 Hey Chris here from IELTS Advantage. So about three weeks ago we released a video showing a real student Rashmi from India doing a mock IELTS speaking test with me and in three weeks it has nearly 400,000 views. So obviously you guys love this type of interaction and the comments were that you love to see how I was able to help a student in real time and help them improve their speaking. So what we decided to do was bring Rashmi back into our office and do a brand new series of videos with her and what we did was we split it into part 1, part 2, part 3. So we're going to have three videos and each part at the beginning I'm going to give Rashmi advice and feedback on how to do her best in each part so you guys can watch that and learn from it yourselves then see Rashmi's performance and then I'm going to give her feedback on her performance, talk about her pronunciation, her grammar, her vocabulary and her fluency and coherence and without further ado here it is. Okay Rashmi, so what we're going to do first is I'm going to give you some advice on how to perform to your best in part 1. Alright, so we're going to talk about part 1 itself first some strategies, some techniques and then we're going to talk about the four marking criteria. So pronunciation, fluency and coherence, grammatical range and accuracy, we'll just call that grammar and lexical resource, we'll just call that vocabulary. Okay, alright so part 1 the best way to describe part 1 is just normal everyday small talk type questions they're all questions about you so you can't get them wrong don't try and think of like impressive ideas or anything like that but just think of it as having a normal conversation with somebody let's say you and I were colleagues or classmates or something like that and I was getting to know you so I'm asking things about your hometown where you live your interests your hobbies just normal getting to know you questions does that make sense yes yeah so like we talked about before one of the things that students do in this part is give very very short answers so for example where are you from Mumbai or what's your job data analyst and in a normal conversation that would be fine but because you're in an English test the examiner needs enough data enough information to judge your fluency your pronunciation your grammar and your vocabulary so try and develop your answers a little bit more an easy way to do that for part 1 is just answer the question and then add a little bit more detail and so you could give an explanation or an example or a little bit more detail so let me give you an example if somebody asked me what's your job I wouldn't say teacher I would say I'm a teacher and I specialize in teaching IELTS primarily I do it online I have a company a little bit more information that and it will also allow you to develop more complex sentences as if you say things like hello my name is Chris that's a very simple sentence but if you add a little bit more detail or an explanation an example it makes the sentence a little bit more complex and for someone like you who is aiming for the the band 8's the band 9's that's what you would need to do and so any questions about part 1 no all good okay I think that the main criticism last time for part 1 was just shorter answers so try and the other thing is not too long either and I know that's frustrating advice like not too short not too long and the thing is if you the examiner has to ask you a range of different questions and they only have four or five minutes to do that so if you talk and talk and talk and talk the examiner will keep stopping you and then often students can feel like oh what did I do I'm doing something wrong they'll get stressed out and that can affect their fluency so I don't like to give students like number of sentences or number of words and so just follow the rule answer the questions a little bit more detail you know two or three sentences maximum and if you're going over like four or five sentences probably but don't but don't be thinking counting words or counting number of sentences or anything like that okay so for fluency last time your fluency was great there was a few m's and a's and likes and fillers like that but good fluency is not about never or you know none of those little audible pauses if you listen to the greatest speakers of all time they all pause and have little audible pauses and and that is not what good fluency is about good fluency is just speaking at a normal pace without an unnatural number of pauses or hesitations and you do pause and hesitate but naturally like everybody else when I'm speaking when you know when anybody in the world is speaking you pause because you need to you need to think so your fluency no big no big problems there coherence you do answer the questions but sometimes are a little bit too short especially for part one we've already talked about that for pronunciation your like intonation your sentence stress your connected speech is all really really good and your clarity is also good one thing though you're you're a shy girl I know you're a little bit timid sometimes when people not that there's anything wrong with being shy you know I was shy when I was your age too people who are shy tend to speak at a low level the volume it can be a little bit low they don't enunciate their words as clearly so you could improve your pronunciation by pretend you're speaking to me you know when I'm standing a little bit farther across the room and speak from your diaphragm not from inside so a lot of people speak from inside their mouth whereas people who enunciate very well speak from their their diaphragm their stomach so if you try and don't shout out but pronunciation is really good for you so you know I'm just just a little tweak it's not nothing no big deal grammar your grammar is incredibly accurate and very very accurate a nice wide range and I think that by extending and developing your answers a little bit you will add complexity to your sentences as well so we don't need to worry about that your vocabulary is also very very good however I think to push on to the next level during your preparation like this is preparation this is not the real test you could try and take a few more chances not trying to use like fancy vocabulary but the best way to improve your vocabulary I think is to think of more topic specific words so if we were talking about data analysis there are certain words that we would use such as you tell me some some words that you know more about data analysis than I do analytics AI artificial intelligence you would only use those words really when you're talking about that topic so when we're talking about these topics try and think of some topic specific words but be careful it can also affect your fluency if you're trying to think of big words so you're like I want to think of this word and then it affects your fluency so only if it comes naturally you don't want to be sitting there thinking hmm what big word will I use but I think try and improve it a little bit is that something good yeah yeah good do you want to start yes okay okay so first Rashmi do you work or do you study I study I'm studying at Queen's University and I'm studying a master's in marketing and majoring in marketing analytics excellent why did you choose that degree oh I choose to study analytics because I'm interested in big data and big data is becoming really popular these days a lot of companies are have now started to look at their dark data dark data which means like data which was collected but they have not done anything about it just lying around in the database so now companies are starting to use that data to analyze it and look at trends past and future trends which is false in in the predictive analytics category so I'm very much interested in looking at both the behavior of data and the consumer behavior which the data tells you so analytics lets me study that and look at the data in terms of how you can manage your customers better so I want to learn analytics because of that is there anything that you would like to study in the future I would like to study Python programming language I'm currently studying that and I would like to master it because it lets you create and develop your own programs because these days the data analytics software is very expensive so it's it gives you much more power to control your own uh dashboards and you can create it on your own so I want to learn uh Python programming because of that excellent now let's talk about your hometown what kind of place is your hometown I come from a very small city in India it's in western northwestern region it's called Baroda and it's a princely state we still have a king who lives in a palace there so there are lots of palaces throughout the city and it's called the cultural capital of my state because there are a lot of like reading and exhibition arts and culture is very much promoted there and what's the most interesting part of your hometown uh I would say the palaces there are a lot of palaces throughout the city and they're like really beautiful in the past only the king was allowed to be there but now it's open to the public so we can go around and see all those palaces and there are lots of museums in it 1800 years of history so it's really great and also we have a river which flows through the city and it's very famous for having a lot of crocodiles in it and it was featured on national geographic so because it's the largest river in a city with most number of crocodiles in it so that's a customer attraction I would say and what jobs do people do in your hometown well like I said my city is very small so most of the people have small businesses there are business owners and the students there they don't they don't really have too many opportunities so they go out either out of the city or they go out abroad to study or to to to look for an occupation but in my city there are not too many opportunities certainly but there we have like some big companies like pharmaceuticals and we have chemical industries so those type of jobs we do have yes and now let's talk about colors what's your favorite color I don't really have a favorite color it's like depends on my mood but I am told that I'm most of the time I tend to wear white or black that's what I'm told but I don't really think of a color when I go to buy clothes I just like pick anything I don't think I have a favorite color no and are there any colors that you dislike I dislike red it's because I had a traumatic experience once so that color scares me but other than that then the color that I dislike and are there any colors in your country that have a special meaning yes but India is a secular country but most of us are Hindus so the orange is the color of my religion so you you'd see orange flags on temples so orange is very prominent but the Muslims they are in minority but they're they are there are a lot of Muslims in my country so they have the green flags so whenever there is a festival a Hindu festival you'll see people wearing orange and waving orange flags and whenever there is a Muslim festival you'd see like people in processions carrying green flags and wearing green well done okay so that was how did you feel was that different from the one that you did last week oh I can't judge for myself you can't judge I'm a teacher I should just tell you people in the comments would say well well let's talk about the differences the main difference was you developed your answers much much more and so that would have helped your coherence would have helped your fluency would have helped your your grammatical range as well so you did a you did a really really good job there and there was only one where you you talked quite a quite a long time but you only did it for one one one answer and the examiner would probably only stop you if you did that for every single answer because they need to ask you a range of different questions and so you did really really well in terms of coherence you answered every question and everything that you said was related to the question so you did a very very good job grammar again extremely accurate and wide-ranging they used a range of different tenses and structures and your your sentences were more complex that time because you're adding in more clauses because you were adding in more detail and explanations and examples and just elaborating a lot more on the answers in terms of vocabulary you did you did an excellent job I think that you used even more topic specific vocabulary and you tried to push yourself a lot more and again the most important thing is accuracy and your vocabulary is extremely accurate so you did a very very good job there with pronunciation again the intonation was great the sentence stress connected speech already good I could understand a hundred percent of what you were saying and you did try and enunciate a lot more the people watching might say I didn't hear this or hear that because it's the microphone and because of the sound on their list watching on their little iphone or whatever um but in the in the studio here I can understand everything that you're saying which is great um one of the things that um was brought up in the comments before was that you have a tendency to say like which is um there's a lot of different ways that you can use the word like the primary way that you use the word like is to is for examples and so when you're writing an essay you would write for example for instance that's a more formal academic way um or such as but when you're speaking if you listen to how people from this part of the world um say give examples instead of saying for example they'll say like um which is totally normal it's not a you're not using it as a filler you're using it to exemplify things to use as an example so that was totally fine um and one of the questions you I asked you about a color that you dislike and you said red and you were talking about an emotional thing something traumatic that happened to you so anyone watching I've had this happen to me um during the test where someone you ask a question that is quite innocent and the person thinks of some horrible event that happened in the past and then they start to think about that event and they start to get very nervous and stressed out and emotional and that can affect the performance so anybody watching I would avoid talking about traumatic things like I've it yeah it's it's totally natural it just pops into your mind um like the very first lesson I ever taught I asked this lady about um her family and she was a I didn't know but she was a refugee and her whole family had died and I was like oh my god you know you just and and she kind of fell apart and and because obviously it was a traumatic thing for her to talk about so if this happens and if you're watching this video avoid emotional traumatic things um in because it can put you off you know but you did an excellent job very any questions about part one I don't know what intonation means intonation okay so intonation is the tone of your voice so we convey meaning when we're speaking English we convey meaning through words through facial expressions but also the tone so a good example would be if I came home late and I said hi honey to my wife how are you and she said fine fine like with a rising intonation that means she's fine but if my wife said fine with a downward intonate that means it's not fine you know or if I or if a student came into the classroom and they were late and I said please sit down please sit down so going up and then down that would mean that I'm totally fine and it's a polite way to ask him to sit down but if I said please sit down please sit down sounds very serious so because it's just there's just a falling intonation um but you have very natural intonation it's it's very difficult to learn um for a non-native English speaker so you're doing a good job with that