorization: Do not memorize answers or try to trick the examiner [3, 13]. The goal is to demonstrate your ability to communicate naturally and effectively in English, and not to deliver rehearsed speeches [14].
• Develop Answers Naturally: Instead of following a formula, develop your answers as you would in a normal conversation [15]. Add details, explanations, examples, and personal anecdotes to make your responses more engaging [6, 16].
• Use Simple, Accurate Language: Focus on using vocabulary and grammar that you are comfortable with [17]. Don’t try to use complex language that you don’t fully understand, as this can lead to mistakes [17-19].
• Use Topic-Specific Vocabulary: Demonstrate a wide vocabulary by using topic specific words and phrases, rather than trying to use more complex or advanced vocabulary [12, 20].
• Practice and Self-Assessment: Record yourself speaking, transcribe your answers, and analyze them for fluency, pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary [21]. This technique helps you identify weaknesses that you might not be aware of during the test [22].
• Understand the Marking Criteria: Familiarize yourself with the official IELTS marking criteria and assess your performance based on these criteria [22, 23].
• Avoid Common Traps: Be aware of common traps such as giving memorized answers, using overly complex language, or refusing to answer difficult questions [13, 24].
• Seek Feedback from Professionals: Get your speaking checked at least once by a real IELTS professional who can identify and fix your weaknesses [23].

Specific Techniques:

• Fluency: Focus on speaking at a natural pace, without too many pauses or hesitations. Use simple ideas and don’t try to make things too complex [25, 26].
• Grammar: Prioritize accuracy over complexity. Use grammar that you are comfortable with and avoid making basic errors [27, 28].
• Vocabulary: Use vocabulary as a tool, and choose words that help you discuss different topics. Focus on simple, topic-specific words rather than complex words [19, 20].
• Pronunciation: Clarity is most important. Focus on speaking clearly so that the examiner can understand you, and use natural intonation and connected speech [7, 29].
• Idioms: Use idioms appropriately and accurately, but don’t force them. Natural idiomatic expressions are important, including phrasal verbs and colloquialisms, but be sure to use them correctly and in context [30-32].

By focusing on these strategies, you can improve your communication skills and increase your chances of getting a high score on the IELTS speaking test.

Common IELTS Speaking Test Mistakes

The sources outline several common mistakes that students make on the IELTS speaking test, which often prevent them from achieving higher band scores [1, 2]. These mistakes can be categorized by the different parts of the test, as well as general errors that apply to the entire test [1].

Part 1 Mistakes:

• Memorized answers: Many students memorize answers to common part 1 questions in an attempt to impress the examiner, but these responses are easily identified and lower your score [1, 2].
• Overly long answers: Students may provide answers that are too long, often because they are using memorized templates found online [2].
• Off-topic answers: If examiners suspect that a student is using memorized answers, they may ask unexpected questions, and those who rely on memorized answers may go off-topic [2].
• Robotic or overly formal tone: Some students believe the test is a formal occasion and speak in an unnatural way, which comes across as robotic [2].
• Very short answers: Giving a one-sentence answer does not provide the examiner with enough information [3, 4].

Part 2 Mistakes:

• Rigidly sticking to bullet points: Average students may read each bullet point in order, without adding any extra detail or making connections, which can cause them to run out of things to say [5, 6].
• Running out of ideas: When rigidly sticking to bullet points, students often do not have enough to say and stop talking before the allotted time [6].
• Using unnatural templates: Some students use templates such as past, present, and future (PPF) to structure their answers, which can sound unnatural and may not fit the question [6].

Part 3 Mistakes:

• Short answers: Students may give very short answers, failing to develop their points [7].
• Avoiding the question: Some students may say “I don’t know” or refuse to attempt an answer, which signals to the examiner that they do not deserve a high score [7, 8].
• Limited range: Students might demonstrate a limited range of grammar and vocabulary by failing to answer difficult questions or not using complex grammar structures [8].
• Wanting the exam to be over: Students who want the exam to be over may give short answers and show the examiner they are not trying [8].

General Mistakes Across All Parts:

• Trying to impress the examiner: Students may use overly complex vocabulary and grammar, which often results in errors and affects fluency and coherence [9, 10].
• Focusing too much on grammar or vocabulary: Focusing too much on grammar can reduce fluency because it’s hard to think of perfect grammar all the time. Focusing too much on vocabulary can also reduce fluency because it is difficult to maintain coherence if you are focusing primarily on using high level words [10].
• Not developing answers: Not developing answers with explanations, details or examples can signal to the examiner that your communication skills are limited [4, 11, 12].
• Using memorized answers: Relying on memorized answers will cause you to struggle when you encounter questions that are not what you expect [10, 13].
• Incorrect use of idioms: Using idioms incorrectly, missing articles, or using incorrect word forms will lower your score [14, 15].
• Speaking too quickly: Speaking too quickly can make it difficult for the examiner to understand you [16, 17].
• Not using topic specific vocabulary: Students may try to use high-level vocabulary, rather than using simple topic specific vocabulary which is preferred by examiners [18, 19].

By understanding and avoiding these common mistakes, students can improve their performance and increase their chances of achieving a higher band score on the IELTS speaking test [3].

IELTS Speaking Mastery

To improve your IELTS speaking score, it’s important to focus on best practices that are used by Band 7, 8, and 9 students. These best practices encompass a range of techniques that emphasize natural communication, effective development of ideas, and strategic use of language [1-3].

General Best Practices

• Answer Naturally: Speak in a natural, conversational way, as if you’re talking to a friend or colleague [3]. Avoid sounding robotic or overly formal [2].
• Answer Directly and Develop Fully: Answer the questions directly and then develop your responses with explanations, examples, details, and stories [3]. Don’t give very short answers [4]. Provide enough information to showcase your language ability [3].
• Focus on Communication: Remember that the IELTS speaking test is a test of your ability to communicate, not your knowledge or intelligence [4, 5].
• Avoid Memorization: Don’t memorize answers to common questions [1, 2]. Memorized answers are easily spotted by examiners and will negatively impact your score [5]. Instead, respond genuinely and spontaneously [3].
• Be Honest and Authentic: Talk honestly about your own experiences, which will come across as more natural and engaging [6].
• Don’t Overcomplicate: Don’t try to use overly complex words or grammar [7]. Focus on using language that you are comfortable with [5, 8].
• Use Topic-Specific Vocabulary: Use simple vocabulary that is topic-specific and appropriate to the questions [9].
• Do Not Try to Impress the Examiner: Do not try to impress the examiner with fancy words and idioms, focus on answering the questions, instead [7].
• Manage Your Time: Do not worry about the number of sentences or words you use, focus on answering the question fully [10, 11].
• Be Confident: Attempt every question, even if you don’t know much about the topic. [12] Show the examiner that you are confident in your ability to communicate in English [12, 13].

Specific Best Practices

• Fluency and Coherence:Speak at a natural pace, without unnatural pauses [6]. It is okay to pause to think, but avoid excessive hesitation [6].
• Answer the question directly and stay on topic. Develop your answer with explanations, examples, or stories [3, 8].
• Make sure that your answers are always relevant to the questions, and show a clear train of thought [14].
• Grammar:Use a range of tenses and structures accurately [15].
• Focus on accuracy over complexity, and ensure that your grammar is correct [16].
• Avoid making basic grammatical errors [16].
• Vocabulary:Use a wide range of vocabulary to express yourself clearly [17].
• Choose words that are appropriate for the context, and use topic specific vocabulary [9, 18].
• Do not focus on using complex words that you don’t understand, but focus on using vocabulary accurately [5, 8].
• Pronunciation:Speak clearly so that the examiner can understand you [19].
• Use natural intonation and connected speech [19].
• Don’t worry about having a specific accent; focus on clarity [19].
• IdiomsUse idioms correctly and naturally, but don’t force them [20].
• Use idioms when they fit naturally into a conversation, but don’t overuse them [21, 22].
• Be aware that natural idiomatic expressions are important including phrasal verbs and colloquialisms [22].
• Part 1: Answer questions directly and develop your responses with some personal details [3]. The key is to sound like a friend or colleague, rather than a robot [23].
• Part 2: Focus on the main topic and use bullet points as a guide, not as a strict structure [18].
• Part 3: Show both sides of an argument and fully explore the topic [12]. Don’t be afraid to express your own opinion as well [12].

Practice Techniques:

• Self-Assessment: Record yourself answering practice questions [24]. Listen back to your responses and analyze them based on the marking criteria [24, 25].
• Transcription: Transcribe your answers and identify areas for improvement [25].
• Targeted Practice: Focus on improving your biggest weaknesses [25, 26].
• Focus on One Thing at a Time: Treat each part of the test separately [27].
• Seek Feedback: Have your speaking checked by a qualified professional who can identify and address your specific weaknesses [27].

Important Considerations:

• Avoid traps: Be aware of common traps, such as memorizing answers, or using overly complex language [9, 28].
• Understand the marking criteria: Make sure you understand the marking criteria, and use practice questions to test yourself based on these criteria [27].
• Don’t compare yourself to others: Don’t compare yourself to “band 9” speakers on YouTube, as this can damage your confidence [26].
• Be Patient: Don’t expect to improve your speaking overnight. It takes time, effort, and consistent practice to develop your skills [29].

By following these best practices, you can improve your IELTS speaking skills and increase your chances of achieving a higher score [24, 30].

IELTS Speaking Idioms: Effective Use & Common Mistakes

The sources provide a comprehensive guide to using idioms effectively in the IELTS speaking test, emphasizing that while idioms can enhance your language, they must be used naturally and correctly [1-3]. Overusing or misusing idioms can lower your score [2, 4].

Here’s a detailed look at idiom usage, based on the information in the sources:

Key Principles for Using Idioms:

• Natural Usage: Idioms should be used when they fit naturally into the conversation, not forced or inserted randomly [3, 5]. The goal is to sound natural, as if you are speaking to a friend or colleague [6, 7]. Examiners are listening for natural, idiomatic expressions, which includes idioms, phrasal verbs, informal words, and colloquialisms [3].
• Accuracy is Essential: Use idioms correctly. Pay attention to grammar, articles, and verb tenses [3-5]. Using an idiom incorrectly will lower your score [2, 4].
• Quality Over Quantity: Do not try to use as many idioms as possible. Instead, use them sparingly and only when appropriate [3]. The key is to demonstrate that you can use idioms correctly, not just that you know a lot of idioms [2, 3].
• Understanding is Crucial: Understand the meaning and origin of an idiom before using it. This will help you use it properly [1, 8].
• Focus on Communication: Remember that the IELTS speaking test is a test of your ability to communicate, not a test of how many idioms you know [3, 9]. The test is about natural, effective communication and not just about the use of idioms [3].
• Do not memorize lists of idioms: Do not memorize lists of idioms and insert them into every answer. It is better to incorporate them into your everyday use of the English language [5].

Common Mistakes with Idioms:

• Forcing idioms: Do not force idioms into your answers when they do not fit [5].
• Incorrect grammar: Using the wrong verb tense or missing articles can lower your score [4, 10]. For example, using “a piece of cake” instead of “piece of cake” [8] or saying “kill” instead of “killed two birds with one stone” [10]
• Overuse: Using too many idioms can make your speech sound unnatural [3, 5].
• Misunderstanding the meaning: Using an idiom incorrectly because you don’t understand it properly [2].

How to Use Idioms Effectively:

• Sprinkle them in: Think of your vocabulary like a birthday cake. The cake itself (97-98%) is made up of simple, everyday words. Idioms are like the sprinkles on top – they add a nice touch, but they are only a small part of the whole [3, 5].
• Focus on Natural Usage: Use idioms as a natural part of your speech, not as something extra or unusual [3].
• Context matters: Only use idioms when the context is appropriate [11]. For example, the idiom “once in a blue moon” should be used when talking about something that happens rarely [11].
• Use topic-specific vocabulary: Do not try to use high-level vocabulary, instead use simple topic-specific vocabulary [12, 13].

Examples of Idioms and Their Use: The sources provide multiple examples of idioms, their meanings, origins, and how to use them correctly in the IELTS speaking test [1, 4, 8, 10, 11, 14-20]. Here are a few of them:

• to bite the bullet: To do something difficult or unpleasant with bravery [1]. For example, “I decided to bite the bullet and study law.” [8]
• a piece of cake: Something very easy [8]. For example, “Compared to practicing law, teaching English is a piece of cake.” [8]
• kill two birds with one stone: To accomplish two goals with one action [10]. For example, “I decided to kill two birds with one stone and buy one present for her birthday and Christmas.” [10]
• to let the cat out of the bag: To reveal a secret, often by mistake [10]. For example, “The phone kind of let the cat out of the bag a little bit.” [4]
• don’t put all your eggs in one basket: Don’t concentrate all of your resources or effort into one area [4]. For example, “It would be foolish for me to put all my eggs in one basket and just hope that IELTS and teaching lasts forever.” [4]
• once in a blue moon: Something that happens rarely [4]. For example, “Since I’ve had kids, it’s really once in a blue moon that I go out.” [11]
• burn the midnight oil: Working very hard, often late into the night [11, 14]. For example, “I do still burn the midnight oil, I work very hard on my career.” [14]
• burn the candle at both ends: Working too hard and exhausting yourself [14]. For example, “I used to burn the candle at both ends… lawyers are expected to work you know 80 to 100 hours a week.” [14]
• at the drop of a hat: Doing something quickly, immediately, and without hesitation [14]. For example, “If you rent, you can move anywhere at the drop of a hat.” [15]
• cry over spilled milk: Not to waste time thinking about something negative that you can’t change [15]. For example, “There’s no point crying over spilled milk, you made the mistake now learn from it.” [15]
• you can’t judge a book by its cover: You shouldn’t judge people or things by their appearance [15, 16]. For example, “You can’t judge a person based on their appearance.” [16]
• don’t count your chickens before they hatch: Don’t assume something will be successful until it actually occurs [16]. For example, “Don’t count your chickens, but if I were to sell these watches I probably would make a lot more money.” [16]
• to go the extra mile: To put more effort than is required [16, 17]. For example, “In whatever she does, she goes the extra mile.” [17]
• raining cats and dogs: Very heavy rain [17]. For example, “It’s Ireland so it’s normally raining cats and dogs.” [17]
• throw in the towel: To stop something because it is too difficult [18]. For example, “It’s so easy to throw in the towel when you get home after a hard day’s work.” [18]
• cross that bridge when you come to it: To deal with a problem when it occurs in the future [18]. For example, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” [19]
• Rome wasn’t built in a day: Significant accomplishments take time [19]. For example, “Rome wasn’t built in a day, you will get better at football, but not right now, you need to keep working hard.” [20]
• when in Rome: You should respect the customs of the place you are visiting [20]. For example, “When in Rome, you should respect their culture and you should fast on their fast day.” [20]

Data on Idiom Usage:

• Band 9 students use very few idioms, averaging only 1.2 idioms in their speaking tests [2]. Many did not use any, and it was rare for students to use more than four or five [2].
• This data emphasizes that it is not the quantity of idioms, but the quality and appropriateness that matters [3].

In summary, the use of idioms should be a strategic and deliberate choice. Do not try to force idioms into your answers or memorize lists of idioms. Instead, focus on speaking naturally and using idioms correctly within the proper context [2, 3, 5].

IELTS Speaking Test Mistakes

Based on the sources, here are three common mistakes that test takers make on the IELTS speaking exam:

• Memorizing answers [1, 2]: Many students try to memorize answers to common questions, particularly in Part 1 of the test, hoping to impress the examiner [1]. This is a mistake because examiners are trained to recognize memorized responses [2-5]. When examiners suspect that a response is memorized, they will ask unusual or more difficult follow-up questions to expose the lack of genuine communication [2, 3, 5]. Relying on memorized answers also hurts coherence because the answer may not directly address the question asked [3]. This can cause test takers to get flustered when asked an unexpected question [3, 4]. The key is to avoid memorization and instead answer questions naturally, as you would in a normal conversation [2, 4, 6-11].
• Giving overly short or overly long answers [2, 3, 12]: Some students provide very short answers that don’t give the examiner enough information [12]. This can lead to follow-up questions that cause stress and make the student feel like they are doing something wrong [12]. On the other hand, some students give overly long answers, which is often a consequence of memorization [2, 3]. An appropriate answer should be developed with details, explanations, examples, or a brief story [6, 7, 10, 12-14]. However, do not think that there is a set number of sentences or a set number of words that you should use [7, 13].
• Trying to impress the examiner with complex language [2, 3, 8, 15-18]: Some test takers try to use very complex vocabulary, idioms, and grammar structures, even when they are not comfortable using them [3, 8]. This is a mistake because it can hinder fluency, reduce coherence, and lead to grammatical errors [3, 8, 16]. Focus on using the vocabulary and grammar that you are comfortable with, so that your answers flow naturally [10, 11, 19]. Examiners are not looking for complexity; they are looking for clear, accurate, and effective communication using natural, idiomatic English [5, 11, 17, 18, 20]. Using simple topic specific vocabulary is more important than using complex words that aren’t appropriate [17].

In summary, avoid memorizing answers, provide answers that are sufficiently developed, and focus on clear and natural communication using familiar language. The test is designed to assess your ability to communicate effectively in English, not to see how many complex words you know [5, 10, 11, 19, 20].

IELTS Speaking Band 7-9 Strategies

Based on the sources, test takers who score in Bands 7-9 on the IELTS speaking test demonstrate several key strategies that distinguish them from lower-scoring candidates. Here are some of the most important strategies:

• Natural and Conversational Tone: High-scoring candidates speak in a natural, conversational way, as if they are talking to a friend or colleague [1, 2]. They avoid sounding robotic or overly formal [1]. They don’t try to speak in a formal academic way, but speak in a normal way [3].
• Directly Answering Questions: They answer questions directly and avoid going off-topic [2]. They do not give memorized answers [1].
• Developing Answers: They develop their answers by adding explanations, examples, and details, rather than just giving short, one-sentence responses [2]. They answer the question and then explain why they think that, or give examples and stories from their own lives [4].
• Using their Own Experiences: They incorporate their own experiences and lives into their answers [5].
• Avoiding Memorization: They avoid memorized answers and instead respond genuinely to each question [1, 6]. Examiners are trained to spot memorized responses and will ask more difficult questions to expose a lack of genuine communication [7-10].
• Not Overthinking: They don’t overthink their answers by trying to use templates, tricks, or complicated structures [8, 11]. They remove as much thinking as possible and allow themselves to answer questions naturally [12].
• Using Simple and Accurate Language: They use simple, accurate, and appropriate language rather than trying to impress the examiner with complex vocabulary and grammar [9, 13-18]. They use the grammar and vocabulary that they are comfortable using [19]. They focus on using topic-specific vocabulary [18, 20].
• Showing a Range of Language: They naturally use a range of grammatical structures and tenses by answering questions appropriately [14, 21]. They do not focus on using the most advanced patterns [22, 23].
• Handling Difficult Questions: They attempt every question, even if they don’t know much about the topic, and are able to communicate in English and explain their thoughts [4, 24]. They don’t refuse to answer, laugh, or say “I don’t know” [25, 26]. They might say that they don’t know anything about a topic, but will still try to give an answer [24].
• Exploring Different Sides of an Argument: They fully explore a topic by showing different sides of the argument and explaining which side they agree with [4].
• Maintaining Fluency: They speak without unnatural pauses or hesitations, indicating they are not struggling to find the right words or grammar [27-29]. Pausing to think is natural, but they avoid unnatural pauses [27, 30]. Fluency means speaking without effort, not quickly [29].
• Using Idioms Appropriately: They use idioms sparingly and correctly, only when they fit naturally into the conversation. Overusing or misusing idioms can lower their score [16, 17, 31-35]. They don’t force idioms into their answers [17]. They understand that idiomatic means natural English, not just using a lot of idioms [16, 35].
• Understanding the Marking Criteria: They are aware of and understand the marking criteria for the speaking test, which allows them to focus on the key areas that the examiners are assessing [36].
• Self-Assessment: They can assess their own performance by using tools that record and transcribe their speech [37, 38]. They then analyze their answers by listening back to their recordings and evaluating their performance against the official IELTS marking criteria [38]. They are able to identify their weaknesses by looking at the transcriptions of their answers [38].
• Focusing on the Communication: They understand that the speaking test is about clear communication and not a knowledge test, intelligence test, or a vocabulary test [3, 4, 8, 15, 25].
• Treat Each Part of the Test Separately: They treat each part of the test (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) separately [36]. They understand that each part has a different format and requires a different type of response [36].

In essence, Band 7-9 candidates demonstrate a combination of strong communication skills, natural language use, a strategic approach to answering questions, and an awareness of the test’s requirements. They focus on communicating effectively and naturally using simple, clear, and accurate English. They don’t try to trick the examiners into thinking that they are better than they are. They are good enough and they show the examiners their genuine English level [15, 31].

IELTS Speaking Part 1: Common Mistakes of Band 5-6.5

Based on the sources, here’s how Band 5-6.5 IELTS speaking test takers typically perform in Part 1 of the speaking test:

• Memorized Answers: A very common mistake that Band 5-6.5 students make is giving memorized answers [1]. They often memorize answers to predictable Part 1 questions about their job, studies, where they live, or where they are from [1]. This is easily spotted by examiners, who may then ask unexpected questions to expose the lack of genuine communication skills [1, 2].
• Overly Long Answers: Many students in this band will give overly long answers, often because they are using memorized templates found online [2].
• Off-Topic Responses: Because they are using memorized answers, students in this band may give answers that are not on topic [2]. The examiner will ask predictable questions in part one but may also throw in unusual questions to catch out those who are using memorized answers [2].
• Formal or Robotic Delivery: Students in this band often sound very formal or robotic, as if they are talking to a robot [2]. This may be due to stress, nervousness, or the mistaken belief that the test requires a formal tone. They often think that they should speak in a formal academic way, but they should speak in a normal way [2, 3].
• Limited Development: They do not develop their answers, often giving short or one-sentence responses that don’t give the examiner enough to go on [4, 5]. They do not add details, explanations, examples, or stories [6, 7].
• Lack of Natural Flow: Their answers often lack a natural, conversational flow. Instead of sounding like a normal human being, they sound like an IELTS candidate [6].
• Focus on Complexity Over Clarity: They may try to use complex language, idioms, and grammar to impress the examiner, which often results in errors and a lack of coherence [3]. They are not focusing on clearly answering the question, but on using fancy vocabulary [3].
• Difficulty with Unexpected Questions: When examiners ask unexpected questions, students in this band often struggle to provide a coherent response. Because they rely on memorized answers, they are often caught off guard by questions they were not expecting, which demonstrates that they can’t speak English fluently [2, 8, 9].
• Overthinking: They may overthink their answers and get lost, pausing or hesitating unnaturally [10]. They are thinking too much and not speaking naturally [11].

In summary, Band 5-6.5 test takers in Part 1 often rely on memorized answers, provide answers that are either too short or too long, and struggle with a lack of natural, conversational flow. They often try to use complex language inappropriately. They do not demonstrate the ability to develop answers or respond effectively to unexpected questions. They do not show the same level of natural, fluent communication that higher band students do [6].

Common IELTS Speaking Mistakes

Based on the sources and our conversation history, here are common mistakes that hinder IELTS speaking test-takers:

• Relying on Memorized Answers: Many test-takers attempt to memorize answers to common questions, especially in Part 1, hoping to impress the examiner [1, 2]. However, examiners are trained to identify memorized responses, and when they suspect that an answer is memorized, they will ask unexpected or more difficult follow-up questions to reveal a lack of genuine communication skills [2, 3]. This strategy undermines coherence because the answer might not directly address the question [3].
• Providing Inappropriately Lengthy or Short Answers: Some students provide answers that are either too short or too long [2]. Short answers fail to provide the examiner with enough information and may lead to follow-up questions that can cause stress and make the test-taker feel they are doing something wrong [4]. Conversely, overly long answers, often resulting from memorization, also hinder performance [2, 3]. Answers should be developed with details, explanations, examples, or a brief story, but without adhering to a specific number of sentences or words [5-7].
• Using Overly Formal or Robotic Delivery: Many test-takers adopt a very formal or robotic tone, as if they are talking to a robot [2, 4]. This can be due to stress, nervousness, or the mistaken belief that the test requires a formal or academic tone [2, 4, 8]. Test-takers should speak naturally, as they would in a normal conversation with a friend or colleague, not in an overly formal or academic way [2, 8].
• Trying to Impress with Complex Language: Some test-takers focus on using complex vocabulary, idioms, and grammar structures, even when they are not comfortable with them [3, 8]. This often leads to errors, a lack of coherence, and reduced fluency [3]. It’s more important to use the vocabulary and grammar that you are comfortable with, so your answers sound natural and are easy to understand, and to use simple, topic-specific vocabulary when appropriate [9-11].
• Failing to Develop Answers: Many test-takers give very short, one sentence answers, failing to develop their answers with explanations, details, or examples [4, 12, 13]. The examiner is looking for more than just a minimal answer to a question.
• Not Attempting Answers: In Part 3, which involves more abstract topics, some students give up on answering difficult questions, saying “I don’t know” or laughing, indicating to the examiner that they do not deserve a higher band [12, 14]. It is important to attempt every question, even if you do not know much about the topic, because the test is about communication and demonstrating your ability to use the English language, not about your knowledge of specific subjects [15].
• Limited Range: Students in lower bands may demonstrate a limited range in their grammar and vocabulary [14]. The examiner is looking for a range of language use.
• Misusing or Overusing Idioms: Some students try to use idioms in every answer, whether they are appropriate or not, believing that it will raise their score [16]. However, idioms should be used sparingly and naturally; misusing or overusing them can lower your score [17, 18]. The test is looking for natural, idiomatic English, which includes, but is not limited to, idioms [18, 19].
• Over-reliance on Feedback: Students can become overly focused on getting continuous feedback from teachers and online services, instead of taking the time to work on areas where they have received feedback [20]. It is better to take the time to improve on areas where weaknesses have been identified.

In summary, test-takers should avoid memorization, provide well-developed answers, use a natural conversational tone, focus on clear and accurate communication with familiar language, and not be afraid to attempt to answer every question. The test is designed to assess your ability to communicate effectively in English, not to see how many complex words you know or how much you have memorized [13, 15, 21-23].

IELTS Speaking: Band 7-9 vs. Lower Bands

Based on the sources and our conversation history, here’s a breakdown of how Band 7-9 IELTS speaking test-takers differ from lower-scoring candidates:

• Communication Style:
• Band 7-9: Speak in a natural, conversational tone, as if talking to a friend or colleague. They avoid sounding robotic or overly formal. They do not speak in an overly formal or academic way, but in a normal way [1, 2].
• Lower Bands: May sound robotic or overly formal [1].
• Answering Questions:
• Band 7-9: Directly answer the questions and avoid going off-topic [3]. They will answer the question directly, then add explanations, examples or a story [3, 4].
• Lower Bands: May give memorized, overly long or off-topic responses [1, 5, 6].
• Developing Answers:
• Band 7-9: Develop their answers with explanations, examples, and details, moving beyond short, one-sentence answers [3, 7]. They use their own life and experiences in their answers [8]. They show both sides of an argument [4, 9].
• Lower Bands: Give short, undeveloped, one-sentence answers, often lacking detail [10, 11].
• Approach to Memorization:
• Band 7-9: Avoid memorized answers and respond genuinely to each question [1, 5, 6].
• Lower Bands: Often rely on memorized answers, which are easily detected by examiners [1, 5].
• Use of Language:
• Band 7-9: Use simple, accurate, and appropriate language, focusing on clear communication. They use topic-specific vocabulary [12, 13]. They use the grammar and vocabulary that they are comfortable using, and don’t try to impress the examiner with complex language [14, 15]. They naturally use a range of grammar structures and tenses by answering questions appropriately and they don’t focus on using the most advanced patterns [16, 17].
• Lower Bands: May try to impress with overly complex language, idioms, or grammar, which often leads to errors and reduced fluency [18]. They may also try to use grammar and vocabulary that is beyond their level [14]. They often fail to use topic-specific vocabulary [12].
• Handling Difficult Questions:
• Band 7-9: Attempt every question, even if they don’t know much about the topic, demonstrating an ability to communicate in English [4, 9]. They will still try to give an answer even if they don’t know about the topic [4, 19].
• Lower Bands: May refuse to answer, laugh, or say “I don’t know” when faced with difficult questions [16].
• Fluency and Coherence:
• Band 7-9: Speak without unnatural pauses or hesitations, demonstrating a natural flow of speech [2, 20, 21]. They demonstrate a natural flow of speech, while still being able to pause naturally when thinking [2, 21]. They stick to the topic and develop their answers appropriately [21, 22].
• Lower Bands: May have unnatural pauses, hesitations, and difficulty with coherence [11].
• Use of Idioms:
• Band 7-9: Use idioms sparingly and correctly, only when they fit naturally. They understand that idiomatic means natural English, not just using a lot of idioms [23, 24].
• Lower Bands: May overuse or misuse idioms in an attempt to impress the examiner [25, 26].
• Understanding of the Test:
• Band 7-9: Understand that it is a communication test and not a knowledge or intelligence test [4, 22]. They also understand that each part of the test has a different format and requires a different type of response, so they treat each part of the test separately [27]. They also understand the marking criteria [27].
• Lower Bands: May not understand the test’s requirements and try to use memorization, tricks or templates [1, 28].
• Self-Assessment:
• Band 7-9: Can assess their own performance by recording, transcribing, and analyzing their speech, and evaluating their performance against the official IELTS marking criteria [29, 30]. They are able to identify their weaknesses by looking at transcriptions of their answers [30].
• Lower Bands: May not understand that self-assessment can improve their performance [31].

In essence, Band 7-9 candidates focus on genuine communication, using natural language and simple, accurate vocabulary and grammar to clearly answer questions, and developing those answers fully. They demonstrate a natural flow of speech and a range of vocabulary and grammar use. They are comfortable with their level of English and don’t try to pretend to be better than they are [32]. Lower-scoring candidates, on the other hand, often rely on memorization, over-complicate their language, and fail to develop their answers effectively, thereby demonstrating a lack of genuine communication skills.

Detecting Memorized IELTS Answers

Based on the sources and our conversation history, here’s how IELTS examiners identify memorized answers:

• Unnatural Delivery: Examiners can spot memorized answers through unnatural, robotic, or overly formal delivery [1, 2]. Genuine communication flows naturally, whereas memorized responses often sound stiff and rehearsed [2, 3]. The test taker may sound like they are talking to a robot rather than a normal human being [2].
• Inappropriate Length: Memorized answers are often either too long or too short for the question being asked [1, 2]. An answer that is excessively detailed for a simple question raises suspicion, as it suggests the test-taker is reciting a prepared script [2, 4]. Also, when test takers give short, undeveloped answers, this may also suggest that they are relying on memorization or a template [1, 5].
• Off-Topic or Incoherent Responses: Memorized answers often fail to directly address the question asked, because the test taker is focusing on reciting a prepared answer rather than responding naturally to the question [2, 4]. The test taker may also launch into a prepared response even when it is not appropriate for the question asked [4].
• Lack of Spontaneity: Examiners can identify memorized responses when test takers struggle to answer follow-up or unexpected questions [1, 4]. If a test taker gives a prepared answer to a common question and then falters or becomes incoherent when asked a related but unexpected question, it is obvious that they were relying on memorization [4, 6].
• Inability to Adapt: Test-takers using memorized answers struggle to adapt their language and ideas to the specific questions asked [4, 6]. They tend to use the same vocabulary and grammatical structures regardless of the context, which is unnatural in a genuine conversation. This shows a lack of flexibility and an inability to communicate effectively in English [6, 7].
• Overuse of Complex Language: Test-takers may insert complex vocabulary or idioms inappropriately in an attempt to make their answers sound impressive, rather than focusing on clear communication and accuracy [4, 6, 8]. Examiners notice when the test-taker focuses on using “big words” rather than answering the question [8]. When test-takers use fancy vocabulary that they are not comfortable using, this also suggests memorization [4, 9].
• Inconsistent Performance: If an examiner suspects that a test-taker is using memorized answers for common questions, they will ask more difficult questions on unusual topics to test the candidate’s genuine communication skills [6, 10]. Examiners know that test takers’ real speaking ability will be revealed when they are asked unanticipated questions, so they will base their score on these responses, not on memorized responses to common questions [6].
• Mismatch with Real Communication: IELTS is a communication test and examiners are trained to identify and evaluate natural communication skills [6, 7]. Memorized answers do not demonstrate authentic communication and will not be evaluated as such [7].

In summary, IELTS examiners use several methods to detect memorized responses, including analyzing the test-taker’s delivery, coherence, spontaneity, adaptability, and vocabulary. Examiners are trained to recognize a lack of natural communication, so they will focus on evaluating a test-taker’s real level of English, rather than their ability to memorize.

IELTS Speaking Part 1: Common Mistakes

Based on the sources and our conversation history, here are the common mistakes in Part 1 of the IELTS speaking test that lower scores:

• Memorized Answers: Many candidates memorize answers to common Part 1 questions like “Tell me about your job,” or “Where are you from?” [1]. Examiners are trained to spot these answers [2], and they will lower a test taker’s score [1]. Relying on memorized responses instead of speaking naturally is a major pitfall [1, 3, 4]. Examiners can easily identify these answers and will ask more difficult questions to assess a test-taker’s real English level [2, 3].
• Overly Long Answers: Students often give excessively long answers, which are frequently associated with memorized responses [5]. Part 1 questions don’t require lengthy responses; a natural, conversational tone with a reasonable amount of detail is more appropriate [5].
• Off-Topic Responses: Some test takers might stray from the topic or fail to answer the question directly, because they are focusing on reciting a prepared response [3, 5, 6]. Answers should be relevant to the question asked and should not wander off into irrelevant details [5].
• Robotic or Overly Formal Delivery: Some candidates speak in a very formal or robotic manner [5]. This often stems from stress or the misconception that the test requires a formal style of speaking [5]. Speaking unnaturally will lower a test-taker’s score because it does not demonstrate genuine communication skills. A natural, conversational tone is more appropriate [5, 7].
• Too Short Answers: Giving very short, one-sentence answers is another common mistake [8]. Examiners need enough information to assess a test taker’s language ability. Giving only very brief answers does not allow them to do this effectively [3, 8].
• Trying to Impress the Examiner: Some test takers try too hard to impress the examiner by using overly complex vocabulary or grammar [7]. This can lead to mistakes and a lack of coherence [7]. It is better to focus on clear, accurate communication than trying to use very fancy or high-level language [3, 9-12].
• Failing to Develop Answers: Merely answering a question without providing any explanation, example, or detail is not sufficient for higher scores [10, 13]. It’s important to add some extra detail or an example to answers to fully develop them [13].
• Not Answering Naturally: Students should not answer in a formulaic way [10]. Thinking of answers in a very structured way, such as always including an explanation and an example is unnatural [10]. It is better to speak naturally, as if you were speaking to a friend, and develop answers in a natural way [10, 13].
• Limited Range: Examiners are testing the test taker’s range of grammar and vocabulary, and a failure to respond to a question that would test that range is a clear indication to an examiner that the test-taker has a limited range [14].
• Not Attempting Answers: Some test takers may not attempt to answer questions, or just say “I don’t know,” which is very obviously an indication to the examiner that a test-taker should receive a lower band [4, 14].

In summary, lower scores in Part 1 often result from a lack of natural communication, relying on memorized responses, failing to develop answers, and trying too hard to impress the examiner with overly complex language. It is better to speak naturally and answer the questions in a clear, accurate, and well-developed manner [3, 10].

IELTS Speaking Part 2: Common Mistakes

Based on the sources and our conversation history, here are some common mistakes IELTS candidates make in Part 2 of the speaking test:

• Rigidly Sticking to Bullet Points: Candidates often treat the bullet points on the cue card as a rigid structure, reading them one by one without any flexibility or development. This approach often results in a disjointed and unnatural monologue, where the candidate simply addresses each point in isolation without connecting them into a cohesive narrative [1]. They may also run out of things to say because the bullet points do not give them enough to go on [2].
• Running Out of Ideas: Because candidates rigidly stick to the bullet points, they often run out of ideas, which can cause them to stop speaking before the two minutes are up. Candidates need to develop their ideas and expand on each bullet point to avoid this problem. [2]
• Using Memorized Templates: Many students rely on memorized templates, such as the “past, present, future” (PPF) structure, to organize their answers. This approach can make responses sound unnatural because it forces the test taker to think about which tense to use, rather than responding to the cue card in a genuine way [2].
• Failing to Speak for the Full Two Minutes: Candidates must speak until the examiner stops them, usually around the 2-minute mark, but some candidates stop talking much earlier, which can affect their score [2]. It’s crucial to develop the answer enough to speak for the required duration.
• Not Using Personal Experiences: Candidates may not use their own personal experiences and real stories, which can make it more difficult to speak naturally [3]. Using real-life examples makes it easier to speak fluently and use appropriate vocabulary and grammar [3].
• Trying to Use Complex Language: Candidates may try to use very complicated vocabulary or grammar, which can lead to errors and a loss of fluency, or a robotic delivery [4]. It is better to use language that you are comfortable with, rather than attempting to use language beyond your level [5].
• Not Developing Answers: Candidates may fail to expand on the bullet points with explanations, examples, or stories, thereby producing an undeveloped and unconvincing monologue. It is important to fully develop answers by explaining ideas and giving examples or details [6].
• Not Understanding the Purpose of Part 2: Part 2 is a monologue, where the examiner is listening to assess a test-taker’s fluency, pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, and whether the candidate can answer the question [1]. It is important to focus on communication, and not just simply presenting a series of ideas.
• Focusing too Much on Structure: Candidates should not get bogged down by the structure of the bullet points, but rather focus on answering the question by speaking like a normal human being [1].

In summary, candidates often struggle in Part 2 due to a rigid approach to the bullet points, reliance on memorized structures, a lack of development, and a failure to use their own experiences to give a natural and fluent monologue. It is better to be flexible with the cue card, and give a genuine response based on personal experience.

The IELTS Speaking “Birthday Cake” Analogy

The “birthday cake analogy,” as described in the sources, is a method for understanding how to approach vocabulary use in the IELTS speaking test [1]. It emphasizes using simple, everyday language as a foundation, with more complex vocabulary sprinkled in sparingly, rather than focusing on using complex vocabulary as the basis of all responses [1].

Here’s a breakdown of the analogy:

• The Cake: The birthday cake represents a candidate’s overall language use in the IELTS speaking test [1].
• Basic Ingredients: The bulk of the cake is made up of basic ingredients like milk, sugar, flour, water, and butter [1]. These represent simple, everyday words that should form the majority (97-98%) of a candidate’s vocabulary use [1]. Just as these simple ingredients are the foundation of a good cake, basic, common vocabulary should be the foundation of your English in the speaking test [1].
• Sprinkles: The sprinkles on top of the cake represent the higher-level words, idioms, phrasal verbs, and colloquialisms that are used to make the cake look fancy [1]. These more complex words and expressions should be used sparingly and appropriately, like the sprinkles on a cake [1]. They add some flair and complexity but are not the core of the response [1]. These elements should be sprinkled in, not used constantly in every sentence, and should be used accurately and appropriately [1, 2].

The analogy highlights that, like a birthday cake, IELTS speaking is not about using complex language all the time, but about using a solid foundation of simple, accurate language with some well-chosen, higher-level words and expressions [1, 2]. A candidate’s score will be lowered if they try to overuse complex language or idioms without a solid foundation [2].

Here are some key points of the analogy:

• Focus on Natural Language: The analogy emphasizes that the main goal is to sound natural and idiomatic [1].
• Use Simple Words Effectively: Most of the words used should be simple, everyday words [1].
• Sprinkle in Complex Vocabulary: Candidates should “sprinkle” in more complex words and phrases, but not force them in [1, 2]. These should be used correctly and appropriately [2].
• Avoid Overcomplication: Overusing complex vocabulary can make communication less clear and increase errors [1, 2]. Candidates should not try to use high-level vocabulary if they are not comfortable using it, or if it does not fit the context of the conversation [2].
• Prioritize Accuracy and Fluency: It’s more important to use vocabulary accurately and speak fluently than it is to use complex or unusual words inappropriately [3-5]. If you are trying too hard to use complex language, it will negatively affect your fluency [4].
• Don’t Memorize Lists of Words or Phrases: Candidates should learn to use vocabulary through everyday use and practice, rather than memorizing lists and inserting them inappropriately [2]. It is better to use words that you know and can use accurately than to try to force in vocabulary that you do not fully understand [2].
• Understanding Over Memorization: The key to language is use. Candidates should seek to understand vocabulary so they can use it naturally, rather than merely memorizing it [2].

In essence, the birthday cake analogy is a reminder to prioritize clear, accurate, and natural communication over trying to use overly complex vocabulary. The emphasis should be on using simple language well, with higher-level vocabulary sprinkled in where appropriate [1, 2]. The key is to use vocabulary naturally and correctly, not to force high-level words into every sentence [2].

IELTS Speaking Test Traps and How to Avoid Them

Based on the sources, here are the “traps” that IELTS examiners set for test takers in the speaking test, along with how to avoid them:

• Unusual Questions in Part 1: Examiners often start with predictable questions about a test taker’s home, work, or hometown, but they will also ask unusual questions that are not expected [1-3]. This is to catch out test takers who rely on memorized answers, because those test takers will be unable to answer unusual questions. The trap is that examiners will assess your real English ability based on how you respond to unexpected questions, rather than on your prepared answers [3]. To avoid this, do not memorize answers. Instead, be prepared to answer any question naturally, and avoid falling back on prepared answers [3].
• Increasingly Difficult Questions in Part 3: If examiners believe a test taker is capable of achieving a higher band, they will ask increasingly difficult and abstract questions in Part 3 [4-6]. The trap is that some test takers will become stressed or tired by the end of the test and will give up on attempting an answer, which indicates to the examiner that the candidate is not capable of achieving a higher score [5, 6]. To avoid this, always attempt to answer the questions, even if you are not familiar with the topic. It is better to communicate in English even if you do not know anything about the topic than to give up [6-8].
• Topic-Specific Vocabulary: Examiners test a range of topics to assess a test taker’s vocabulary [8, 9]. The trap is that many students memorize lists of “band 9 words” and attempt to use these words in every answer, but examiners are more impressed by simple, topic-specific vocabulary than by complex words that do not fit the context [8, 9]. To avoid this, focus on using simple, accurate words that relate to the specific topic, rather than trying to use high-level words in every answer [9]. This is part of the “birthday cake” analogy, where you use a foundation of simple, common language with more complex language added as “sprinkles”.
• Over-reliance on Memorized Answers and Templates: Test-takers who rely on memorized answers for common questions in Part 1, or try to use memorized templates in Parts 2 and 3 will be caught out by the examiner [1, 2, 10, 11]. Examiners are trained to spot these, and will ask more challenging questions to evaluate a test-taker’s real English ability. A test taker who uses a memorized template or answer is not engaging in genuine communication [11, 12]. To avoid this, focus on speaking naturally and honestly about your own experiences, and don’t rely on pre-prepared responses or templates [1, 12, 13].
• Focusing on Tricks Instead of Genuine Communication: Many test takers focus on “tricks” and “hacks” that they find online, instead of genuine communication skills, and this will hurt their performance [14-16]. The “trap” is that these tricks are not effective, and are often used by people who are not confident in their real level of English [9, 14, 16]. To avoid this, focus on improving your genuine English ability, rather than trying to use tricks to “fool” the examiner.
• Believing that a High Score Requires Complex Language: Many test takers mistakenly believe that using complex grammar and vocabulary is necessary to get a higher score, but this often leads to errors [17, 18]. The trap is that the focus on using complex language will take away from accuracy, fluency, and coherence [11, 17, 18]. To avoid this, prioritize accuracy and fluency using the language that you already know, and do not focus on using grammar and vocabulary that are beyond your level [14, 18-20].
• Trying to Memorize Sentence Patterns: Many test takers attempt to memorize and use high level sentence patterns, but they should focus on answering the question clearly [15]. A test-taker may also attempt to use the high level sentence patterns incorrectly, which will lower their score [15]. The trap is that a test taker will not be able to communicate clearly if they are focused on using memorized sentence patterns, rather than answering the question. To avoid this, focus on communicating clearly, and use simple, direct language when possible, and always focus on answering the question [15, 21].
• Not Understanding the Marking Criteria: Some test takers do not understand how the speaking test is scored, and they do not use the test questions to learn more about how to use the marking criteria [22]. The trap here is that the test takers are unable to identify their own strengths and weaknesses, and are not aware of the areas of the test that they need to improve. To avoid this, use practice questions to evaluate your performance based on the marking criteria, rather than merely practicing a lot of questions [22].
• Seeking too much feedback: It is good to get feedback, but a test taker will not improve if they simply continue to do mock speaking tests after they get feedback, without focusing on improving their weaknesses. The trap here is that test-takers can end up relying too much on feedback sessions, instead of working on improving their weaknesses. To avoid this, focus on improving the areas that the feedback has indicated are your weaknesses. Do not simply continue to take mock speaking tests without improving the areas that you need to improve [23, 24].

In essence, the “traps” in the IELTS speaking test are designed to identify candidates who lack genuine communication skills and who are trying to “cheat” the system, often due to lack of confidence [9, 16]. To avoid these traps, it’s crucial to focus on developing your actual English skills, speaking naturally, answering questions directly and fully, and demonstrating your ability to communicate effectively in a range of situations [16]. The key is not to try and trick the examiner, but to show them your real English ability by demonstrating fluency, coherence, pronunciation, and a good range of grammar and vocabulary [16, 25].

IELTS Speaking Vocabulary: Accuracy, Range, and Idioms

Vocabulary in the IELTS speaking test is assessed based on both accuracy and range [1]. Examiners are not looking for test takers to use complex words all the time. Instead, they are looking for test takers who can communicate effectively using appropriate and accurate vocabulary [1-3]. Here’s how the sources describe the assessment of vocabulary:

• Accuracy: This refers to whether you use words correctly. Do you use words precisely and appropriately, or are you making errors, such as using the wrong word or using a word incorrectly [1]? For example, you could say “This is a phone,” which is correct, or “This is an electronic device,” which is also correct, but you would not say, “This is a sitting device” when referring to a chair [1]. Using words incorrectly will lower your score [3, 4].
• Range: This refers to the variety of words you can use to discuss different topics. Examiners want to see that you can use topic-specific vocabulary, which refers to words and phrases related to a specific topic [1, 5]. For example, if you are discussing phones, you should be able to use words like “screen,” “resolution,” or “memory.” If you are discussing pens, you should be able to use the word “ink” [1].
• Topic-Specific Vocabulary: Examiners are trained to ask about a range of topics to assess if you can use appropriate vocabulary for various situations [5]. They are more impressed with simple, topic-specific words than with complex words that do not fit the context [3, 5]. For example, you would not use the word “gigabytes” when talking about pens because that is a word used to describe the memory of a phone [1].
• Idiomatic Language: Examiners listen for “idiomatic expressions,” which include not only idioms, but also phrasal verbs, informal words, and colloquialisms [3]. This refers to expressions that are natural and correct, as a native English speaker would use them [3]. However, it is important to understand that:
• Idioms are not required to get a good score. Some test takers use no idioms at all and receive a high score [6].
• Using idioms incorrectly will lower your score. Do not try to use an idiom if you are not sure how to use it [7, 8]. If you use an idiom incorrectly, it will indicate to the examiner that your level of English is not very high [9]. For example, the idiom is “let the cat out of the bag,” not “let cut out of bag” [7]. Another example is to say “it’s a piece of cake” rather than “it’s piece of cake” [4].
• Do not memorize idioms and try to force them into every answer, because this will lead to using them inappropriately [8].
• The “Birthday Cake Analogy”: This analogy emphasizes that you should focus on using simple, everyday words as your base vocabulary, and then add more complex words “like sprinkles” when appropriate [3].
• Focus on Simple Words: The majority (97-98%) of the words that you use should be simple, everyday words [3]. You should be comfortable using these simple words [8].
• Sprinkle in Complex Words: Higher-level vocabulary, idioms, and phrasal verbs can be added like “sprinkles” on a cake, but these should be used sparingly, appropriately, and accurately [3, 8].
• Do not prioritize vocabulary over other aspects of speaking: Do not focus too much on trying to use complex vocabulary, because if you are thinking too much about vocabulary, it will affect your fluency and accuracy [10-12].

In summary, to get a high score in vocabulary, you should focus on using words accurately, using topic-specific vocabulary, and using a wide range of vocabulary naturally, rather than using complex vocabulary in every sentence or trying to memorize lists of words [3, 8, 12]. You should avoid overcomplicating your answers, and instead make sure that you use a good foundation of simple and accurate vocabulary, and only sprinkle in more complex language if you are comfortable using it correctly [3, 11].

The Original Text

you’ve just found the Ultimate Guide to I speaking this is the longest most detailed guide to I speaking you’ll find anywhere on the Internet it’s going to help you understand things about the format of the test how you can improve your speaking at home for free and give you the same strategies thousands of my students have used to get a band nine on the speaking test not only that we’re also going to give you the same grammar and vocabulary that we’ve only ever shared with our bond n VIP students before and then at the end of the video we’re going to do something very very special we’re going to share a mock test that we’ve never shared before it’s from a student who you might have seen before where she got a band8 we’ve showed her lots of the things included in this video and then we invited her back to our studio to see if she could improve from a band eight to a band nine but let’s start by helping you understand the three different parts of the speaking test and share with you those strategies that our band n students have used to succeed so without further ado let’s jump into it so let’s start off by going through the three different parts of the I speaking test and also tell you the characteristics of a band 5 to 6.5 student versus a band 7 eight or nine student the vast majority of the candidates that the examiner will see will be in and around these scores these are the average scores and vast majority of examiners are seeing things like and these students do very particular things that are very easy for the examiners to spot they are very very different from band seven eight and nine students so what we’re going to do is first of all go through each part and tell you what these things are that these students do and then show you one of our students and you can decide whether they are doing these things here or these things so part one normally the easiest part but it is where a lot of students mess up and they do a few things that are very avoidable the most common thing that examiners hear and see is a memorized answer the reason why they hear so many memorized answers is in part one because these are quite predictable questions like tell me about your job your studies where you live where you’re from a lot of students will memorize answers in the hope to impress The Examiner but it’s very very easy to spot these and it actually lowers your score related to that are very long answers and these two are related so often students will go online they’ll go on to YouTube they’ll go on to websites that have these kind of template answers and often those are just way way too long you don’t have to give very long answers to a question like do you work or do you study or tell me about where you live imagine you are in a normal situ situation imagine you are meeting someone for the first time and they say where are you from you wouldn’t talk for 20 minutes also sometimes these are off topic so again these three are kind of related because the examiner will ask you quite predictable questions in part one but then if they think that you have memorized answers what they’ll do is they’re a bit sneaky they will throw in very unusual questions like how often do you wear hats do you like hats when was the last time you had a birthday cake these are all questions that you’re not expecting and it’s really to catch out people who are just relying on memorized answers and that is a really big sign to The Examiner that you don’t know what you’re doing and you’ve just memorized a bunch of stuff the other thing that is quite surprising for many people is that they sound very formal or another way to say this would be they sound robotic they sound like you’re talking to a robot now this could be because of stress this could be because of nerves but it also could be that you have just been taught the wrong way often teachers with very little experience and students who don’t know the test very well think this is a big important test this is a very formal occasion I should speak like this hello my name is Chris you do not need to do that I’m going to show you uh some answers from my students and I want you to think about do they do any of these things or do they do other things and then we’ll talk about the main characteristics of a band 7 eight or nine students to thank you for watching this video I want to give you a free course that has helped thousands of students improve their I speaking score what it’s going to do is take you through every single part of the test and give you strategies for part one part two and part three and also allow you to practice at home for free and get feedback to sign up for that for free all you have to do is just click the link in the description thanks very much and let’s get back to the video do you ever miss being in high school um I do actually because um I started working very early I did not get to experience the University or college so um the memories that I have or the friends I have is from high school and I do think about times where we could just go back and have a reunion and like have that moment again do you have any animals in your home as pets yes I have two dogs they’re both from the shelter the animal shelter the rescues um yeah I’ve always had pets our family really likes keeping animals around so you can probably hear there that it didn’t sound very memorized it wasn’t very long they stayed on topic and it sounded like a normal conversation especially band n students it doesn’t seem like you’re talking to an i candidate it feels like you’re talking to a friend or talking to a colleague they will also always answer the question directly so if you ask them do you like Huts it’ll be yes I like Huts if you ask them what’s your favorite flavor of birthday cake they will say vanilla or chocolate even though they might have never thought about that before they will still have enough English and enough ability to answer any question now let’s talk about seasons of the Year what’s your favorite season of the year well um I love anytime when the Sun starts to come out so around spring or early summer before it gets too hot you know I just love a little bit of vitamin D and it makes me happier as well so that is um definitely better than the winter what do you do when it gets too hot in the summer hide I don’t to also you know go into any kind of buildings which air conditioning and I have to fan on every night when it’s really hot so yeah when it gets really hot in the summer you know I really need a lot of like fan and you know kind of just anything I can hold with me when I’m go out as well now none of those answers were very long but they did develop their answers so there’s enough development normally what they do is they will directly answer the question and then they might add in some explanation an example maybe a little story maybe a little bit of extra detail again there’s no set number of sentences you shouldn’t go into the exam thinking I must use two sentences or three sentences or I must not go over three or four sentences because that’s just too much thinking we want to remove as much thinking as possible and just allow you to answer questions naturally a good little tip is if you are confused about this imagine you’re starting a new job and you’re meeting your colleague for the first time and they say to you you know where do you live you probably wouldn’t just say London like because that’s a little bit rude to be honest um it doesn’t really give people a lot to go on you might say oh I’ve just moved to London I’ve actually um just moved to an area called Wandsworth it’s really nice it’s close to the river so you can see there that I didn’t really think about how many sentences to use there or whether I should use an example or whether an explan I just thought how do I sound like a normal human being okay so let’s move on to part two of the speaking test part two you will get a q card like this one and you will have one minute to prepare your answer and then you will be asked to speak for up to 2 minutes and this is slightly different from part one and part three because this is a monologue The Examiner isn’t asking you questions The Examiner isn’t interacting with you the examiner is just sitting back and listening to you it’s a really important part for two reasons number one it’s very unusual to speak for up to 2 minutes in a foreign language often this is the first time anyone has ever done this so it can be quite daunting and the second reason is more important because the reason I think they put this part in here is because it gives the examiner a real chance to just focus on what you’re saying focus on your fluency your pronunciation are you answering the question your grammar your vocabul so it’s really important that you do well and you avoid these things that average students do so the first one might be quite surprising they rigidly stick to bullet points so it’s important that you understand the bullet points there are there to help you they’re not there to hinder you so what average students normally do is they will just read bullet point number one then oh what do I say about bullet point number two I get to bullet point number three I don’t know what to say uh uh uh uh let’s go on to bullet point number four and then before they know it they have run out of things to say and they’re only 30 seconds in which is going to lower your score you must speak until the examiner stops you in and around the 2 minute Mark B 78 and N students do something very very different which we’ll talk about in a second we’ve already mentioned this they often run out of ideas this is because they’re just sticking to bullet point 1 2 3 4 doesn’t really give them enough to go on and they just stop talking and I often hear students trying to make things way too complicated by using some kind of trick or template that they’ve memorized for example a very popular one is ppf past present future the intention is to make things easier for you but it can end up making things more complicated because it’s a very unnatural way to answer any question when have you ever been in a coffee shop and someone has asked you a question and you think hm I’m going to talk about the past then I’m going to talk about the present and then maybe compare the present with the past and then talk about the future you’re just doing way too much thinking and often students will get questions that they don’t know what they’re going to do in the future or the past is just not applicable at all so this can make things worse and ban 78 and N students don’t use this at all what do they do let’s listen to one and think about what they do differently the first time I met a new friend so I’m going to go way back it was my first year of school kindergarten and I met a girl named Aman prit k um she we were about I think we just turned four years old uh we met obviously in kindergarten um first year of school uh what I liked about her when I first first saw her I mean we were sitting together with the teacher made us sit next to each other and um she had this long hair and it was like sectioned into two parts and it was just braided all the way down and she had the cutest face I’ve ever seen she had this little fluffy marshmallow like face I guess that’s all it takes when you’re a kid to want to be friends with somebody um and then I tried to so there’s like this little thing that kids do where they put their thumb out to show other kids that I want to be your friend um and then if you don’t want to be friends with them you do this it’s like a silly little thing so I did this to her I put my thumb out to say hey do you want to be friends and she was like this and I was heartbroken I was like how can she know want to be my friend um and then I saw her again the next day um and the day the next day after that and the day after that and then eventually we ended up becoming best friends she she did it back to me obviously at some point she was my first best friend that I ever had in life she was from Punjab which is a part of India um and her mom used to make the most amazing it’s called parata it’s like this stuffed bread it’s like they put uh potato and spices into like um into a flatbread and my mom used to make something called CRA which is sweet semolina situation that’s the end of the two minutes okay so again this was very natural the student just was able to speak naturally the conversation flowed and they were able to speak quite fluently and easily for up to 2 minutes how did they do that well the first thing that they did was they just focused on the main topic again if we look at at the Q card you will have the bullet points here but at the top this is the main topic by just focusing on the main topic this gives you a lot more freedom to speak fluently and naturally rather than trying to do bullet point 1 2 3 4 so again it sounds like a natural conversation because again they’re not using any tricks any memorized structures or anything like that it is again like talking to someone in a coffee shop up saying let’s talk about this or what do you think about this now you might be thinking well should we not use the bullet points well they do use the bullet points but they only use them when it’s appropriate to help them so they use the bullet points to help them speak naturally so what does that mean well if they see bullet point number one and they think I can easily talk about that they talk about that but if they look at bullet point number two and think I don’t really know about that I don’t feel comfortable talking about that don’t talk about that and then they can talk maybe about bullet point number three and bullet point number four but they can add other things below the bullet points other things related to that main topic all they’re doing is just picking things that make it easy for them to speak like a human being naturally to The Examiner now let’s move on to part three part three in my opinion is the most challenging part because it requires the student to do a few special things that most students are not used to doing so let’s look at part three for these band five 6.5 students so the biggest difference between part one and part three is part one is just as I’ve said every day getting to know you chitchat Small Talk type questions part three are more academic style questions it doesn’t matter if you’re doing academic or general training the reason why I say they’re more academic style questions is they’re asking asking you about more abstract topics so in part one they might say something like do you use public transport that is a question about you it’s impossible to get it wrong but in part three they might say something like should governments give citizens public transport for free or what are the advantages and disadvantages of using a private car versus buses for example these are not really about you you can talk about you but they’re more abstract type questions that require a far more developed answer so what band five 6 6.5 students are doing is they’re often giving very short answers the examiner is not really interested in the answer to the question this is not a knowledge test this is not an IQ test they are testing your ability to communicate and part of communication is developing your answer and we’ll talk about how about eight nine students do that in part three and a second you’ll often hear these students saying things like I don’t know anything about that topic or that was a very very difficult question and they will often just not attempt an answer at all now let me tell you a little secret about I examiners on test day for the speaking test if they think you’re good they will ask you more and more difficult questions because they have to separate up the bound sevens from the bound eights from the bound nines so they’re going to ask you increasingly difficult questions to see if you can cope with it if you don’t answer the question or you just do something like I’ve seen students laugh because they’re probably nervous I’ve seen students just go I don’t know you are basically telling the examiner I don’t deserve one of these higher bands I am one of these lower band students it’s also very very obvious to The Examiner that you want the exam to be over it is a very tiring day it is a very stressful situation The Examiner is just throwing lots of difficult questions at you you’ve been speak speaking in a foreign language for 15 minutes maybe at this stage you just want it to be over what students will do is they will just give very short answers because your brain is screaming at you just give the examiner short answers and you can leave and this ordeal can be over and it’s also very obvious to The Examiner that your range is limited what do I mean by range well the examiner will be thinking about your range of grammar and your range of vocabulary this is an opportunity for them to ask you about lots of different topics and also asking you questions that require more complex grammar structures now they’re not doing this to be mean it’s just the best way to test someone’s language level so when they ask you about a more difficult topic again students won’t be able to answer the question or they will just refuse to answer the question and then they’ll ask you maybe a question that requires a more difficult tense or more difficult grammar structure to answer it effective ly and you’re not able to do that you’re just using those basic structures let how listen to a few answers from our VIP students and think about whether they do these things or whether they do things differently is it easy to predict the weather in your country um I suppose it is yeah uh because like I said earlier uh some parts of India the weather like cannot the temperature doesn’t go over a certain uh degrees but but wherein some parts are really hot and humid throughout the year so I think it’s quite easy to predict but when it comes to um rain or monsoon season it’s a bit hard like last this year sorry a few months ago um in the north of India it was raining heavily and the rain did not stop for um I’d say two weeks so that was not predictable why do you think some people fail in some careers I think one of the main drivers is I think for for people is money and when you do anything solely because of money then it will never work and the reason people fail I think the biggest reason is because they have fail to align the identity with their work because we spend a third of Our Lives you know in work so a very big proportion of it you know needs to feel fulfilled and it can only be fulfilled if you’re you understand understand you know what what you like authentically inside you know and and then you know go into a career but then the reality is that most people then you know jump in and figure it out explore and then will work it out you know in hindsight I guess that’s what life’s about so as you can probably hear they attempt every question doesn’t matter if they’re thrown a difficult question as you you heard there some of the questions were extremely difficult and it was obvious that the student was not an expert on that topic but again it’s not an IQ test it’s not a Knowledge Test best thing that you can do even if you know nothing about that topic is attempt some kind of an answer because you’re explaining there to the examiner okay I don’t know about this topic but my English is good enough I can communicate in English and it is an English communication test and there was lots of development so they answered the question but they also explained why they thought that or why other people thought that they might have thrown in an example or a story related to their life and what you often hear about seven eight and nine students doing is showing the other side of the argument they might say well some people think this but other people think this and I agree with this person or I agree with that person so they’re fully exploring that topic they’re not just saying I think this and they have no problem with range again it is the intention of the examiner to test your language ability the best way that they can do that is to throw these more complex topics that require a broader range of grammar a broader range of vocabulary and as you can hear b seven eight and N students just naturally answer those questions so now you know what to expect in part one part two and part three and that was just a general overview of the difference between lower level students and higher level students now let’s look at some very specific common mistakes let’s get into even more detail so that you can really understand what not to do and then improve your score to about 78 and N so here are some common mistakes okay so what we’re going to do is talk about these very very briefly then I’m going to get my glamorous assistant here to ask me a question I haven’t prepared any answers or anything like that I wanted to be as As Natural as possible and I will pretend to be a student who is doing one of these common mistakes in the comments what I want you to tell me is which of these am I doing my favorite website is is Advantage because it helps me with my is scores okay so that’s the first one uh what do you think would be the problem with that one thank you for making it this far in the video I want to give you 10% off our VIP course I VIP course is the most successful ISS course in the world that is a fact because we have more band seven eight and nine success stories than any other I course in the entire world we do that by simplifying the whole is process supporting you with some of the best is teachers in the world and being with you every step of the way until you get the score that you need all you have to do is just look down in the descript description just click that and you can sign up if you have any questions about the VIP course always feel free to get in touch with us we answer 100% of the questions that we get hope that you become a VIP if not enjoy the rest of this free video Justin ask me what’s my favorite website and I said my favorite website is I Advantage because it helps me with my I scores which of these things do you think is the problem in the comments let me [Music] know okay so it’s pretty obvious it’s too short but why is that a problem so I mean the grammar was fine the vocabulary was fine the fluency was fine pronunciation was fine why is that a problem well you’re not really giving the examiner enough to go on if you give a really really really short answer to a question um and they’re going to be they might ask you follow-up questions like why or can you you know asking you to develop your answer a little bit more that might put you off it might be like oh is am I am I doing something wrong it’ll cause extra stress you want to be developing your answer a little bit more than that now for part one you don’t have to develop it much more than that but just giving one a one sentence answer wouldn’t really be enough and you’d have to add a little bit more detail or an explanation or example or something like that just to develop it a little bit more this is going to be more difficult than I thought I thought this was going to be really easy but trying to answer a question and pretend to be someone else is more difficult than I thought all right so give me another one my favorite kind of weather is cold weather because I do not like to be cold when I am cold I feel bad and I shiver because it is very cold I always like warm weather warm weather is nice that’s why I like the summer time okay so in the comments what do you think about that one was it a memorized answer trying to impress The Examiner too long too short robotic delivery what do you think and do transes robotic delivery yeah so I mean this is not really a student’s fault it can be a couple of things number one it can be because you’re really stressed out um it is a very stressful exam obviously you you know you might have a lot of pressure in terms of it might cost you your job it might lead to your family being you know upset with you you might have a Visa waiting for you it is a very very high Stak test so what happens is people just you know kind of climb up and speak in a very very robotic way and so that is a problem because you’re not being as fluent as you could be also if you are so stressed out that you are speaking in that way then people tend to make in my experience more grammar and vocabulary mistakes because they’re just not relaxed and speaking in a natural way and also sometimes it can cause pronunciation uh issues for the same reason because you’re a lot of people when they’re speaking in that way can speak in a very quiet way like inside their mouth is what how I always describe it rather than projecting their voice so it might make it a little bit difficult for the examiner so there’s lots and lots of problems you can have there the other reason is a lot of people have been taught that the ielt speaking test is a formal academic test and you should speak in a formal Academic Way it’s not it’s a speaking test about how you would speak to a normal person in a normal situation you’re not going to speak in that overly formal overly academic robotic way because that’s not how you would speak to someone like imagine if if Justin and I were having a meeting and I said like how is thing how how is your weekend my weekend was good I went like he wouldn’t really talk like that um so one of the key pieces of advice is just speak to the examiner in the same way that you would speak to a friend or a colleague or a classmate or a teacher someone who you know when you’re not speaking in a really really informal or formal way just in a in a normal way would be good okay so you could say that I’m a real fashionista and I wouldn’t really dress down once in a blue moon because I am a Real Fashion a holic and fashion is my life I would die for fashion so when I’m in the mood I go to the shopping center with my body and we buy the place out and we spend lots of money buying new clothes okay so in the comments what would you say is the problem there trying to impress yeah so that person is trying to impress The Examiner and what they’re doing is they’re just thinking of as many big words and idioms and you know fancy vocabulary as they can they they are not answering the question they’re not thinking about answering the question they’re approaching the test as if it is a vocabulary test you can also try and impress examiner with fancy grammar structures and things like that but that person was principally thinking that the test wasn’t a speaking test it was a vocabulary test and ignoring these things all right so when you’re doing that when you’re focusing just on vocabulary then you’re not really focusing on being coherent and answering the question so there’s a relationship between these two and you shouldn’t worry about one more than the other for example if you are just focusing on grammar and being 100% accurate all the time then your fluency tends to go down all right because you you can’t think of the perfect grammar every single sentence and hope to have really really good fluency same with your vocabulary if you’re just focusing on vocabulary then your fluency and your coherence tend to be affected so there is a relationship between these two remember it’s a speaking test and these are components of of speaking it’s not just a pronunciation test or just a vocabulary test or just a grammar test or just a fluency test so we’ve talked about robotic delivery we’ve talked about trying to impress The Examiner we’ve talked about being too short memorized answers this is when obviously you memorize an answer and this really tricks people be or trips people up because what you’ll do is you’ll memorize an answer for a common question like tell me about your home to or describe your home or one of these like what is your job do you what do you like to do in your free time so they’ll memorize that answer and they’ll give a normally a very very very very long answer to a question and I’m sure you’ve heard people do this what that means is two things normally that will affect your coherence because you’re not really answering the question because you’ll ask someone like uh a really good example was on Friday I was working with a student and I I asked them is your hometown a good place to grow up and they told me about the architecture in their Hometown their transport system in their Hometown their what else did they talk about um education system like telling me everything about their Hometown and I said to them you just memorized an answer and you about your hometown and you’ve given me that so that obviously affected their their coherence what will also happen when you memorize an answer is the examiner will not think oh my God this person is amazing The Examiner will think this person has memorized an answer I’m pretty sure let’s ask them a more difficult question or a question on a different topic or a follow-up question and see how they cope with that they’ll ask you a different question and what people who memorize answers normally do is like uh uh uh I don’t know how to answer that because it’s not a memor because I haven’t memorized an answer so you’re not fooling The Examiner they’re trained in these things they know what you’re doing they do it for for a job um could someone come into your job and try and trick you on something as silly as that hopefully not so why do you think the examiners would fall for that you’ve just demonstrated that you you can’t speak English you’ve demonstrated that you can memorize answers and give very very long answers but it’s not a memorization test all right it’s a speaking test let’s look now at best practices so I’m not going to give you the best practices what I’m going to do is I’m going to ask Justin again to ask me some questions I’m going to pretend that I am a student in the test all right and I’m going to answer them as best I can demonstrate what I would do and then we’re going to come up as a group in the comments you’re going to tell me some of the things that you think I did right remember we’re going to be basing everything on these pronunciation grammar vocabulary fluency and coherence so and compare them also with the the bad examples that we showed you here okay I would have to say hands down my favorite food is stick so my wife cooks this for me every Friday normally I go for a workout and been lifting weights and running around and I’m really really hungry so what I get is steak with chips mushrooms and onions and I just feel fantastic after I have that and normally have a little glass of red wine to go along with that as well so in the comments tell me some of the things that you think I did well and so how could we create some best practices in the comments and that wasn’t like a by the way that wasn’t a perfect answer or an answer that you should copy or an answer that you know that’s the only way to answer answer that what’s your favorite food there are a million ways that you could answer that that could get you a band nine there are a million ways you could answer it to get you a b five the content wasn’t important what we’re trying to get are these best practices the things that you can learn from so that you cannot copy that answer but model it and and learn from it so a lot of you are saying that the answer was too long what a lot of people learn from teachers and from online resources is that you should use a set number of sentences that like you should say three sentences or you should say a set number of words like it should be 50 words long that is not how you should think about it you should think about the answer as how can I answer this question naturally if somebody asked me this question under normal circumstances how would I answer it don’t be thinking of number of sentences or anything like that so reason so put explanation here good coherence which I think what you mean is that I actually answered the question I got to the point and I I answered it fully so developed specific okay rather than just give one answer I’ll give a few different answers and then you can judge it’s better to have a a good sample I love to watch us crime dram so there’s a few of those that I’ve really become addicted to in the past principally Sopranos the wire and Breaking Bad so these are are all very very long series um and what I like about them is they’re very episodic so that you can just go from episode to episode to episode um and it’s try and watch like one or two a night but sometimes it goes a little bit over that because they are very very addictive again from that what would you say are the good things that you could use to model as well someone said the idea generation was good I wouldn’t really say idea generation for the speaking test so much because remember part one is about you you can’t get it wrong so you’re not thinking of an idea like making something up really what you’re doing is just talking honestly about what you’re like that was my favorite food that were those were the the my favorite TV programs and those are much much easier to talk about than to make something up like to generate ideas sometimes you’ll have to do that um but most of the time it’s better just to speak naturally a little pause for thinking yeah so fluency does not mean speaking without pausing ever you do need to think all right um it is better to think for a couple of seconds and then give your answer than to immediately begin talking and then get lost and you know uh uh uh so I don’t think it’s you know mandatory for you to think at the beginning I don’t think that that’s a best practice um but I think the point I’m trying to make is fluency does not mean that you never pause you you it’s a bad fluency is when you’re pausing at an unnatural rate examples grammar I’m fluent okay so I’ll give one more example and then we can talk about what I did I use too many apps I use hundreds of apps actually recently what I’ve been trying to do is to make my phone a lot healthier uh for I’m more to make me more productive so what I mean by that is in the past I had a lot of social media apps such as Facebook Instagram YouTube and that wasted a huge amount of time so I deleted all of those from my phone and now I use apps that can track my number of steps that I’m taking my sleep um General exercise calorie intake things like that um so that will help me improve in the future rather than just waste time with apps that don’t really improve my life at all again what do you think about that one so all of them all of them have some some common themes all right and that’s what you want to do you don’t want to be copying the content or thinking this is exactly what he said or this is exactly what he did just think about the common themes amongst them so definitely a lot of you talked about that they were natural and and yes these are about me there are questions they’re asking about me they’re when you are in the test they’re asking about you so just ask them naturally or answer them naturally and that is going to help your fluency but I also think it helps your grammar your pronunciation and your vocabulary as well because you’re not thinking too much um because it’s just easier to talk about yourself and to talk naturally um also I wasn’t talking in a very robotic way I wasn’t um trying to impress The Examiner I wasn’t trying to insert lots of fancy words or anything like that I was just speaking obviously I’m a native English speaker so that that obviously helps um but as a if you need if you need a seven or above you should be at a high level of English anyway so just speaking in the same way as imagine you it’s your first day of a new class and you’re speaking to your your classmates how would you answer those questions um I so a lot of you talked about the questions are developed I gave some explanations some examples again going back to this answering it naturally I don’t think it is a good idea to answer part one questions in a very formulaic way what do I mean by that so what a lot of people will do do is suggest that you answer explanation and then example like that is a very very formulaic way of answering a question can that help you sure it can help you but do you answer questions in your native language in that way like imagine you’re speaking to your brother your sister or your friend tonight and they asked you what’s your favorite TV program or what’s your favorite food you wouldn’t think like my favorite food is steak explain you know and then okay it’s my favorite food because blah blah blah blah blah example last week I you wouldn’t really do that does that mean that you should never use explanations and examples no but just have them as like tools in your toolkit think about it when you’re developing things I need to give the examiner enough information so that they can understand what I think about this but don’t think about it in a formulaic way like like a mathematical formula you can add a little bit more detail add an explanation add an example but not in a formulaic way hopefully that makes sense coherence so that’s related to I developed the answer and I answered the specific question when they ask you about your favorite food tell them about your favorite food they ask you about apps talk about apps answer the specific question that they’re asking you um and also again developing it will help with your coherence I’m a native English speaker so I don’t want to say my grammar was great or my vocabulary was great because I was you know born speaking English obviously as well with fluency so we not want to talk too much about those I’m not going to Pat myself on the back by saying my English is great when I’m a native English speaker of course but what you will find there was I didn’t try and focus on using really really impressive grammar impressive vocabulary what I did was just answer the questions naturally and by doing that the grammar and the vocabulary and the fluency just flowed from that if your grammar and your vocabulary and your fluency is good enough and you just answer the questions naturally these will take care of themselves but if you go into okay he asked me about my favorite food what’s what are some big adjectives I can think of or what are some idioms I can use then your fluency is going to suffer you’re thinking way too much and you’re probably going to make lots of grammar and vocabulary mistakes because you’ll be thinking about grammar and vocabulary that’s beyond your level that you’re not able to use yet so use the grammar and vocabulary that you are comfortable using to fluently develop your answer and then everything kind of looks after itself pronunciation we’ll not talk about that because I’m a native English speaker and I obviously hopefully my pronunciation is okay next I want to share something very very special with you so part two is probably the most challenging part of the speaking test for many many students what I’ve done is I have taken lots of real part two questions and I’m going to show you how I personally would plan out the entire answer and then show you how I would answer it this is going to fill you with confidence because you’ll see even I don’t really make things really complicated and you don’t need a very highlevel complex answer you just keep things simple give the examiners what they’re looking for and it can really improve your confidence on test day and your score so without further Ado let’s jump into it before I show you each of the Q cards and reveal my band n sample answer for each of them I want to talk about how you can use this video to improve at home so one thing you can do is you can just sit back relax and watch the video that’s fine if you want to do that but if you really want to improve what you can do is each time I show you the Q card you could pause the video spend one minute preparing your own answer and then set 2 minutes on your phone record yourself answering the actual question and then listen to my answer and you can compare now if my answer is completely different from yours that doesn’t matter what matters is you are actually practicing you are thinking about these questions and you are actually speaking and and listening back and thinking about your performance is really really going to help so if you want to do that that is really going to help you improve your speaking or if you just want to sit back that’s fine as well so let’s have a look at these Q cards okay so talk about a time when you received good news so that will be my wife’s passport was before Easter give a background on why why it was good news and what the news was about so that will include that explain why the news was special and will all us to travel um no need for visas and then if we have time we can go into a holiday so I received amazing news just before Easter this year my wife got her new passport now for most people that wouldn’t be great news but for my wife because she’s not from the UK that was her her first passport so it was an an amazing thing to happen just to give you some background on why it was so important and so special um if you’re not from the UK and you get married to a citizen from the UK it takes between five and six years before you can get an actual passport um you can live in the UK but you’re not allowed to get a passport you have to apply multiple times send them mountains of information and spend thousands of pounds trying to get that done and what that does is it creates a huge problem because if you have what’s called a spouse visa for the UK and you don’t have one of the premium passports that allows you to travel around the world it means you’re kind of stuck in the UK so for about five or 6 years we were living in the UK but my family could only travel to my wife Home Country she couldn’t travel to Europe she couldn’t travel to America without going through a very stressful process of applying for visas there so getting this passport was amazing news because it means that we can go on holiday we can travel anywhere pretty much in the world Visa free and it just opens up literally opens up the whole world to my family uh and to celebrate uh I booked a holiday to Port pugal it was the first time my wife had ever been to Portugal and we were able to just Breeze through immigration with her British passport okay so I’m going to go snorkeling and tell a story about Barbados H so the first time and then the second time to it was too wavy no not too wavy it’s too rough and may me try scuba what activity it was where you did it when you did it explain whether you liked it or not okay maybe say why you like it okay so an activity that I took part in I doors recently and well a few months ago actually uh was snorkeling so I’ve never been snorkeling before and in August 2020 uh we went on holiday in Barbados and we had a house right on the beach and I went swimming every day cuz the the water was right there and our next door neighbor uh it was an american guy every day he would go in snorkeling and I didn’t really think that snorkeling was available and then on our last day of the holiday he said do you want to try my my snorkel so I put the snorkel on and I was kind of really surprised and kind of disappointed because there was this amazing coral reef under right under the sea a stone away from my house so you know for 2 weeks I was swimming and could have been watching this amazing scene underneath the water uh so we rebooked our holiday to Barbados we went back again December last year and I brought my snorkel with me I went to the sports shop and purchased the best snorkel I could I could buy and brought it to in my suitcase with me and when we got there we discovered that the sea was too rough so I couldn’t snorkel and the sea was rough and choppy the whole time we were there so not only could I not snorkel I couldn’t even swim so I missed that opportunity again in the future I hope to snorkel um maybe somewhere else that has more reliable snorkeling and but I’d also like to try scuba diving um because I think WEA doesn’t really matter so much cuz you’re underneath the water and it’s a far more immersive experience um but it does require a lot of training so maybe I need to do my party license so that was we on a flight cuz the flight was cancelled um we had to decide so what we did right away [Music] decide Portugal or Spain or stay decided to stay it was great cuz it was quiet um hope for come uh but disappointed because no compensation okay I hope that you’re enjoying this video but YouTube can be a little bit confusing and overwhelming so what we’ve done is we’ve created a free IELTS course called I fundamentals what ielt fundamentals does is it just boils everything down into the most important fundamental things that you need to learn it’s designed to help you remove all of the stress and just get the score that you need in the quickest possible Time by just giving you the information that you need and it covers everything it’s 100% free and it has helped thousands of students get about 7 eight or n if you want to sign up for is fundamentals for free click the link in the description thanks for very much and let’s get back to the video so recently I had to wait nearly one week for a flight so we were flying back from the south of Portugal the Algarve from an airport called pharaoh and probably miss pronouncing that apologies to any Portuguese in the audience but what happened was our flight was at 8:00 p.m. from uh Portugal to back to Belfast and at 1028 so 10 minutes before the flight was about to take off um I got a text message saying that the flight was cancelled with no explanation at all I think it was the French traffic controllers so thanks very much for that and what happened in the immediate aftermath was we just said okay no problem we went to a hotel and it was actually a bonus because we went to a little town in Portugal that we would never normally go to and it was amazing because we got to see the real Portugal they had a a fish market and a vegetable market there and right beside the water so it was nice just to go and Shop with the locals and have coffee with the locals um so it was actually a blessing in disguise later that day we needed to decide either we had to get a taxi to Spain um because there was no um flights available that day from Portugal to Belfast or to take a like a 4-Hour taxi ride to Lisbon the capital um or just wait for the next available flight which was 5 days away um so we decided to do that because when we added up all the cost it was actually cheaper just to stay an extra 5 days and that was an amazing experience because we went back to the same Resort that we stayed in and because Easter had passed it was basically just us in the resort so we got you know not just five star service six-star service and it was really quiet and beautiful and having our flight consult was an amazing experience okay there’s no one that I can think that I really want to work with um so I’m just going to pick someone famous because that’s going to be easy to talk about um so Elon Musk how you know them um Tesla Twitter Etc um what they do so that’s kind of the same thing um the thing I would like so it’s first principles thinking and then he makes money by solving problems um and you could learn a lot from him then what else could we talk about probably the negatives he’s controversial don’t know why but he is I suppose if I had to choose one person to work with it would be Elon Musk Elon Musk is one of the most successful business people in the history of the world one of the richest people in the world so it’s obvious why you would want to work with him because you could learn a huge of Mind from him um he’s famous because not only has he started one successful company I think he started more than 10 successful companies um he’s famous for uh Tesla which was the first company to successfully um start an electric car company SpaceX um he also bought Twitter but he also set up Paypal so he not only has been successful he has been successful in many different domains and the thing that I would really like to learn from him is how he makes money and and uh makes a profit by trying to solve problems for the planet and for people because Tesla makes a lot of money but it is also saving the environment um SpaceX makes a lot of money but it could also save Humanity if there was a natural disaster and we all had to get off the planet then it’s probably the only way we can go is to move to the moon or move to Mars um so his rationale his his modus operand seems to be find a huge problem solve that problem and get paid for it and I would really really like to do that I try and do that in my own business so the is test is a huge problem for thousands of people all around the world we try and make it simple and easier for them to get the scores that they need but I think there’s probably bigger problems that I could tackle now that I’ve solved that I problem this is actually quite a difficult one because I don’t come from a rich family so I suppose I’ll just say that and the only time I can ever remember getting money from my family is communion money um explain what that is and that’s why I received it um it was stolen from me um so um but it makes me very grateful because of why it was stolen stolen in inverted commas I don’t come from a very wealthy family so I’ve never been given a huge amount of money in my life the only time I can remember being given a significant amount of money was for my First Holy Communion so I’m Irish I’m from a Catholic background and if you grow up Catholic when you’re around 7 8 years old you do your First Holy Communion and it’s like a big milestone in a child’s life and normally family members will give you some money so I think at the time I was given like between 40 and 50 pounds so in the you know late 80s early ’90s I don’t can’t remember exactly when that was early ’90s that was a significant amount of money um but I actually reminded my mother the other day um that she took that money from me I said she stole it from me and her response was well we didn’t have any money so I stole it from you to buy you food and to buy you clothes um so I did feel quite AG grieved at the time because a lot of my richer friends were going and buying toys and things like that and it was the first time I’d ever had a significant amount of money and then it was taken from me right away but looking back now it fills me with gratitude I’m very grateful um that it happened because it shows how much my mother struggled and how hard she worked for me in order to set me up um in life and recently my little boy did his First Holy Communion and he got a lot more than than I got and he wasted it on buying things in a computer game and it was a good opportunity for us to teach him about money and teach him about not wasting money now he wants to um buy more things um in the computer game but I told him that he has to work for it and he has to do some jobs around the house if he wants that okay so I’m going to talk about copyright because that’s a law that affects me directly every day um so I’m going to explain what copyright is and basically protects IP um I follow it by being original um protects from people I hate that’s called a spade to Spade um and explain what should happen if you break that law so a law that I like is copyright copyright protects content creators people who create things it protects their intellectual property from being copied um without authorization uh the reason why I like this law is because my job principally 80% of my time is spent making original content so that could be a blog post that could be a YouTube video it could be an image something like that and how this law protects me is um on a daily basis definitely a weekly basis um somebody takes my original work and just copies it completely and what we can do is we can then tell the platforms or sometimes like YouTube tells us hey somebody has copied your your work and what that allows us to do is basically get that taken down and then YouTube YouTube can either ban them from the platform or what they do is they have a three strikes policy I think um where if they do it three times um they’re completely banned from the platform I do like this law but I think that it isn’t enforced enough and it isn’t um respected Enough by other people uh recently we had or not recently throughout our whole whole career um we’ve had a lot of people not only copying our content the words and the images and the video but copying things now like our titles and our thumbnail images which are all original and they take a lot of creativity and brain power and time and work and I absolutely hate the fact that somebody lazy and stupid to be honest can just come along and take that and steal it and when we report people stealing our titles people stealing our thumbnails um YouTube are less likely to take that down because they don’t consider that a copyright violation when if you follow the letter of the law it actually is okay so Portuguese fish stew uh and perfect because in a pot um restaurant allight us to take turns explain how you felt [Music] and great because cuz it allowed us to have a good time with our children an unusual meal I had recently was at a Portuguese restaurant and for the first time my wife and I and my two little boys had Portuguese fish do I’ll not try and pronounce the Portuguese version of it but basically it comes in a big cast iron pot and it has rice and prawns and other fish and other and clams and other shellfish in it the reason why it was such an unusual experience was it was a restaurant that was completely outside and it was set in a big Garden on the ocean on the Atlantic Ocean and there were Cliffs kind of going down to the ocean and it was very special because if you have two young boys they don’t want to sit in a fancy restaurant and this allowed our boys to kind of run around the gardens and and go and have a look over the cliffs and all don’t worry it was safe um and it allowed myself and my wife to take turns playing with the boys or eating our meal and because the stew was in a big cast iron pot as I said um it didn’t get cold so I would eat some while my wife was looking after my boys and then my wife would come back and she would eat some and then I would go and play with my boys and they didn’t eat it because they they think that you know prawns and things like that are gross um but we really really enjoyed it um I would definitely go back to that restaurant again and I would definitely order that meal one thing we did Miss idon was we as we were leaving we discovered they had um a f a Fresh Fish Fresh Fish counter where the you know the daily catch was brought in and you could actually go and choose your fish and my wife love seafood and next time we’ll get the fish stew but we’ll also pick a few other things so be hiking I’ll explain three places or four places um I normally do it alone because I like to listen to podcasts um or to think and then I’ll talk about um physical side of it and then talk more about the mental benefits and then if I run out of time I’ll run out things to say I’ll talk about the weather which kind of a dine side of it yeah that should be enough as you can probably tell from looking at me I’m not the healthiest person in the world but one thing I do enjoy which is quite healthy uh is hiking um I live in Northern Ireland and I live in um a part of Northern Ireland which is world rened for its natural beauty um so right on our doorstep we have beaches we have two beautiful Forest parks we have a beautiful Lake and we’ve got um a a medieval castle that you can walk around um so that means that there’s a huge variety of plac and even within each of those places like within the Forest parks um there are different Trails you can you can go down so you’re always discovering new places and you never get bored um I like to do this on my own um because I don’t only do it for the physical health benefits I do it for the mental health benefits so I have quite a a busy stressful job and being able to just get out in nature um we say it allows you to get your head showered here in in Northern Ireland which means you know just get out and bathe in nature and not literally bathed but just surround yourself with nature and it not only helps you with your cardiovascular health um it can help with stress and de-stressing as well um the only problem with hiking here in Northern Ireland is our weather is notoriously bad um so during the winter it can snow but most of the time it is actually just raining and walking in the rain is not and and especially when it’s cold and when it’s windy is not a great experience but in the summertime um we often get spells of weather maybe two or three weeks um where it is nice and dry and that is an amazing time I generally work a lot less during those times and try and get out every day onto one of the the hiking trails Istanbul uh Champions League um who you go with because my son Sports Man City and why you want to go there to see Man City explain why you want to go for a short period jump in league so there’s not much there so um I’ll talk about why it’s not not suitable for kids um and I’ll talk about other parts of turkey so so it’s a lot of walking uh historical stuff cultural stuff yeah so a place I’d love to go for a short period of time is stanbul in Turkey there’s a very specific reason for that is in a couple of weeks I think it’s two or three weeks uh they have the Champions League final there my little boy Tom who is 8 years old is obsessed with man city so we watch all the Man City games here in the house and he especially loves the Champions League so if they make it to the final I would love to take him to the Champions League final I don’t know if we’ll be able to go however because tickets are quite hard to come by um but if we get the opportunity I’d love to go um I wouldn’t take him there for more than a couple of days I know that Istanbul is an amazing place to visit but I don’t think it’s suitable um for children or not for my kid anyway uh the things that I would like to do in Istanbul such as experience the wonderful food and the historical sites and the religious sites and the cultural things to do there an 8-year-old is just not really interested in those things so we would probably just fly in um stay the night before um go to the match and then come back and I think the matches are held quite late there because of the temperature um so he probably would fly back the next day um I would like to take him back to Turkey but probably not Istanbul um for the for the reasons I just said he doesn’t really like um big cities but he does like Seaside Resorts and there are places like antalia in the south of turkey and I’d like to take him there for a lot longer a week or two so he could experience turkey and all the wonderful things there that they have for kids okay so an old man in the sea I met him in the sea while I was swimming um how you met them met them in the sea what they do uh so he’s lived there for more than 80 years um in the sea nearly every day um told me by the history of the village he’s just calm and Serene he’s a product of his environment and it also worked in tourism so fascinating man that I met recently um back back in December so a few months back um I was swimming in the Caribbean Sea um on the west coast of Barbados and there was an old man who was just lying back relaxing in the sea um and he started talking to me and I discovered that he lived in a house right on the beach in the village where where I was staying um he was more than 80 years old and I discovered that he had been in the sea nearly every day of his life and for me that location is one of the most beautiful places on in the entire universe and it was quite astounding to meet someone who was doing the thing that I wish that I could do and he’ done that for his entire life and what struck me about this man was he was so calm so Serene and when I thought about it he was kind of a product of his environment so um I often wondered after meeting him you know if he grew up in a in a let’s say a poverty-stricken part of the world in a very rough inner city neighborhood would he be that person um so it’s kind of thinking about that nature versus nurture debate and it was also fascinating to talk to him about um The Village in Barbados that he grew up in cuz his I think his grandmother um he said owned most of the land around that Village and she was such a lovely woman and she just gave plots of land to everybody who needed it so the village kind of grew up up around her and he knew everybody in the village and they were all very tight because she had just gifted that land to everybody so fascinating guy so by now you’re probably thinking just give me some quick tips and tricks your test might be coming up very very soon and we’re going to do that but in a very special way we’re going to teach you all the tips and tricks you need by telling you the story of one of our most successful students prianka PR Bianca failed the speaking test four times in a row and we helped her improve from a band six to a band eight in Just 2 weeks by sharing the four most important tips that you need to understand in order to improve so let’s hear priyanka’s story Priyanka failed her speaking test four times in a row and she was about to give up on her dream of moving to Canada forever but after I gave her these four simple tips she jumped from a b six to a band 8 in Just 2 weeks so the other day I got this email Chris my test is in 2 weeks and I’m going to fail again I failed my speaking four times in a row and I don’t know why help so I replied let’s do a one-on-one speaking test and she was right she failed again in fact she got a band Six in fluency pronunciation grammar and vocabulary but I could tell that if she changed just four simple things she was going to to get a band8 on her next test and when I told her this she said do you know my test is in 2 weeks yes do you know that if I fail this time I’ll never be able to move to Canada yes don’t worry every band n student that I’ve worked with used these four simple tips the first thing we needed to work on was her per fluency there were more o and as in every answer than an Elon Musk interview um um um um um um um and prianka had the exact same problem Elon does when he speaks publicly you see when anybody speaks they make these audible pauses these M’s and as’s this is totally normal and we all do this when we’re thinking of what to say next Elon is thinking of very complex things like how to launch a rocket to Mars so he has more pauses M and as because he’s thinking a lot about what to say next and this is exactly the same reason why PR D’s fluency was so bad you see your brain is just like a computer if you’re like me you’ll have hundreds of tabs open in your browser and what happens when you have hundreds of tabs open your computer slows down so you might have the latest MacBook Pro but if you push it too hard it slows down her fluency wasn’t bad she was just trying too hard you see she was taught by other teachers that to get a high score on the I speaking test you need to have have impressive ideas so I asked prianka what happens when you’re speaking in the test and you try and think of complex ideas and she said I freeze and my mind goes completely blank so why try and think of complex ideas the truth is that nowhere in the official ielt marketing criteria does it mention complexity of ideas in fact ideas are not marked at all but just telling students this information doesn’t really change their behavior and their performance on test day so I decided to show Priyanka exactly what to do so I asked her a simple IP speaking question and her answer was a complete mess the usual M’s and as’s and long pauses so I asked her the same question again and I asked her just to change one simple thing and this changed everything she answered the question with band n fluency and Bano was completely amazed you mean simple ideas increase my score yes if you’re trying to use complex ideas in the speaking test you’re making your life 10 times more difficult for no gain at all it’s like trying to eat a bowl of soup with a Swiss army knife instead of just using a simple spoon but just because we fixed her fluency issues doesn’t mean she’s going to get a high score for grammar so let’s look at that next so we did the same thing again I asked her a simple speaking question hi has your your home time changed since you were a child and her first answer was long it was complex it had multiple different tenses on multiple different grammar structures in there do you think an answer like this would get a high score well her answer might be complex it might have a very wide range of grammar but it contained multiple grammar errors so what I did was I asked her the exact same question and I gave her some advice and told her to change just one thing and here is her answer my home Time Has Changed dramatically since I was a child it used to be a small village but it has grown into a bustling City with new opportunities despite the fast pace the sense of community has remained strong right this example only has two of the most basic tenses in the English language it is much much simpler but it contained zero errors and to get a bond seven or above on your I speaking test 50% or more of your sentences must have zero errors to put it simply the more sentences you produce with no grammatical errors the higher your score so which answer do you think would get a higher score the one that has a very wide range of grammar but lots of mistakes or a simpler one with zero mistakes but like many of you prianka was still very worried and she asked me what about range of grammar aren’t I being judged on both range and accuracy well in the text you know the way the examiner asks you a range of different questions well they’re doing that to test the range of your grammar just by answering each question naturally and appropriately you’ll naturally use a range of different grammar structures and tenses all you have to do is just answer the question so in less than 5 minutes we had fixed 50% of priyanka’s problems but she’s still worried about her vocabulary and her pronunciation she’d been told by all of her old teachers that she needed to use complex vocabulary and that her accent was a problem and this was going to lower her pronunciation score so I said listen I have good news and I have bad news the good news is you’ve just fixed your grammar and your fluency issues in less than 5 minutes and you’re probably going to get a very high score the bad news is you’re going to have to completely change everything about your vocabulary and her reaction was very predictable like nearly every student I tell this to they say but my old teacher told me that I need to make all of my vocabulary complex and this is 100% true most teachers especially on YouTube teach you that complex words equal a higher score but we teach students something completely different think of vocabulary as Tools in a toolkit each tool helps you do a job each word you know helps you discuss different topics this tool helps you talk about your hometown and this tool helps you talk about where you’d like to live in the future band 8 and nine students have enough words enough tools so that they can handle any question or any topic you see using fancy vocabulary is like buying a very expensive fancy tool when all you need is a Hummer to hit in a nail the truth is that the vast majority of students that we work with have enough vocab already to get the score that they need but because they’ve been taught to use very highlevel complex words they make lots of mistakes and this actually lowers their score it’s like a band seven is a weight that they can easily lift already but instead of just lifting that weight they try and lift the weight way heavier that they’re not capable of lifting and they end up dropping it on their head so did prianka just answer some questions and use Simple vocabul and live happily ever after and get the score that she needed no like many students she got very angry with me for criticizing her old teachers she told me that this was going to lead to failure and she ended the call so a few days go past and I don’t hear anything from prianka finally I check my email she’s booked another one-on-one speaking test with me but at this point her test is in 24 hours the next day she’s not just worried she’s completely freaking out so I asked her a simple question you failed four times before do you think doing the same thing that you did those four times is going to lead to success you see all these speaking tips and tricks that you’ll find online are just ways of you trying to trick The Examiner into thinking that you’re good enough and that you deserve a higher score than you’re really capable of we have was saying here in Ireland you can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig the truth is is that you are good enough to get the score that you need you just have to use the English level and the words and the grammar and the vocabulary that you already have and show the examiner your real genuine English level so finally pranka said let’s do a practice test let’s do it your way her ideas were simple but relevant her grammar was appropriate and accurate and her vocabulary was wide ranging enough that she could talk about any topic I asked her about and she was able to speak accurately and fluently but this just left her pronunciation if she couldn’t fix her pronunciation issues it doesn’t matter how good the rest of it was she would still fail to get the score that she needed and pran’s big pronunciation problem was that she spoke too quickly if you speak too quickly it is really difficult for the examiner to understand every word that you’re saying and if the examiner doesn’t understand every word they give you a low score but in that final one-on-one session her pronunciation popped up from a band six to a band eight without me giving her any advice at all she changed one thing without me telling her what to do you see once she answered each question naturally and used the grammar and vocabulary she already knew how to use she relaxed this meant that she made fewer mistakes was less nervous and relaxed even more the more relaxed she was the better her pronunciation by fixing everything and being able to speak to the examiner in the same way that she would speak to a friend or a colleague she slowed everything down I could understand 100% of what she was saying and she instantly improved her pronunciation and a result on test day she got an amazing band eight she moved to Canada she found a better job she earned more money and lived happily ever after and she never had to think of the silly I test ever again in this video I’ll reveal the most common sentence patterns used by Band 78 and N students we’ve used AI to analyze thousands of band 78 and N performances so that you can learn from them and improve your score we’ll also be playing a little game throughout the video and if you get enough points you’ll win a very special prize at the end so let’s start off with question one which of these sentence patterns is the most common for band 78 and nine students in part one of the speaking test I’m a my role entails in my professional capacity and I am responsible for final answer the correct answer is a I’m a so when asked do you work or study which is the most common question that you’ll get in part one of the speaking test the most common response from band 7 8 and N students is simply I’m a teacher worker whatever you do but isn’t that a little bit too simple for B 78 and N student well let’s continue and we’ll explain later in the video question two which of these sentence patterns is the most common for b seven eight and N students in part one of the test I originate from I hail from I’m from I am a product of final answer and the correct answer is I’m from so like question one all of the wrong answers are technically correct the English is absolutely fine but in general students that try and use those more advanced options tend to get a lower score I know that doesn’t make any sense right now continue to watch the video and we’ll explain why that makes sense and how to improve your score question three which of these sentence patterns is the most common for b seven eight and N students in part one I prefer I like I normally I live in final answer and the correct answer is I like but these are actually all very very common sentence patterns in part one of the speaking test we use I like and and I prefer to discuss things that we like doing we use I normally to talk about daily routines and we use I live in to talk about the accommodation that we live in or maybe talk about where we’re from again you’re probably extremely surprised that these highlevel students use such simple language it must get more complicated when they start talking in part two of the test let’s move on to part two of the test to find out which of these sentence patterns is most used by about seven eight and nine students in part two of the I speaking test we went to we were going they had gone we had been going so this is a tricky one would you like to phone a friend we use things called narrative tenses to tell stories about past experiences and looking at these four options these are all narrative tenses one is pass simple one is past continuous one is past perfect and one is past perfect continuous any of these could be used to tell a story about the past but the most common tense among these is past simple so I’m going to go for we went to Final Answer correct so now that we know that it’s very common to use narrative tenses in part two let’s look at how to use them in question number number five which of these sentences is incorrect I went to London for 3 years I was watching TV when the phone rang he realized he left his passport at home I’ve been walking for hours before we found a restaurant final answer the correct answer is I went to London for 3 years this is very very important because it shows a crucial point about part two of the speaking test it is not about which sentences you use or the range of different tenses that you use it is about choosing a sentence that is appropriate and accurate so in part two you’ll be given a range of different bullet points and the last bullet point the most common one the most popular one will look like this and explain how you felt about that thing so let’s let’s move on to question six all about how you feel which of these sentence patterns would get the highest score I felt sad I was over Moon I have a feeling of overwhelming Joy words cannot describe the depths of my feelings so that’s a tricky one do you want to ask the audience audience please pick the correct answer and if you want to play along at home in the comments write A B C or D so let’s look at the results 49% think that it’s D 19% C 177% A and 15% think it’s B so 49% of you are wrong it’s wrong for two reasons one you didn’t actually answer the question that’s not actually saying how you feel about anything and examiners are trained to spot memorize answers this signs like a memorized answer so you would actually get a lower score rather than a higher score 19% of you are wrong because this is simply the wrong verb tense remember it’s not just whether the sentence is appropriate but it also has to be accurate 15% of you are wrong because this is simply inaccurate it is wrong to say I was over a moon it is I was over the moon if you say to the examiner I was over Moon again you are lowering your score you’re not increasing your score because you used some magic idiom and well done to the 17% of you playing at home who got it correct it answers the question and it is grammatically accurate it is better than all of the others therefore so let’s move on to the final round where we’re going to look at part three of the speaking test part three is the most challenging it is the most difficult it has the most difficult questions and requires the most complex answers of the whole test so question seven what was the most common sentence pattern for band 7 8 and N students in part three of the speaking test I totally agree not necessarily it’s possible that in my opinion so all of these are very very common but let’s look at what they do so I totally agree we use that functional language to do the job of agreeing with someone not necessarily again the function of that sentence pattern is to disagree with someone it’s possible that the function of that is slightly different it’s possible that is to consider someone else’s opinion and in my opinion you are expressing your opinion and B 78 and nine students use this type of language this functional language all the time because it helps them do things they’re not thinking about the most advanced pattern to use or the most high level structure to use they’re thinking what do I want to say and what sentence pattern helps me do that in other words they’re just solely focused on clearly answering the question and the most common one is in my opinion because you will be giving your opinion a lot but you’re not done there you can’t just give lots and lots of opinions and get a high score you must back it up with explaining your point of view question eight which of these is the most common way s eight and N students explain things like in other words that is to say that because now all of these are actually fine to use all of them are correct all of them can be used to explain why you believe something is true or why you have that opinion but the most common way is because too simple well no because because is the most common way native English speakers use that’s the most common sentence pattern that they use to explain things would a native English speaker get a low score because they use everyday normal English like because so will you get a b nine we’re down to the final question question nine so you’ve stated your opinion you’ve explained that opinion but you need to go even further and there are a few options open for you to help you expand your part three answers even more question nine which of these sentence patterns is the most common way for band 7 8 and N students to expand their answer even further in part three on other hand for example to sum up a nutshell you’re probably going to need a 50/50 for that one do you want to take a 50/50 computer please take away two wrong answers so they’ve got rid of to sum up why is to sum up wrong again think back to what we talked about functional language to sum up is to summarize something it is actually quite rare for highlevel students to summarize what they’re saying in part three so to sum up isn’t technically wrong it is just quite rare for a student to do that in nutshell again we would use that to summarize something we don’t normally summarize things as we just said but in nutshell is wrong because it is inaccurate it is not in nutshell it’s in a nutshell so that leaves us with one wrong answer and one correct answer will you get them all right on the other hand is good showing the other side of the argument is one of the best ways that you can expand your answer even further in part three so you talk about one side of the argument and then you talk about the other side of the argument if you can think of it so it’s good but it’s not right because it’s not on other hand it is on the other hand again this is why a lot of students mess up because they go and memorize a bunch of sentence patterns before the test and that’s why you clicked on the video isn’t it and they use them incorrectly so the correct answer is for example which is just a nice simple way of giving an example so if you use the sentences the sentence patterns in this video are you guaranteed to get a band nine absolutely not the reason why you clicked on this video video is because you want to memorize things many of you have been brought up in education systems where you have been taught that memorization is a skill unfortunately IELTS is not a memorization test it is an English communication test memorization is the opposite of clear communication the key for the speaking test is to understand what type of questions might come up and then have appropriate and accurate simple correct direct ways of dealing with all the most common questions that is why B 7 8 and N students use Simple language most people think that the secret to I speaking success is learning how to do a few things really well but after helping thousands of students get a b nine and high speaking I can tell you the opposite is actually true the real secret is bandl students avoid traps set for them by I speaking examiners and if you fall for them you will fail this video will show you what those traps are how to spot them and how to avoid them so that you can massively increase your score and at the end of the video I’m going to reveal the biggest IP speaking secret that’s contained in one of my favorite movies understanding this secret has done more to help my students get a band n than anything else and you can learn it instantly the first trick they play is really sneaky and it’s the same trick my dad used to play when he worked here as a chef Young Chefs would come into his kitchen and ask him for a job sure my dad would say come back tomorrow cook me something if I like it you can have a job and just before they left he’d say is there anything you do not like to cook and when they arrived the next day for the cooking demonstration he’d ask them to cook the thing they hated so what has my sneaky father got to do with I speaking if you look online for topics that will definitely come up on test day you’ll find these three topics but if you look at the official Cambridge questions you’ll find very unusual topics that you weren’t expecting you see when I examiners ask about your home or your work or your hometown they often get answers like this I am over the moon that you ask me about my hometown it is only once in a blue moon that I get to talk about a topic that is so close to my heart there are a plethora of reasons why one would enjoy my hometown let’s talk first about the 18th century architecture but if the examiner was to ask them about a topic they weren’t expecting such as wigs The Examiner might hear an answer like this I don’t know anything about wigs I’ve never worn a wig in in my entire life and things are going to get much worse for this student because the examiners are trained to spot memorized answers and what they will do if they think that you are giving memorized answers for example about your hometown they will ask you more and more difficult questions on unusual topics and here’s the scary part The Examiner has your memorized answer and your answer to the questions you weren’t expecting they will not base their score on this answer they will base their score on this answer alone because as my father used to say a shed f is only as good as their worst dish not their best dish your memorized answers are not your real level your real speaking level is dealing with questions you w not expecting so if you do get an unusual question on test day answer it like this no I’ve never worn a wig I think that people who wear wigs sound and look ridiculous I think they really just do it for attention or to be funny which isn’t funny at all to be honest now if you thought the examiners were sneaky in part one you’re really going to hate them after I reveal their sneaky trap in part three of the test now before I tell you what it is let me tell you why they do it because once you understand the why you’ll be able to spot it immediately and deal with it much more easily so when I was a kid in primary school I really struggled academically I couldn’t even write my own name properly I couldn’t understand most of the lessons and I wasn’t allowed to sit with the other kids but despite all this I was able to eventually graduate from one of the best law schools in the world you see when I did a test I got all the easy questions wrong but the few really difficult questions at the end of the test that no other students could get correct I would always get those correct and this is exactly what the examiners are trained to do in part three of the speaking test if they believe that you are at one of the lower bands let’s say a band four or a band five they will ask you quite easy questions like these ones but if they think that you deserve one of the higher bands a b seven eight or even nine they will ask you more and more difficult questions notice how in the book here the questions get more and more difficult but the key here is how you react to these more difficult questions these questions will come at the very end of the speaking test when you are stressed you are tired and you just want the test to end and when the examiner asks these questions often students will give answers like uh yes [Music] um I don’t know the thing you have to remember with these questions is the examiner is testing you they are testing are you capable of answering these band seven8 and N questions cuz they have to separate out the band sevens from the band eights from the band nines one of the ways they’re trained to do that is ask these really really difficult questions and then see how you react to them so what if you know nothing about the topic or you just find that question really really challenging are you going to automatically get a low score no let me show you how to cope with those questions so if I was doing the test and I got this question and I know nothing about this topic I am a complete idiot when it comes to this topic I could say something like this to be honest I don’t know anything about this topic I’m not from from India and I don’t know much about cooking but if I had to give an answer um it’s very difficult to predict the future but what I would say is maybe AI will change how the restaurants take orders and how they deliver the food to their customers but that’s just a complete guess now is that the best answer in the world no but it is much better than uh and by attempting an answer and telling The Examiner what I think about that topic even though I know nothing about it I have indicated to The Examiner that I am good enough to deal with those questions and they might then steer the conversation to a topic that I’m more comfortable with and then I can really show them how good I am now the last trap is the sneakiest of them all and it’s got to do with how they test your vocabulary there are thousands of words in the English language and the examiners only have between 10 and 15 15 minutes to test your ability to use English vocabulary so they came up with a genius way of testing it in around 10 minutes see some words we use to talk about this topic some words this topic and some words this topic but if we try to use these words to talk about this topic it doesn’t work these are called topic specific words and we can use them to talk about different topics knowing this information is crucial for two reason reasons first the examiners are trained to ask you a range of different topics on test day so that you can’t just memorize a list of band nine words and put them into every answer and cheat the test in that way secondly the examiners are more impressed with a simple topic specific word than a more complex word that doesn’t really help you answer the question this is why so many students failed the test when they were expecting to get get a really high score because they memorized lists of band nine words and this is why so many of our VIP students get a band 7 8 and N not by memorizing lists of highlevel bond nine words but using the simple topic specific words they already know it’s actually imposs whoa It’s actually possible to avoid 100% of the traps that might come up in the speaking test not just the speaking test but all all areas of the I test every part of the I test reading listening writing has traps contained within it but there is one way that you can spot all of them and avoid all of them and massively increase your score in the movie Catch Me If You Can Leonardo DiCaprio plays a criminal that is being chased by FBI man Tom Hanks Leo’s character plays a criminal who pretends to be an airline pilot and a doctor and a lawyer he also steals money by making fake checks and stealing credit cards The crucial scene in this movie comes when Tom Hanks asks Leo how did he fake passing the bar exam the bar exam is an exam all lawyers have to take before they can become a lawyer it is one of the most difficult tests in the entire world and Tom Hanks can’t figure out how a criminal how a Conn man would be able to fake passing this test and here’s how did it I didn’t cheat I studied for 2 weeks and I passed you see he didn’t need to fake becoming a doctor or a lawyer or an airline pilot he didn’t need to steal money to become rich he was already talented and smart and intelligent enough to do all of these things without cheating without stealing he just needed to stop cheating all of the is’s traps are used to catch cheaters like Leo’s character most I students don’t cheat because they are bad people they cheat because they lack confidence they are scared that they’re going to fail and then they get desperate and resort to listening to these tricks and cheats and hacks and the most fascinating thing is this movie is a true story he now actually works for the FBI and credit card companies have paid him millions of dollars to help prevent future criminals taking advantage of the system if you believe that you’re good enough and you don’t cheat The Examiner is going to give you your real score on test day and you’ll be rewarded with a new life in a new country getting paid way more than you currently are you are more than capable of doing that you just have to show them made it across didn’t die I’m going to give you the the most common idioms used by real band n students and for each idiom I’ll also give you a band n sample answer we’ve helped hundreds of students get a ban nine in the ielt speaking test and we took all of their practice tests and analyzed them using Ai and identified the most common idioms that they used and at the end of the video we’re going to show you the number of idioms that band n students actually use Hint it is much much lower than you think and reveal the biggest mistake that students make when it comes to idioms so that you can avoid that and improve your score so without further Ado let’s get into it so the first idiom is to bite the bullet bite as in to bite something and a bullet something that you put in a gun to bite the bullet what to bite the bullet means is to do something difficult or unpleasant with bravery so you don’t want to do something something very very difficult or unpleasant but you do it anyway you’re brave and you do it so where does this come from well this actually comes from the battlefield from war so many many years ago if you had a wound if you were shot or stabbed or whatever it is and you needed a very unpleasant procedure from the doctor there wasn’t any anesthetic there wasn’t any painkillers so what they would do is they would give you a bullet and tell you to bite down on that bullet I don’t know if this helps or not but that is where it comes from an understanding where idioms comes from really helps you remember them and use them properly so let’s pick a real question and I’ll answer it and use to bite the bullet in the answer I didn’t really want to study law but I was the only one in my family ever to get high grades in their a levels so my mother sat me down one day and said it’s either medicine or law so I went to a hospital on work experience and fainted when I saw the sight of blood I’m too squeamish for medicine so I decided just to bite the bullet and study law now some common cations of this idiom are to bite the bullet it’s normally to bite the bullet not bite the bullet I decided to bite the bullet I chose to bite the bullet and I had to bite the bullet and the correct pronunciation of this is to stress or emphasize bite bite the bullet not bite the bullet the next idiom is a piece of cake a piece of cake means that something is very easy and we often use this when we are reassuring someone who is worried about something so if my little boy was worried about his math test I would say don’t worry it’s going to be a piece of cake you don’t always use it to help someone or give advice to someone we normally talk about it just when we are describing something that is simple that is easy to do where does this come from well there’s quite a debate about where this comes from but the easiest way to think about a piece of cake is that it’s Pleasant it is easy to eat a piece of cake it is a very nice thing you might also hear the idiom it was a cake walk that means walking around looking at cakes a very pleasant night easy thing to do to be honest compared to practicing law teaching English is a piece of cake to give you a concrete example to qualify as a lawyer takes around 6 years of study and work experience to qualify as an English teacher only takes 6 weeks the pay obviously isn’t as good but the students the clients are much nicer and friendlier a common mistake that we hear a lot with a piece of cake is to drop the article to just say it’s piece of cake if you make that mistake it’s not going to improve your ey out score it’s going to lower your ey out score so don’t just pick these and use them without really learning them properly and again the pronunciation is a piece of cake you’re stressing piece rather than cake next is a very very old idiom kill two birds with one stone what this means is to accomplish two goals with with one action and this actually comes from Greek mythology it is thousands of years old and the story of Icarus where they killed a bird with one stone but they were able to get the feathers that’s one goal and to build wings to fly out of a cave that’s another goal but a good way to remember this is just think of something in your everyday simple life and think of one action that you take that achieves two different goals so let’s get a real question and I will use this idiom in the answer yes I actually bought my wife a diamond ring last Christmas so my wife’s birthday is in November and Christmas is obviously in December so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and buy one present for her birthday and Christmas and she was very happy with that because she got one nice expensive ring rather than two less expensive gifts a common mistake that we see with this one is to use kill in its present simple form rather than killed k i l l e d in its past form so if you’re talking about the past just like I did in that question or that answer I used killed two birds with one stone not kill two birds with one stone you could also say I decided to kill two birds with one stone or I chose to kill two birds with one stone just to make sure that you’re not taking the idiom and inserting it into the sentence without thinking about tense without thinking about grammar the next idiom is to let the cat out of the bag to let the cat out of the bag is to reveal a secret Often by mistake where does this come from well think about it if you had a cat in a bag and it was let out of the bag would it be easy to put that cat back into the bag it would be very very difficult and this is the same with Secrets once you reveal a secret once it is out there into the world you cannot take it back so that is where to let the cut out of the bag comes from if you count watches as jewelry then yes for my last birthday my 40th birthday my wife bought me a very special watch that I’ve been looking at and Desiring for for many many years uh the funny story about that is that my credit card and my wife’s credit card are the same so whenever my wife bought it it pinged on my phone and I got an alert from my favorite watch Boutique and it was the exact amount of money that was for this watch cuz I’ve been looking at this watch for ages so the phone kind of let the cat out of the bag a little bit but it was still a very nice gift and a nice surprise the pronunciation of this is to stress or emphasize cat and bag let the cat out of the bag let the cat out of the bag common mistake we see with this one is again missing out the Articles let cut out of bag you shouldn’t take the idiom and then say it you know partly you shouldn’t use it incorrectly a lot of students believe that if you just use idms and it doesn’t matter if you use them correctly or not you’re going to get bonus points and you’re going to get a high score again if you use it incorrectly you’re lowering your score not improving your score the next itm is don’t put all your eggs in one basket what this means is don’t concentrate all of your resources or all of your effort into one single area in order to minimize risk where does this come from well quite literally if you had lots of chickens lots of hens that were laying eggs and you put all of your eggs into one basket if you drop the basket all of your eggs would be destroyed we often use this to talk about our careers or work or investment strategy for example you know don’t put all of your money into one stock don’t put all your eggs into one basket put them into many many different places and then you’re minimizing risk it’s basically about diversification probably not because with the developments in AI recently I don’t think there are going to be I Els teachers or even any teachers in the future I think it would be very foolish for me to put all my eggs in one basket and just hope for the best and hope that IELTS and teaching lasts forever but honestly I don’t think it will the next idiom is once in a blue moon which means it happens rarely so you’re talking about frequency you’re talking about how often something happens and this thing happens rarely probably less than once a year this is quite a literal idiom because literally it is rare to have a blue moon but it does happen sometimes this refers to I think it happens once every 3 years or once every two or 3 years you will have two moons in one calendar month so once in a blue moon means something that doesn’t happen very often I used to go out nearly every night but since I’ve had kids it’s really once in a blue moon most of my friends have either settled down with kids like me or they have moved away so it’s quite rare to have an occasion where a group of friends are all together at the same time uh sometimes at Christmas when a lot of our friends visit Ireland uh during the Christmas period or in the summertime when a lot of our friends have time off I might go out but it is quite a rare occasion these days a common mistake that we see with once in a blue moon is trying to use it when it’s not really appropriate to use it a lot of students have been taught that you know if you use this idiom and it’s really easy to use because it’s talking about frequency um which is quite a you know a basic function of English uh that it will automatically bump your score it’s kind of like easy points students will insert this in in unusual situations remember you’re only using it when the examiner asks you how often do you do that this might come up in part one it might come up part two it might come up in part three but probably part one but if you don’t get a question how often do you do something you don’t have to use it you won’t get a lower score because you didn’t use once in a blue moon only use it when you can use it and when you are actually talking about something that happens very very rarely like once every few years the next one I’m going to give you two edms in one burn the Midnight Oil and burn the the candle at both ends they have similar meanings but are slightly different so I’m going to answer a question and use both of them in the same answer so burn the Midnight Oil is talking about things that are difficult you’re working hard on something you are literally sitting up at midnight working on something so we would often talk about work or studying and burning the midnight oil that means that you’re working very very hard at something doesn’t have to be at nighttime just means that you are working very very hard on something and where does this come from well before electricity our main source of light would have been oil lamps so you would have lit an oil lamp and used that oil so if you were burning the midnight oil it means that you weren’t sleeping it means that you were working at midnight meaning you’re working very hard burning the midnight oil now to burn the candle at both ends has a similar meaning but slightly different burning the midnight oil doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing it isn’t negative per se it’s quite positive you’re you’re working hard on something burning the candle at both ends means that you’re working too much you are exhausting yourself and where does this come from it actually comes from France where they would like everywhere else use candles for light but if you were an aristocrat if you were very very rich you wouldn’t burn the candle on one end you would turn the candle horizontal and you would light both ends and what this meant was that you were wasteful that you were rich and you were just wasteful for Waste sake but over the years the meaning has changed to mean that you are working too hard and you were exhausting yourself it’s often used in the context of people who work very hard so they spend a lot of time and energy in work and then they party too much after after so it’s you know typical lawyer for example um or a banker who is working very very hard all day and then going out all night they’re burning the candle at both ends and they’re going to exhaust themselves yes I used to burn the candle at both hands I had a very much work hard play hard attitude uh because I was a lawyer lawyers are expected to work you know 80 to 100 hours a week but we would often go out to bars and restaurants after after work to blow off steam and to de-stress um which isn’t really sustainable um now I do still burn the Midnight Oil I I work very very hard on my career but you’re more likely to find me tucked up in bed by 900 p.m. than to be out party the next idiom is at the drop of a hat and this means to do something quickly immediately and without any hesitation so without even thinking about it without debating it in your mind you just do it where does this come from well many many years ago hundreds of years ago everybody wore hats if you look at pictures from a long time ago you’ll see that everyone in this country anyway wore a hat and if people were going to fight or run a race or compete in some way what people would do is they would take their hat off and when they dropped their hat that was the sign that the fight was going to begin or the race was about to begin so people would drop their hat you started immediately without thinking about it we actually rent our home we could afford to buy a home but we really value our independence and freedom if you own a home you’re kind of stuck in that location because it can take a very long time to sell that home but if you rent you can move anywhere at the drop of a hat the next idiom is cry over spil milk and this means not to waste time thinking about something thinking negative thoughts about something that you cannot change that has already happened where does this come from literally if you spill milk is there any point in crying about spilling milk no you can’t put it back into the bottle you can’t change that scenario the thing I dislike most about my job is dealing with people who only focus on the negative especially when they are given negative feedback that could be students that could be employees but people who make mistakes and don’t learn from them so for example I give a lot of feedback on student essays and some students see mistakes and they’re like great now I know what my mistakes are and I can improve other students will just cry about it for days and they’ll cry about it for weeks be like I’m going to fail it’s like there’s no point crying over spelled milk you made the mistake now I learn from it the next IDM is you can’t judge a book by its cover this means that you should not judge people or things based on their appearance normally people but can also include things the origin of this is quite obvious if you go into a Bookshop you will see lots of covers of books but you actually need to read the book to judge it you can’t go in and say I don’t like that book I think it will be terrible based on the cover because you actually have to read it to understand it and we apply this to people you can’t judge a person based on their appearance very rarely actually because I’m a firm believer in you can’t judge a book by its cover and we should judge people not on what clothes they wear and their appearance but by their character and the things that come out of their mouth my wife firmly disagrees with this because she says someone who gets millions of views on YouTube shouldn’t be wearing the same shirt every day so she does encourage me to go buy new clothes but I do it begrudgingly the next one is don’t count your chickens before they hatch another chicken idiom and this means don’t assume something will be successful or something will happen until it actually occurs so you shouldn’t assume that watching this video and using these idioms is going to guarantee a band nine you should actually go and do the test and see if you get a band nine don’t count your chickens now the full version of of this idiom is don’t C your chickens before they hatch but English speakers normally just say don’t CCH your chickens you can use either of them in the test but I think it’s just simpler and easier to remember and use the shorter form don’t C your chickens this actually comes from asap’s fables about a milkmaid this milkmaid was going to use milk to make butter and then she was going to sell the butter to buy eggs and then she was going to hatch the eggs and raised chickens and then sell the chickens to buy a new dress unfortunately it didn’t work out she didn’t get her dress so don’t count your chickens I prefer to buy luxury watches than jewelry I’m not sure if you could count a luxury watch as jewelry but the thing about jewelry is like diamond rings necklaces things like that often as soon as you buy them as soon as you walk out of the Jewelers um they lose value whereas many of the watches that I’ve purchased have actually gone up in value I don’t want to count my chickens but if I were to sell these watches I probably would make a lot more money on them than I paid for them so that’s why I prefer luxury time pieces over simple jewelry the next itm is to go the extra mile and this means to put more effort or to work harder than what is required so for example instead of making an ielt idian video where I just say all the idioms and go through them quickly I go the extra mile and talk about the origin and give you example sentences this is actually a Biblical reference from The Sermon on the Mount and in the Bible it says if anyone forces you to go one mile go with them two miles and many people interpret this as you should always do more than is required of you my wife does the vast majority of the cooking not because she’s necessarily a better cook but the thing I love about my wife is in whatever she does she goes the extra mile so if I was cooking steak I would just cook the steak and eat it with a little bit of bread but my wife will have like three different sauces and balsamic vinegar and two different olive oils and four different types of potato she really does go the extra mile when it comes to cooking in our house the next idiom is raining cats and dogs this is very useful because it is used to describe the weather and the weather will often come up uh during part one or part two or part three and it describes very very heavy rain to rain cats and dogs now there’s a bit of a debate about where this comes from it’s quite unusual but the one that I find that helps you remember it and is a very Vivid image is back in the day many many years ago countries and cities didn’t have the same drainage that we have these days and when it would rain hard when it would rain heavy the um city streets would flood what are the most common pets in most countries cats and dogs so those cats and dogs would actually drown and whenever the storm was over people would go into the streets and there would be cats and dogs lying lifeless all over the place they had drowned it’s not a very nice image but you’ll definitely remember it yes and no uh where I live is one of the most beautiful places in the world uh we’re spoiled for choice in terms of outdoor activities and beautiful places like on our doorstep we have beaches forests Lakes mountains but unfortunately it’s Ireland so it’s normally raining cats and dogs so you don’t really get to eny enjoy it a big mistake that I see with this one is getting the cats and dogs mixed up and saying dogs and cats um when students don’t really learn this properly and just see a list of idioms they go into the test they’re like it was raining dogs and cats a native English speaker or someone with a very high level of English will spot this immediately and it is basically you holding up a sign saying I’m not very good at English so make sure you use it properly I also see students using the wrong tense of rain so it rained cats and dogs if you’re talking about um the past to talk about something that normally happens so it’s normally raining cats and dogs or it rains cats and dogs you need to understand the verb tense of the word rain and use it correctly again if you’re saying it’s raining cats and dogs yesterday that’s incorrect and it’s a big flly bag to The Examiner that you don’t really know what you’re talking about the next itm is to throw in the towel so a towel that you use to dry yourself that you after a shower and this means to stop something that is either very very difficult or has become impossible to throw in the towel and this comes from boxing so if guys are boxing and one boxer is getting so beat up that it is impossible for them to continue you know continuing is not going to result in Victory it is going to result in them getting badly injured their Corner their trainer will throw a towel into the ring and whenever a towel is thrown into the ring the referee stops it immediately to throw in the towel as you can tell from looking at me no I don’t have a very healthy diet I do try I normally get up in the morning and have a healthy breakfast and have a healthy lunch but it’s so so easy just to throw in the towel when you get home after A Hard Day’s work and you know your wife has a beautiful meal prepared there’s a bottle of wine on the table and your kids half eaten chocolate is lying all around the kitchen so um I do quite well most of the day and then fail in the evenings the next DM is cross that bridge when you come to it people often say we will or we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it or I will I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it and what this means is to deal with a problem or a situation when it actually occurs in the future not to worry about something that has not happened yet so imagine you are out for a walk and someone starts talking about a bridge that is miles away and they’re worrying about Crossing that bridge you would say Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it so where this comes from is you know many many years ago Bridges weren’t free and they weren’t reliable so often people would collect tolls collect taxes to cross a bridge or the bridge wasn’t very sturdy and Crossing that bridge could result in you falling off or the bridge collapsing and you dying so it’s talking about an unpleasant or difficult situation that is coming up in the future but you shouldn’t worry about that you know we’ll worry about that when we get there let’s just focus on the here and now it’s not something I really like to think about because in the back of my mind I know I teachers and all educators are doomed because AI is going to replace them and why would a student hire a human that is not as good as a machine that can do it at half the price or a fraction of the price and do it much more effectively um you know we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it um but I don’t think it’s that far away but in the meantime I’m just going to enjoy teaching for as long as I can next we have two Roman idioms or idioms that originate from the city of Rome Rome obviously was one of the greatest Empires that the world has ever seen and it has a huge influence on the English language and a huge number of languages to this day and the first one is Rome wasn’t builing in a day and this means that significant accomplishments so to accomplish something big a big goal takes time it takes a long time to achieve something significant so back in the day many many years ago Rome was the greatest city in the world but it was built over centuries it took a very very very long time to build Rome into the greatest city in the world and we often use this when some someone is trying to get us to do something too quickly um so if somebody said to me you know you need to have the best biggest uh YouTube channel in the world well Rome wasn’t built in a day we’ll do it one video at a time it’s often used as well to console someone who is feeling bad about not achieving something so you know if my little boy was like we lost a football match you know I’m not very good at football Rome wasn’t built in a day you know you will get better at football but you won’t get better at football right now you need to keep working consistently hard into the future and then you will be a footballing superstar which he wants to be the thing I hate about social media is the fact that these companies have so much power to change their systems and change their algorithms but they decide not to for money so to give you an example from my work and my job job uh to become a famous ielt YouTuber is actually quite easy all you have to do is come up with some clickbait titles like hacks and tricks and predictions and things like that and put a pretty girl on the thumbnail um but that doesn’t mean that the person making that video knows anything about I it just means that they know how to trick the algorithm you know I understand Rome wasn’t built in a day that you know it takes time to fix platform forms and change algorithms but these are you know sometimes trillion dooll companies if they wanted to get these people off their platform they could but they decide not to because popular is more important than you know educating the public properly the next one is When in Rome do what the Romans do but this is often shortened to When in Rome so you’ll very rarely hear native English speakers say when in Rome do what the Romans do just say when in Rome and what this means is that when you are visiting a foreign place when you are a tourist or a visitor in a country that you’re not from you should respect the customs and I respect the religion the culture the customs of that place and this comes from the Catholic faith where Milan and Rome had different different days for fasting so in many religions you have fast days where you don’t eat anything and in Milan it was on a Sunday but in Rome it was on a Saturday so they were talking about like when do you fast do you fast on a Saturday or fast on a Sunday when in Rome you should respect their culture and you should fast on their fast day when you’re home do it normally no I actually hate it and it makes me feel very uncomfortable um I’m from Ireland and in Ireland it is quite rare for someone to take your photo and if they want to take your photo it is rude to just take it without asking you so it’s customary just to say do you mind if I take a photo and if somebody says yes you can take it but if they say no you should definitely not take it my wife who is from Vietnam in Vietnam they have a very very different culture they are taking photos all of the time and they will think nothing of just taking a photo of you and if I get angry with someone for taking a photo they’ll think that I’m the problem and I’m being rude so you know when in Rome so now you know all of these different idioms that ban n students use does that mean that you can use them in the I test and automatically get a higher score yes and no and this is the most important point in the video if you don’t watch this bit you probably will mess up your test fail waste a lot of money please do watch it so what I’m about to say is very different from most ielt YouTubers and most ielt teachers so let’s just look at data and facts none of this is my opinion all the things I’m about to tell you are straight facts so when we analyzed all of our band n students who got band n in the real ielt speaking test what were the number of idioms that they actually used and the number is quite shocking 1.2 on average this means that many of them didn’t use idioms at all most of them maybe used one or two but there was quite a variation and it was quite rare for students to use say more than four or five why is this and why are many of you you know typing in the comments right now that is wrong you must use idioms to get a higher score let me explain so if you go to the official band descriptors for ielt speaking you’ll find them online what it says for lexical resource which is basically a fancy way of saying vocabulary for band seven is uses some less common and idiomatic vocabulary and shows some awareness of style and collocation with some inappro roate choices so what you’ll hear from most I YouTubers is you must use idioms to get a seven or above and this is a misconception it is a misunderstanding of the official marketing criteria most I YouTubers have not been examiners and they don’t really know what these actually mean let’s look up the dictionary definition for idiomatic what does idiomatic actually mean mean because most YouTubers and most students think that idiomatic means idioms just use lots of idioms you’ll get about seven eight or n does it actually mean that well if we look at Cambridge dictionary the definition of idiomatic is containing Expressions that are natural and correct and this is what idiomatic actually means for the purposes of a idiomatic means natural English and in other words English that a native English speaker would use natural idiomatic expressions it does contain idioms but it also contains slim phrasal verbs informal words colloquialisms and many other forms of natural English because if you are studying English in school and you’re just using textbooks that is not the most natural English that you will hear it’s only when you move to a native english- speaking country and start copying these idiomatic phrases and expressions that you sign like a native English speaker and that is what the examiners are listening out for they’re not listening for how many idioms did you use they are listening to your whole performance and then thinking are they using some idiomatic expressions or not and that includes idioms But it includes many many other things so have I just wasted your time with this lesson you you’re telling us that you should learn these idioms and then you’re telling us not to learn these idioms so let me tell you what we tell our VIP students when we’re teaching them vocabulary we use something called the birthday cake analogy or the birthday cake method if you think about a birthday cake it looks very fancy and it looks very very impressive but if you think about the ingredients of a fancy looking birthday cake they are the most basic Foods the most basic ingredients in the World things like milk sugar flour water butter these are things that can be found in any shop in any country in the world they are simple they are basic most birthday cakes are made up 98 97% of the simple basic ingredients but the sprinkles on top make it look fancy that’s the exact approach that we teach our VIP students 979 8% of the words that you use are going to be simple everyday basic words because that is how the English language functions that is how any language functions then you can use some high level words you could use some idioms you should use some phrasal verbs you could sprinkle those on top but it’s going to actually be quite rare when you use them the examiner is not looking for you to use them in every single sentence now if you go back in this video and listen to to uh my answers even though I tried to use idms in every single answer if you broke down the words of all of those answers 90 95% of the words that I use are simple basic everyday words remember the birthday cake analogy so it is great having idioms in your toolkit and you can use them appropriately and accurately but you don’t have to use them you know if you are building a house would you rather have a massive toolkit that allows you to do many many things or would you just like to have a hammer teaching you these idioms is about expanding the vocabulary you know how to use and the key word there is use you are not learning vocabulary you are learning to use vocabulary effectively please please please do not do two things number one do not memorize these idioms and try and insert them force them into every single answer you are going to fail because it will be inappropriate you’ll use them too much and you will use them incorrectly you know the words will be correct incorrect the collocations will be incorrect and the pronunciation probably will be incorrect try to incorporate them into your everyday use of the English language use them properly and use them appropriately that is the difference between a b six student and a b n student the second thing you should not do is learn lists of idioms the reason why this is a very very long video and why I’m talking a lot and explaining all of this to you and why I didn’t just give you a list of idioms and just rhyme them off and show you examples was to demonstrate to you that you should use them appropriately I could not take those idioms and do a speaking test and use all of them in the speaking test in fact when I did the speaking test I got a b nine because I’m a native English speaker of course but I used zero idioms that is because I’m not being judged on my use of idioms alone I’m being judged on all of the words that I’m be that I’m using not just the fancy highlevel idioms well done for making it this far in the video by this stage you should be ready to start taking some practice questions and start practicing at home and we’re going to give you more than a thousand of them in The Following part of this video but not only that we’re not just going to give you a bunch of questions we’re going to show you how to use practice questions at home to really really improve your score so don’t just skip ahead in the video and find the link and download all the questions and start practicing watch the next part of the video that is going to show you what not to do how not to practice and how to practice kind of simple dos and don’t for practicing at home it’s really going to accelerate your speaking ability and improve your score in a much shorter period of time let’s start off with the don’ts these are things that you should not do and these are things that band 7 eight and N students do not do when they’re using IP speaking questions number one don’t get overwhelmed sometimes when we give students hundreds and hundreds of questions they get completely overwhelmed and they think that their job is to analyze and look at and practice every single question and they need to be aware of all the different questions you do not need to do that don’t look at hundreds of questions and think that you must have an answer for all of them or be aware of all of them just use them in the way that we’re going to show you in this video so important don’t get overwhelmed number two don’t worry if you see a topic in there that you’re not an expert in remember that it is a speaking test it is not a knowledge test or an intelligence test number three you should not try to prepare answers and memorize them and try to improve your speaking score in that way I examiners are trained to spot this and they can easily spot it and what they will do is they will ask you other questions that you were not prepared for and they will base your score on those unprepared questions because IELTS is not a test of memorization because it is testing communication you don’t use memorization when you’re communicating with people in any language so don’t try to prepare answers for any of them number four don’t try and anticipate the different topics that come up if you go through all of these you will see that there are no common topics you could be asked about anything so you’ll see lots of things online uh but you know YouTube videos saying these are the common topics that might come up or here are the predicted topics that might come up this is just to get you to click on those videos none of those are actually real so don’t try and do that this is a big one don’t compare your performance with so-called band n students that you find on YouTube this is going to damage your confidence and it is also highly misleading now not to bash any other channels and not doing that or I’m not going to mention specific channels but just looking at those you know band n mock speaking tests or band eight or whatever they are the vast majority of them either are not actually band n or band8 or the people giving feedback are not real teachers those videos are incredibly popular so what’s happening is companies are hiring fake teachers and then hiring models and actresses is to make I videos abide speaking but none of them are accurate so if you’re comparing yourself to those people it’s not a fair comparison and if you’re watching too many of those videos you might be getting bad advice from unqualified teachers and the last don’t is something that a lot of students don’t really think about don’t take these questions and look constantly for feedback so some students what they do is they’ll look at the questions and then they’ll ask the teachers or some online services to just constantly do mock speaking tests and constantly do feedback tests with them and give them lots and lots of feedback those things are important you should be practicing you should be getting feedback but the real Improvement comes after you get feedback so if a teacher gives you feedback for example on pronunciation or fluency or grammar or vocabulary doing another mock speaking test is not actually going to improve those things at all there is such a thing as too much feedback so don’t take these and just do lots and lots and lots of feedback sessions work on improving the things you need to work on and you’re going to see far more Improvement if you work on your weaknesses okay let’s get into the things that b 7 8 and N students do when they are using these practice questions okay so Chris here this is how you find the article with all of the practice questions in it I’m going to show you how to access them in three steps so step one what you’re going to do is you’re going to go to Google and you’re going to type in ielt speaking once you have ielt speaking up in Google you’re going to scroll through all the different websites and go to is Advantage so it might be on the first page it might be on the second page probably be in and around the middle of the first page you’re just going to click on I speaking how to get a band seven or above I Advantage you’re going to click on that that’s step one one of the big things successful students do is they treat each part of the speaking test separately so part one part two and part three are very very different different types of questions and different types of answers and the examiners are thinking about different things when they are assessing you so what you should not do is just take some part one questions a part two question some part three questions and then try and answer them all in the same way B 7 8 and N student don’t do that keep watching this video but at the end of the video I’ll give you some links so that you can the differences between the different parts it’s very very important number two band eight and N students understand the marking criteria it is far more important that you use these questions to understand the marking criteria IIA than just to go through all of these questions use the questions to test yourself to practice to think about your performance and think about how are you doing in relation to the markeing criteria that’s the only thing that matters because that’s the only thing that the examiners are thinking about on test day and we’ll show you how to do that when we give you the VIP technique at the end number three get your speaking checked at least once by a real IELTS professional now I’m not saying that because I want you to buy our services we’re normally completely sold out I’m saying this because it is so easy to spot if you’re a real I professional an ex examiner it’s so easy to spot little things that the student is doing that will lead to failure and it’s so easy to fix these things now many of you don’t want to spend any money on this but it is a lot lot cheaper than failing your test and the difference between failing your test and doing a mock speaking test with a real professional is the real test costs a lot more and you get no feedback if you do a mock speaking test with a real professional it’s much much cheaper and they are going to give you real actionable feedback you’re going to know what’s going on what your weaknesses are what your score is and how to improve your score but please be careful most people calling themselves ex examiners are not really X examiners and your local I teacher who has very little experience and has never been an examiner probably will not give you very good feedback it is better to find a source that you trust that you know that they’re real X examiners and they really know what they’re talking about in general the more expensive ones are going to be more reliable the cheaper ones are going to be unreliable we do provide that service but we’re normally sold out if you want more information get in touch with us but before you say oh my God he’s only making this video to try and make money from us I’m going to show you how you can get real feedback accurate feedback for free at home at zero cost this is the same Technique we give our VIP students it is extremely effective but you’re going to need a few things so we’re going to go through it step by step step two it should bring you to this page on our website ielt speaking in 2023 this page has a lot of information on it what you’re going to do is you’re going to scroll down and you’re going to keep scrolling you’re going to keep scrolling you’re going to keep scrolling until you get to I speaking topics now let’s go back to the video and I’ll show you how to click on the article you need in step three first of all you’re going to need practice questions real practice questions we’re going to show you how to access those at the end of the video so you’ve got those the next thing is you’re going to need either a phone or a laptop you’re going to need some kind of electronic device that will record your voice most laptops most phones will be able to do this please don’t ask should you use a laptop or should you use a phone it doesn’t matter just pick something that you have that you can use to record your voice the next thing you need to do is download some kind of recording app or program to your phone or to your laptop now all you have to to do is go into your app store or Google I’m not going to name specific apps because they change all the time and it’s so easy for you to just find this yourself the next thing you want to do is sign up for a service that automatically transcribes your voice so let me give you some examples but again these change over time do your own research so on uh an Apple phone in the notes function you can just press the transcribe button and it will transcribe what you say there’s also a service that you can use on your computer called otter.ai they have a free version of that software that will record your voice and transcribe it but as I said before do your own research find a tool and you’ll be able to get this done but you do need one to record your voice so you can listen back and one to transcribe it there might be some apps out there that do both if there are put it in the comments let people know what you find and help each other okay so that’s all the tech set up done next what you’re going to do is you’re going to pick one part of the test either part one part two or part three don’t do a full test just pick one part and focus on one thing at a time so for part one you’re going to use about nine questions part two you’re only going to use one question and for part three you’re going to pick three or four questions make sure that you don’t study these questions we want to recreate create the real test as much as possible don’t look at easy questions and try and prepare answers all right just pick questions from the list don’t look at them don’t study them just pick them look at each question and answer it as if an examiner is asking you that question so read each question and answer it as if you are in the real test if you mess up don’t worry about it this is just practice next I want you to download the official marketing criteria I’ll put a link below but if you just Google speaking marking criteria it should come up on Google as well what you’re going to do is you’re going to listen back and you’re going to think about your performance you’re going to read the marketing criteria and think about which band you should get based on your own performance if you don’t understand the marketing criteria you don’t understand the bands I’ll put a link at the end of the video that will show you in more detail what the Bands been as you’re listening back think about your biggest weaknesses so if you were um uh you couldn’t really answer the questions fluency is an issue if you can’t understand anything that you say pronunciation is probably an issue or if you’re making lots of vocabulary mistakes or grammar mistakes that’s your biggest issue the great thing about this technique is when you’re in the real test you’re unaware of the mistakes that you are making but when you’re listening by and just focusing on your mistakes and focusing on your performance you’ll be able to pick out things that you were completely unaware of and you’ll be able to fix those things and that takes us on to our next Point you’re going to look at the transcription whatever service you used that will write out your answers and you’re going to analyze that in more detail so the first thing you’re going to analyze is did you actually answer the question look at the question look at the transcription did you actually answer the question and did you develop your answer enough you can also analyze your fluency if there are lots of um and as and pauses in the transcription if you’re jumping around a lot then fluency might be an issue for you if the transcription cannot understand most of the words like the words are completely different then that is a pronunciation issue you can also analyze your vocabulary did you repeat too many words are you trying to use words that you don’t really understand did you struggle with that topic because of a limited vocabulary and then with grammar what you can do is you can put that transcript into something like grammarly for example or there are lots of other options and it will highlight all of the grammar mistakes that you made and you’ll be able to identify your key grammar mistakes for example if you are using the wrong article before every line you need to work on articles so this technique is not actually about improving your speaking yet this technique is to give you feedback as I said before feedback doesn’t improve your speaking instantly but what you do after does so for example if you look at the transcript and you messed up every article being aware of that is just the first step you’re not going to magically uh improve your speaking by just being aware of that but you will magically improve if you work on those things and some of you watching right now you might be thinking well that’s a lot of work yes it is but it’s a lot less work than going and watching a bunch of tips and tricks videos believing that they’re going to help you and then failing the test over and over again and not knowing why that is a lot of work this is actually a lot less stressful because you will be in control and you can do it all for free at home at your own pace again we’re here to give you things that are actually going to improve your score not tips and tricks that make you happy so step three you should be here I speaking topics you’re going to scroll down and you will see a link I speaking topics The Ultimate Guide click on that and it will give you access to all of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of questions that you will need for your speaking practice well done you made it to the last part of the video so we’re going to do something we’ve never done before so you’ve probably seen that we do lots of mock speaking tests here in our studio and but this is the first time that we’ve brought a student back so before we had this student who got a band eight but I thought that she was actually capable of a much much higher band a band nine which is a huge Improvement so she went through a lot of the same lessons in this video that you have just went through and I want to show you the massive Improvement that she made just by following the steps in this video so without further Ado let’s look and see if she did get her band nine let’s start off by talking about exercise how often do you exercise when you talk about exercise exercise I don’t really exercise that much but then I do other forms of exercise if you can take that into the category exercise so I like to dance I like to do yoga I like to go for a walk so I’m sure that’s included in exercise so if you talk about that I think every day at least an hour so yeah I do like to take care of my body and I do like to invest in my body what’s your favorite exercise so I think I’d like to say dance because it’s it’s funny because it’s mindless you don’t realize you’re exercising when you’re dancing it’s just one hour of katharsis you you’re just going and sweating it out and you don’t realize that you worked out for an hour so yeah I think I’ll say dance are there any exercises you do not like I wouldn’t say I don’t like I do like lifting weights but it’s not one of my favorite part of the exercise it’s something which I find monotonous something which I find uh cumbersome something which I find boring so yes lifting weights do you prefer to exercise indoors or Outdoors M I think both when the weather allows then Outdoors but otherwise I’m more of an indoor person I don’t mind uh doing yoga every single day in my room I know like a lot of people don’t enjoy that they need an environment they need a setup they need to go to the gym which is also indoors but uh I do enjoy indoors and I do enjoy just exercising in my home in my room and that being said I also enjoy working out in uh outside facility as as well like I like going for walks I like going for a run so yeah I think both now let’s talk about weekends how do you normally spend your weekends weekends I usually have more classes I’m a yoga teacher so my weekends are not uh a normal weekend for other people where they go out for lunches dinners and celebrate for me weekends are more heavy on work but uh if I can say that Monday is my weekend or Tuesday is my weekend then I like to watch movies I really like watching Netflix and I like to spend time with my husband I also like cooking and that’s the time which I get for myself so yes I think I like spending it in the house and really giving that time to myself and my husband do you like to spend your weekends in your local area or do you like to travel so it depends it’s both if I have a lot of time to myself in the sense if I have 2 days off or 3 days off I like to go out on a vacation like a mini trip so I like to go out probably do like a picnic go out to a park or maybe explore any other Countryside any other city but if it’s a short duration if it’s only a day then probably spend it in the house like I mentioned earlier are there any interesting things to do in your local area on the weekend yes there are a lot of coffee shops and there’s a coffee shop right beneath my house so which is very popular in London it’s called Gales so uh yeah there are a lot of nice places around my neighborhood but I wouldn’t say that I like going to those places because they’re very uh familiar I would like to go to places which are a little away so I would like to travel a little bit and enjoy the entire journey of reaching a place but yes my neighborhood is also quite uh friendly and social do you prefer to go out or stay in at the weekend so like I mentioned earlier if it’s a short weekend if it’s only a day and a half then staying in is better for me and because there are a lot of things that I need to finish so so I prefer staying in but if it is a longer weekend like in the sense you also have a Friday Saturday Sunday it’s a 3 days then I like to probably step out and probably explore other uh neighborhood cities and towns and Villages yeah now let’s talk about reading what was your favorite book when you were a child I can’t go back that far like when I was a child but I do remember somewhere in school probably towards the end of school I loved this book called many master many lives and I think I like to call myself an old SCH because when I was a child I still was very inclined toward spirituality and I really liked to know where we’ve come from where would we go after life before death you know those kind of things so uh after death after life uh so yes so that’s I think a book which rings a bell which I always get reminded of how often do you read so uh as of now my reading is very education based I have have a lot of books on yoga a lot of books on spirituality I’m very Less on fiction but I try and listen a little bit of fiction as well so I listen to the audiobooks it’s called audible so I have that app with me so I think when I’m on uh on the tube when I’m traveling it’s always the audible the book which I listen to and uh when I’m at home and when I’m trying to educate myself and I’m trying to know more about yoga then it’s probably I think overall an hour a day or maybe sometimes an hour in 2 days mhm do you like to read when on holiday um depends like I said most of my reading reading is education based so I need to dedicate time to it uh to just the Reading part of it but when I’m on vacation then I don’t write like to educate myself so it depends but sometimes I do like to read uh I think when I’m on a vacation I’d rather go for just listening to a book and do you prefer to read physical books or ebooks I think I prefer to read physical books I do have a Kindle as well but I think it’s been longest that I’ve touched it I like to have the feel of it to turn the pages in real so I do prefer a physical book now let’s talk about history do you enjoy watching TV shows about history yes but I’d like to put it uh this way I enjoy history but I like more of the crime-based histories there are a lot of events which have happened in certain countries certain part of towns so I like to know more about that I’m very heavy on crime based Series so yes and sometimes I also like to watch just the history bit as well like I’ve I think I’ve seen that entire show on Netflix called the Roman Empire or something like that but that’s also because it’s very heavy on drama it’s very heavy on the crime based as well so I think I do have an inclination towards that did you enjoy studying history in school as far as I remember I don’t really have a clear memory of reading or learning history in school which of course we did it was it was there in our textbooks but I think I grew more fonded and more interested in history way later when I started reading about civilizations when I started reading about different areas and regions and how the world was divided and then you know invaded by different uh uh kingships if I may can I can call that uh so yes it was only later that I started getting interested in history so it says uh describe a time when you were late for something so I’m usually a very punctual person and I can’t think think of any time when I was really late but there have been a few instances and one such instance was when I got really really late was for my work so I’m new to London and I’ve started teaching yoga over here it’s been about 6 to 8 months and I’m still understanding the tube work like how does the commute work over here how does the uh bus work over here and uh also the timings and everything so I’m still adjusting myself to the city so there was this one class I was supposed to reach after two classes which I was always already taking an angel so there was this one area called angel I was taking two classes over there right after that there was another class in another area and I was supposed to reach there this another class wasn’t mine so I was covering for someone and I got like a last moment uh notification that can you take this class and I accepted it really vouching for it and really saying that I will be there it was very disheartening for me because by the time I wrapped up the studio and I left from there I couldn’t make it on time and this is a big professional setback on my end because I shouldn’t be doing that that and what happened was that I went for uh I thought I’ll take a bus so I took a bus and uh by the time I was about to reach a certain location I realized I’ve taken the wrong bus so I got down and then I tried to take a train so by the time I tried to reach the next best train location I realized that the train station was shut that is when I started panicking I started uh looking for a cab and I started contacting my DM which is like a manager who’s always on call and checking if you on time or not and the DM told me this is really sad because it looks like I’ll not be able to reach on time and even 5 minutes late is late for students so they they started asking questions like why is it that the stain station is stopped like in the sense it’s shut because probably I think they weren’t believing me in that moment but uh later when I described everything I clicked pictures and finally they believed me and when I reached that’s the 2 minutes are up well done okay you’ve been telling me about a time when you were late we’re now going to discuss arriving late and being punctual right is it rude to be late if you’re meeting a friend in a way yes uh because I think I’ll say if you’re constantly late if you’re always late it’s a yes it is rude because you’re playing with someone’s time someone has specially dedicated their time to you and vice versa even you’ve dedicated your time to them so in a way yes because that person could have done a lot of things in that much time but also sometimes no because uh you never know what is that person going through I mean in the sense uh it’s it’s a friend right it’s not a profession sometimes I’ve had my friends complaining that AA it’s all right I mean you can chill because oh we’re just meeting for a coffee so it’s okay if they get a little bit late if it’s only like 10 15 minutes it’s fine what should happen to people if they are consistently late for work well I think it’s a big no because you’re answerable for a lot of people and you have to deliver a job a product or something in that profession and if you get late it’s not only you who’s uh suffering but it’s also the entire company who’s suffering because of you so I think they need to learn how to manage their time well and there should be some kind of a repercussion for that so that they are being more careful and mindful in the future what can can people do to become more punctual okay so I have this trick which is um a lot of times I noticed that people who are constantly late they take the deadline as the deadline for example if they have to be somewhere at 10:00 they’ll think okay I have to be there at 10:00 I’d like to put it the other way I’ll say keep your time 15 minutes earlier say that you have to reach there by 9:45 or probably 9:30 if you have a habit of constantly being late that ways you’ll start early getting you’ll start getting ready earlier you’ll leave the place earlier your home earlier and probably you’ll be on time you can set a time alarm you can uh set a timer you can really make use of these things in order to be on time I think now let’s talk about work productivity mhm is it better to work for long interrupted periods of time or to take multiple small breaks H in my opinion I think to take many multiple breaks because uh it doesn’t matter how long you’re working if you’ve refreshed yourself and if you have come to your full capacity mental capacity to work even if you work in short bursts that could be more productive and uh yes I think that’s what I think about productivity are open plan offices good for productivity what do you mean by open plan offices so um some offices uh cubic have cubicles and they’re closed or offices are closed and then some offices are just tables in a big room and everyone can see each other working all right well it depends I’m not really sure how it works because uh either it works for them because uh it’s a very social environment you can relax and you’re not like really just into work because that can also play with your uh stress maybe but in a way also no because then you can get you have the chances to get distracted sooner and if you’re working in a closed environment then you can probably take out that small burst of time which I was talking about and just dedicate it to your work some people believe companies should move to a 4day week do you think this would improve overall productivity I think I’m a big advocate for that because I really feel there should be a good work life balance where you’re working and also you have time for yourself when you’re constantly only working which is like 6 days a week probably that that ways you don’t have time for yourself you don’t have time for your family you don’t have time for your hobbies and interests which plays a big role in your stress so if you have four days a week that means that you have you have more time for yourself and by default you’ll be able to focus on your work because you’ve uh been able to take care of other parts and uh categories in your life you know now let’s talk about AI in the workplace which jobs are most likely to be affected by AI in the future I’m not sure sure but I think uh maybe the film industry I feel that a lot of the editing will be taken care of by AI because I have noticed and I’ve come across a lot of people who are using only AI for editing on Instagram so that just rang a bell in my head because I thought o oh if that is the case then probably the film industry will be the one which will suffer because uh most of their jobs are done by human labor right so if AI takes over then it’ll make their jobs easier but also take away jobs from their hands if AI takes millions of people’s jobs in the future how will society change financially I’m not very sure because that will reduce uh the jobs for a lot of people but I also feel that um people will have more time to themselves and people will have more space to figure out the other kind of jobs that they should be doing so in a way a lot of work load if you look with a positive perspective a lot of workload will be taken away from them and will give them a lot more space to decide what do what would they want to do with their time and are there any positive consequences of AI replacing millions of workers I think this is very similar to what I just mentioned that yes you can look at it positively as well but I did mention that I’m not very sure how will it play financially on people but the positive side effect or positive effect can be that it can unburden or take away the burden from a lot of people and uh give them more space and time to utilize in another activities of their life so you’re hoping to get a b nine which is a very very high score what I will do is I’ll give you feedback on part one part two and part three of the test and then I’ll give you feedback on the four marking criteria so to get a band nine you need top marks in fluency and coherence grammar vocabulary and pronunciation so part one um what the examiner is looking for is for you to answer the question and develop it a little bit I think the key Hallmark of a of a band n candidate in part one is it’s like talking to a friend or it’s like talking to a colleague and that’s how it felt talking to you so you were able to answer each question naturally and develop them you had no problem talking um about any of those topics and I really like the way you used your own life and your own experiences in that so it didn’t feel like speaking to a robot who prepared answers it felt like talking to a real human being who’s at a very very high level of English I also threw in some more unusual uh topics in there and you were able to to cope with those those perfectly so part one I have no negative feedback all very very good part two is probably the most challenging part for a lot of students because it’s a monologue so you have to to speak for up up to 2 minutes what you did was you decided to choose a a real story from your own life that was a very good choice because it led to a very fluent coherent answer so it’s much easier to talk about an experience from your own life than it is to make up a story or to talk about something a little bit more abstract so we would always suggest to to students to try and choose something in part two related to your own life and then it’s much easier then to use vocabulary um and and grammar as well especially vocabulary because you’re talking about real things and real experiences and you weren’t trying to we would say fetch the language you weren’t thinking of the correct word or the correct grammar structure or the correct tense you were just talking very coherently and and naturally again and I didn’t have to encourage you to speak more um a problem with many students is they’ll speak for one minute minute or 1 minute 30 seconds and then you have to encourage them to speak I had to do the opposite I had to stop you which is which was very very good in my opinion uh part three is the most challenging part because these topics like arriving late work productivity AI in the workplace these are more abstract academic type type topics when you compare them to to part one and you did very very well what the examiner is looking for is development and answering the question then really developing it you did that multiple times by showing both sides of the argument by using examples sometimes you use real examples from your own life and you had no problem with with any of those topics the reason why towards the end I asked you more and more difficult questions is the examiner will think that you’re a very good candidate so they will ask you more and more difficult questions to see how you cope with them so even when I asked you um about societal changes in the future from AI like that is a very very difficult question many students in that position would just say I don’t know or that’s difficult or I have no idea you attempted the answer and you gave a very you know a coherent answer that’s related to that topic and you really developed it well you could see at the end that you were struggling a little bit with with those ideas but the thing to remember is that it is not an ideas test it is a test of your English and you did up you did really really well now let’s move on to your scores for each part so fluency and coherence we can break that down coherence is all about did you answer the question so if I asked you about is it rude to be late if you’re meeting a friend you talk about meeting a friend you don’t talk about being late for work for example um and every question that I asked you you answered exactly uh how it was supposed to be answered you really stuck to that topic the other part of coherence is development so did you develop your answer with explanations examples stories things like that for every part you did a really good job with that so full marks um for coherence fluency is not speaking quickly or not speaking slowly but really speaking without effort someone who is like a lower band like a bound six or a b seven even they will often be searching for the correct word to use or the correct am I using the correct grammar structure so they’ll have a lot of audible pauses uh things like that and they’ll also be trying to think of ideas because your English level is so high you pretty much never had to do that there was never any real pauses where I was like oh she’s trying she doesn’t really know that word and she’s trying to fetch that word from from her brain you spoke effortlessly about a range of different topics without any audible pauses really when I say without any audible pauses I’m talking about unnatural audible pauses because while I’m speaking now as a native English speaker and as an ises teacher I’m pausing sometimes that is natural unnatural is as I just said you’re like thinking oh what’s the way to say you know to say this you never do that so for fluency and coherence you would get a band nine you would get full Mark so that that’s native English speaker level um which is very very good for pronunciation um there’s two things that the examiner is thinking about pronunciation the first is the most important which is Clarity can I understand everything that you’re saying and I could understand 100% of what you were saying so first box is is Tick you no problem in that area the second is something called higher level uh pronunciation features and that those are things like intonation as your voice goes up and your voice goes down naturally at lower level students will speak very monotone like this everything is very flat whereas native speakers will go up and down in order to um convey meaning I can understand 100% of what you’re saying you’re using intonation at a very high level you’re using connected speech you’re using sentence stress word stress all very very naturally which allows me to understand you even more a lot of people um confuse a high pronunciation score with a British accent or an American accent or or an Irish accent The Examiner is not really thinking about how British you sound or how American you sound The Examiner is thinking about the clarity of your speech so you have an an Indian accent and you should be very proud of your your Indian accent but there’s some people when they speak with not just an Indian accent but any accent sometimes that accent will interfere with um the the The Listener ability to understand what you’re saying at no point does your accent interfere with with with what you’re saying you are from India and in India you guys speak very very quickly to each other it’s not a not a criticism it’s just naturally a lot a lot of you guys do speak like that would you would you agree yes I agree with that um and also being in a T situation when we’re nervous we speak a little bit more quickly now sometimes especially with with Indian students when you combine the accent with speaking very very quickly that can sometimes cause a problem um for the for the listener but it doesn’t with you you’re nervous a little bit sometimes and you do speak a little bit quickly um if you were doing the test soon I would suggest that that’s the one thing that you would just be careful of is if you go into the test very very very nervous and you speak really really quickly that could affect your pronunciation score slightly but I don’t think that’s I’m being overly cautious with my uh feedback you mixed up your V and W sounds a little bit um it’s very common with German speakers it’s very common with Indian speakers but it wasn’t to the extent where I couldn’t I didn’t understand what you were saying for example Spanish speakers will say video instead of V video I watch the video on YouTube and some German speakers will say I watched a video now that if it was extreme could lower your score but you had just a very slight um mix up between those two signs if every time you were trying to pronounce the you said W that would lower your score because that is a systematic error that just keeps happening every time you use that sound but it wasn’t the case at all with with you so you would get a b n for pronunciation the next is vocabulary so there’s two things that the examiner is thinking about when it comes to uh vocabulary the first is accuracy did you use the correct words basically or are you getting words mixed up so for example um you could say this is a phone which is correct um you could say this is an electronic device which is correct but phone would be a little bit more precise but we would say that this is a sitting device you know this this is a chair or if you got these mixed up it’s like I’m sitting on a phone like that is completely wrong so um you are using vocabulary correctly and precisely accuracy you have no problems there you’re also using a lot of topic specific vocabulary topic specific vocabulary is for example to talk about phones we would talk about a screen we would talk about the resolution of that screen we would talk about the memory and how many megabytes or gigabytes of the memory but we couldn’t use gigabytes to talk about a pen for example we couldn’t talk about the resolution of a pen and but we would talk about ink but we can’t use the word ink to talk about phone so these are very topic specific words as you can see no matter what topic we ask you about you are able to pull those topic specific words and that indicates that no matter what topic we ask you about you will be able to talk about that topic so that’s the second thing that’s your range so it’s not like you can only talk about arriving late but you can’t talk about AI you can talk about any topic so the range of your vocabulary is very very high and the accuracy of your vocabulary is very very high so you get a bad nine last but not least is grammar um so your grammar again is being assessed by accuracy and range the range of your grammar is very good you pick the most appropriate structures and tenses to use so as you can see what you do is you don’t just answer every question with the present simple tense for example you use the appropriate tense the appropriate structure to answer each question which indicates you have a very wide range of grammar now a lot of people think that to get a b nine for grammar the accuracy needs to be 100% % but that’s not actually true what it says in the official marking criteria is that you can have a few slips some examiners would listen to you and think yeah you made a few tiny little slips like this one however under exam conditions if you’re stressed you can often make little mistakes that you wouldn’t normally make and some examiners might think that you’re making a few too many of these small grammatical errors if that was the case where they thought that you were making a few too many small grammatical errors you would get a band eight not a band nine um for grammar but I think that you would be on the side of it just being a few slips where you would get a band nine so I think overall you probably would get a bond nine I think the lowest you would get would be an 8.5 overall but I would be quite confident that you would get a bond nine if you you had that performance thank you any questions oh well done thank you so much so I hope you enjoyed this video it was very very long but I hope that you will agree that it is going to really really improve your speaking score if you need more help with not just your speaking preparation but your writing your listening you’re reading this is my email address we answer 100% of the emails that we receive so if you just need a little bit of help or you have a question or you want to work with us let us know via email and we will be back in touch with you or if you just want to continue on your journey with us here on YouTube this video should help you right

By Amjad Izhar
Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
https://amjadizhar.blog

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