 Hi everyone. Chris here from IELTS Advantage with a brand new mini course. What we're going to look at today is IELTS Band 7 or above and we're going to specifically, if I can talk, specifically talk a look at reading and we're going to have a mini course this week. So we're going to have three lessons in this mini course. Lesson number one, real reasons why you struggle. So we're going to, it's really important to look at the things that most students do and the reasons why they are not going to help you so you can stop doing those things. We're also going to look in this lesson at how important vocabulary is and how to strategically improve your vocabulary and we're also going to give you a free ebook and show you how you can download that and that ebook is going to help you improve your vocabulary. So I'll give that to you at the end. Lesson two, which is going to be on Wednesday, we're going to look at improving your reading skills. So we're going to look at things like skimming, scanning, close reading, what these actually mean, how to use them in the test so that you can obviously how to improve your reading skills. And then on Friday, lesson three, we're going to look at a strategic approach for improving your IELTS reading scores. So lesson three, a strategic approach for improving that. And these are the times and dates and everything for what's happening this week. So lesson one is going to is obviously you're watching it now at 1pm today. 1pm on Wednesday, exactly the same time 1pm UK time, you can figure that out whatever that is in your own time zone. And this Wednesday, we're going to have lesson two, lesson three is going to be on Friday at a slightly different time 11am UK time. So you can join us live here on Facebook, and you can interact with us, I'll be answering questions and everything at the end. So why do most people struggle with the IELTS reading test? I'd say most people don't have a real problem with listening. In the comments below you'll probably tell me that you do have a big problem with listening. But when it comes to the difference between listening and reading, I'd say most people are like half a band or a band in my experience higher, and they struggle a little bit with the reading test. So we need to think about what most students do. Most students who fail the reading test don't get the score that they need. What are they doing? And I'm going to show you using this pyramid why that is. So at the top of this pyramid, if you look at my inbox, if you look at my email inbox, and you just search for reading, and I'd say each day, how many emails would we get each day? A thousand? But a thousand emails a day. Let's say a hundred of those are about reading. And if you scan those emails that are just asking for help with reading, the majority of them ask for one thing in some way, shape or form. And that is they ask for tips. All right. So they say things like, can you give me some tips to help me improve my reading? Can you help me with some reading hacks or reading shortcuts or reading cheats or just some little tricks to help me improve my reading score? The thing that we always say is no, because they do not work. So what I'd say, you know, 90% of students are looking for something that doesn't actually help them. So if you are doing something and looking for something and using something that doesn't help you, are you going to improve? No. And there are four other factors that are far more important. And these are things that students completely ignore. And these are things that are actually going to help you. So let's look at these things and we'll be discussing them throughout this mini course this week. So the first thing is something that we will talk about throughout the whole course. We'll touch upon it in every single lesson this week. And because it's the most important thing. So this is the most important, then this one, then this one, then this one, this one, not really that important. First one is mindset. How you think about the test, what your attitude is to the test, what your attitude is to your preparation, what your attitude is to test day will determine your score more than anything else. And we'll talk about this throughout the course and it will make a lot of sense. So if you're typing in the comments, what do you mean by mindset? By the end of this three day mini course, it's going to make a lot of sense to you. So the other factor that is very, very important is vocabulary. Basically, the reading test is not only a reading test, it is also a vocabulary test. If your vocabulary is not at the level that it needs to be, it doesn't matter how many tips you look at, it doesn't matter how many hacks you look at, it doesn't matter how many shortcuts you use, you're not going to convince IELTS that your reading skills are at a certain level if your vocabulary is not also at a certain level. So look at this today in a lot more detail and we'll give you a free ebook at the end to help you strategically improve your vocabulary. All right, the thing that is next on the list, skills. So obviously it is a reading test, it is testing your reading skills, but the problem with reading skills is they are very much misunderstood by most students. Most students take a very simplistic view of this. They think that all I have to do is just skim and then scan and then find the answer and that's a job done. It's a little bit more complicated than that. So on day two on Wednesday we're going to look at how to improve this and how to understand what these skills are and how they will help you improve your score. And the next thing is strategy. So you should have a step-by-step strategy for each of the different types of questions. Why do you need that? Because the different types of questions are all testing different reading skills and reading subskills and require a completely different approach. So if you're going into the test and just applying the same strategy to every different type of question, it would be like a football team applying the same strategy to every single team that they play. You need to adjust it depending on who you're playing. You need to adjust your strategy depending on which question is coming up. So it's about understanding the different types of questions and applying a step-by-step strategy for each of them and thinking very strategically about your whole approach to your preparation. And that's what we're going to look at this week. But today we're going to focus on mindset and we're going to focus on vocabulary. Okay so is vocabulary important? Many of you watching this will think like it's a reading test, it really depends on my reading skills. It's testing my reading. Vocabulary isn't that important. I would argue that it's probably in terms of systems and skills, it's the most important thing when it comes to the reading test. So number one, if you have a wide-ranging vocabulary, it's going to help you understand the text. If you do not understand multiple words within each paragraph or within each sentence, it's kind of like if I took a pen and deleted multiple words from each paragraph. Just rub them out or cover them up. If you don't understand that, it doesn't matter how good your reading skills are. If you don't understand the sentence, if you don't understand the paragraph, if you don't understand it, then it's going to make it very very very difficult for you. So the wider your vocabulary, the easier it will be for you to navigate your way through the passage to understand it and to answer the question. Number two, having a wide-ranging vocabulary helps you locate the place, the location of the correct answer. So when you are looking at the questions, it might say one word but the place, when you're scanning the paragraph that you're looking for, the part of the text you're looking for, doesn't say that word, it says a synonym of that word. So unless you understand that word means the same as that and they're both synonyms of each other, then you're not going to be able to find the correct answer. If you can't find the correct answer or find the correct location, you're going to be floundering, you're going to be taking a very very long time to find the location because that is part of doing the reading test. You can't immediately look at the question and then find the correct answer, you have to find the location first. So helping, improving your vocabulary is going to help with that tremendously. Number three, helps you decide correct answers. So you might, for example, in a multiple-choice question, get three different answers and the words in it have three slightly different meanings. So that's just one example of one question type with three slightly different meanings, but you need to understand the different meanings of those words. That's just one example out of many many many many others where knowing the vocabulary and knowing the meaning of the words and the difference between the meaning of the words is going to help you find the correct answer. So it's going to help you understand the whole text, find the location of the correct answer and decide the correct answer. So it's absolutely crucial that you work on your vocabulary and that's why we'll be giving you the free ebook at the end. So you need to improve your vocabulary. Hopefully I've proved that to you that if you want to improve your reading scores first you need to improve your vocabulary. So how do you improve your vocabulary? So let's look at how not to improve your vocabulary first. The worst thing you can do is look at lists. All right, lists are not going to help you. I see this all the time. Sometimes students will send me a link to some school or Facebook page that deals with IELTS and it'll say things like, you know, learn these lists of golden words or diamond words or power words or whatever it is and it's going to help you improve your vocabulary. They're not. Let's look at why that is. So number one, for reading it's impossible to predict which words are going to come up in the text. The English language is so broad, it's so massive that you would have to literally look at the dictionary and nobody has time to do that to like start at A and go all the way to Z. You're just not going to be able to do that. So it's a really silly way to try and learn vocabulary for the reading test by looking at a very limited list of words because these word lists could be anything from, like, you know, 100 words to a thousand words. That's not going to cover it. So it's a complete waste of time and lists are not going to teach you the word 100%. You're going to have to understand, of course, the meaning, but most word lists only give you like the meaning and a translation, which is useless. You're not going to understand collocations. You're not going to understand synonyms, antonyms, how it's used in a sentence. You need to understand how the word operates in a sentence. You need to understand the word 100%. If you're not doing that, it's a waste of time. And looking at a list of words doesn't help you improve your reading skills. And so there's a much better way of doing that. And I'll show you this in the ebook that we will share with you. And all you have to do is just add your email and then you can we'll email it directly to you. So the best way to improve your vocabulary is to read. If you look at any study done on the best way for someone to improve their vocabulary, reading is the number one way. However, just reading is not the answer. I can't go and just grab any book off the shelf and just start reading it. And magically, my vocabulary is going to improve. My vocabulary will improve a little bit, but you have to take a more strategic approach to it. So as I said, you need to be a little bit more strategic. So what we're going to do now is share the ebook with you. So let me show you how you can find it. So it's on our website. So if you go to our website, so type into Google IELTS Advantage and go to the homepage. So if you scroll down right to the bottom of our homepage, you'll see here we've put a little box in for you, free IELTS Vocabulary ebook. And it tells you step by step exactly what to do, exactly what to read, how to read, how to record your new vocabulary, how to review it, how to make sure that it sticks in here and you can use it on exam day. So all you have to do is just go to the main homepage. So just type in IELTS Advantage, go to the homepage, stick your email in there, and that's it. Simple as. Let's talk a little bit about mindset. So as we mentioned, tips are not going to help. So why is it that tips don't help? Well, you've got the wrong mindset. You're looking for a shortcut, you're looking for an easy way out. You're not going to be able to do that. Related to this, once you download the ebook, two things are very, very important. One, it tells you to read a lot. So many of you will have the wrong mindset about this because you'll be thinking, I don't have time. I don't have time to do this. Well, that's exactly the same as looking for a shortcut. All right, there's no short way of doing this. Think about anything else that you're trying to improve. You can't, let's say you want to lose weight. You can't really, really quickly lose weight. Or you want to get stronger. You can't, there's no shortcut of doing that. It takes years and years and years of working out. Or you want to become a marathon runner. You want to run a marathon. You can't immediately go from someone who doesn't run at all to immediately running a marathon. Exactly the same here. You need to have the mindset that yes, you will do it, but it's going to take daily practice. It's going to take daily work. You're going to have to do it over a long period of time. And I'm not talking about like 10 years or 20 years, but it's much longer than what most of you are looking for, which is an instant solution. The instant solution just does not exist in this context. The other thing to do with mindset is when you download that ebook, it's going to tell you exactly what to do. Like a blueprint of how to improve your vocabulary. But 90% of you will read the ebook and think, this is great. And then do nothing with it. 10% of you or maybe even less will read the ebook and actually do the things that it says to do. And that only takes, like you can do this in 15 minutes a day or 20 minutes a day or 30 minutes a day. But it's all just about scheduling that time and actually doing the work and actually putting in the work. And that is why I put mindset as the most important thing, because it doesn't matter what your teachers are like. It doesn't matter what your materials are like. It doesn't matter if you don't want to do any work, you don't do any work, or you have a really unrealistic attitude about, and you're just looking for shortcuts and cheats and hacks and things like that. So I'm not saying that to complain or saying that to be negative. I'm saying that because I want you to improve your scores. And that's the best way to do it. And that's why we've included this at the top of the chart here. So that's it for lesson one, lesson two, we're going to look at reading skills. So we're going to look at skimming, scanning, and close reading. So we're going to look at exactly what this is, exactly what this is, exactly what this is, how to use them and what combination and how to improve them. And that's what we're going to look at on Wednesday. So join me at the same time on Wednesday. And we'll take a few questions. I have about 10 minutes. So let me see if there are any questions. Yeah, so one one thing. Okay, one thing a lot of people have missed. A lot of you are commenting with your email. This is an online form, you put your email in there. Alright, I cannot go and copy and paste 100 emails. Alright, and then put them in here. Put your own email in there. And it's a lovely system. It just emails it to you directly. So please do that instead of entering your email. That's not a very efficient process. Let me see if you have any questions. Hello to everybody saying hello and thank you to all the people saying thank you. Rowena says where are you located in Northern Ireland in the UK. Everybody's adding their email address. Yeah, maybe I wasn't that clear. Put your email address in there. Okay, so go to the website, the homepage. Step one, step two, go to the bottom. Step three, enter email. Simple. Stick it in. That's it. Someone says don't use foul language, please. Two things. Number one, I didn't use foul language. And number two, it's my channel. I'll use foul language if I want. Feel free to log off and not look at it if you want. Maybe you were talking about people in the comments, if so, I apologize. Yeah, there just seems to be mass confusion about what to do. So that's probably my fault and I apologize if I wasn't clear. Good question from Yassaman. Is IDP changing its attitude about listening and reading? Because it's so difficult in comparison to the Cambridge test. So let me explain how it works. IDP, the British Council in Cambridge, those three bodies, they co-own the IELTS test. IDP and the British Council, they provide the test. So they provide the test centers and they mark your tests and everything. Cambridge create the tests. So IDP and the British Council do not create the tests. Cambridge do that and then they send them to IDP and the British Council. So your question is, are IDP tests more difficult than Cambridge? It's not the right way to think about it because Cambridge are the only people that produce them. Normally when somebody says, oh, that particular test was really, really difficult, it's probably because you were stressed out and you were under exam conditions or it could be normally something to do with human performance, not anything to do with the test. So it could be as simple as the breakfast that you had that morning or how much sleep you got the night before. These things happen all the time. Good question. Shahid, how much does translation help in improving vocabulary? Do not use translation at all. I know that that's a really difficult thing to accept. It's the reason why if you go to a really, really good school, if you go to a really good English school, the great teachers there, once you get to a certain level, like pre-intermediate basically, or even below that, they will not allow any translation devices or you to translate anything or any translation whatsoever because it is stopping you from using the language. Because what you're doing is you're putting a step in between you processing the language and using it because what you're doing is instead of you just looking at a word and thinking about it and using it in English, what you're doing is you're thinking about a word, translating it into your own language, translating back, then thinking about it in your own language and then thinking about it in English. And it's just using parts of your brain that you don't really need to use. And the problem often is that no two languages exactly match up with each other. So for example, I had this in my house yesterday. My wife is Vietnamese. She speaks English brilliantly, but one thing that she said was we were talking about food and she said, oh, it's good for health. And I said, it's not good for health. It's healthy. It's healthy. She said, oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. She says I was translating from Vietnamese. So from in Vietnamese, it's good for health. But if you use that translation, you're making a grammar mistake. And it's not just about grammar. It's also about different meaning and context and everything. So just like my students used to hate me because I would never allow any translation translation whatsoever. I had some students who would leave my class and say I want a different teacher. But the students who stayed really thanked me when they were able to actually use the English language. A very good question. How can I practice to improve vocabulary? In the vocabulary improvement plan, the ebook, it shows you how to do that. Let me see if I have time. A few more minutes. A lot of you are asking about how to improve my vocabulary, how to use vocabulary, what's the best way to learn vocabulary. Everything is included in that. I don't want to repeat myself over and over and over again. But download that, read it, and use it, and it'll answer all of those questions. A lot of you are asking about my VIP course. It's currently closed, but you can email me and ask some questions about it and maybe get put on the waiting list. My email address is chris at aislesadvantage.com. It should come up here. Here's my email address if you have any further questions or you want to work with us, you can send me an email. Can't guarantee that I'll be able to accept all of you or any of you, but you can email us if you want. This is very controversial now by translation. A lot of you are saying, but if I don't have any translation, how am I going to understand the word? Let's say, for example, you're reading a text. Let me put this up. Let's say you have, where did I put the pen? There we go. Imagine this is a paragraph, but 50 words or something like that. There's a word here. It's one word out of the whole paragraph. Let's say 50 words. And there's one word here which you see and you don't know. Okay. So what most students will do is they will, thank you, what most students will do is they will simply look at word up and put it into like Google translate or some sort of translation thing or look at it up in a dictionary that translates your language to that. So what happens is you read that, you look at the translation, it goes in here and out here and you will never remember it. It's very difficult to remember it. You're definitely not going to be able to use it in, let's say, you're doing the writing and the speaking test. You're never going to be able to use it. What you would do instead, if you weren't using translation, what you would do is you would look at the context, which is all these words around it and try and guess the meaning based on the words around it. Then what you would do is look at an English dictionary, so just an English, and then you would look up the meaning and you can compare what you thought was the meaning with the actual meaning. And that is going to help you do two things. Number one, it's going to help you become very, very good at guessing the meaning from context. You are especially in the reading test, but not only the reading test, but if you move to a different country, an English speaking country, every single day, multiple times a day, you're going to see new words you don't understand. So you're developing the skill of guessing the meaning by doing this. Also, the second thing is you're going to remember it, all right, because what you're going to do also is after you've guessed the meaning from context is to note that down in a special notebook or an app or something like that, record all the information you need there and review it regularly. That's much better than looking up the translation and completely forgetting about it. So join us on Wednesday. On Wednesday at 1 p.m., we'll be looking at reading skills, and then on Friday at 11 a.m., we'll be looking at taking a strategic step-by-step approach to all of the different types of reading questions. Thank you very much for all your comments. One last time, if you want the e-book, go to the main website, IELTS Advantage, go to the bottom, oops, enter your email, and you'll be able to get that. In the comments, let me know what you think of the e-book. If you have any questions after you've seen the e-book, have a look there and ask any questions that you have. I hope that you've enjoyed that. It's a free lesson, so all we ask is that you like and share it or just say thanks in the comments, and I'll see you again on Wednesday. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.