 Hi everyone, Chris here from IELTS Advantage with another mini course of all the things that you could improve. Vocabulary is probably the one that it's going to give you the biggest bang for your buck. It has a force multiplying effect and it's really going to help you in many, many, many different areas. First of all, is vocabulary important? Is it worth your time spending improving your vocabulary? So let's look at writing and speaking first. So it's 25% of your total marks, it's obviously very, very important. But for writing and speaking, it helps you express meaning. If you can't express meaning and get the meaning across to the examiner either through speaking or writing, then you're going to be in all sorts of trouble and the wider vocabulary you have, the better you're able to express meaning and express yourself and the better you are able to discuss the different topics either in the speaking test or the writing test. Before listening and reading, the wider your vocabulary, the more you're going to be able to understand. I'm sure that you've done maybe reading and listening practice tests and you just have no idea what's happening because there are lots of words you don't understand. And it also helps you locate the correct answer. It's good for skimming and scanning and it helps you decide the correct answer as well. Imagine you have a multiple choice question with three different possible answers with three similar meanings, knowing that the meaning of those words and having a wide vocabulary is going to help you with that and then being aware of synonyms and all of those things is going to really, really help you as well. So is vocabulary important? It is extremely important and I'm not saying that you should just focus on vocabulary. You need to focus on everything but if you're not focusing on vocabulary and you're doing some of the bad things that I'm going to show you in this video, then you're going to get into a lot of trouble and if you are learning vocabulary the wrong way, it's actually going to lower your score. So many of you are doing things that are not helping you at all, they're actually lowering your score and that's what we're going to look at in today's video. Is vocabulary important? Let me demonstrate with this sentence. So if I said to you, meet me at 11pm next to the old cinema. You should know exactly what I mean. There's no problem with meaning there. But imagine I take out some of the more functional words. So if I take out this, I take out a preposition, I take out an article, so I take out the functional grammar words if you like and I said meet me at 11pm next to the old cinema. Would you understand what I mean if I said just those words to you? Meet me at 11pm next to the old cinema. Sure you would understand exactly what I mean because these words have meaning. But let's try it the opposite way around. Let's remove the meaning words, let's remove these words and just leave the more functional words in. Let's get rid of that, let's get rid of that, let's get rid of that. Let's just leave the prepositions and the articles in. And if I said to you, at to the, would you understand what I mean? You would have no idea because all the meaning is gone. So when I take out the words, when I take out the important words, the vocabulary, then you're going to really, really struggle. So this is to demonstrate that not only is it important for expressing meaning when you're writing and speaking, but if you did not understand those words, imagine you had no idea what that meant, that meant, that meant or that meant. You would have no idea how to understand it if you were doing the reading and the listening test so it's extremely important that you are improving your vocabulary every single day and it's extremely important that you're not doing the wrong thing. So if you enter IELTS vocabulary into YouTube and you sort by page views or video views, the two most popular videos on YouTube related to IELTS vocabulary are these. Use these five words to score high in IELTS speaking, 2.4 million views. So 2.4 million people have watched that video and memorized 1800 words in 18 hours. Nearly a million people have watched this. Now, first of all, do not go to these videos and be nasty to the people who made them or leave nasty comments or say anything negative. This is not about being negative and it's not about bashing people, it's not about that. It's about giving you guys the right information and the two most popular videos on IELTS vocabulary in YouTube perfectly illustrate the two main problems when it comes to learning vocabulary. So let's look at the first one. Use these five words to score high in the IELTS speaking test. So if I was speaking to the person who made this video, I would simply ask them these questions because what they are saying is learn five words and you'll get a high score on the IELTS speaking test. So what I would say to them is, number one, is the examiner a fool? Is the examiner an idiot? I don't think they are. I think it's their job to do speaking tests day in, day out. And are you going to fool them with five special words? So imagine this, imagine you go into the speaking test and your vocabulary is okay. Let's say it's at a band five, band six level and then you say these five words. Is the examiner going to be fooled into thinking you have an amazing vocabulary? No, because they are going to be basing your vocabulary score on all of the words you use, not just the five words. So it's just a basic misunderstanding of how the examiners are thinking about your speaking score. Will you use more than five words? Hopefully, alright? Hopefully in the IELTS speaking test you're going to use more than five words and you're being judged on all of the words you're using, not five. So is it a good idea to just learn five good words? No, it would be a silly idea. Will you be asked about a range of different topics? Yes, and the examiner will be thinking and listening for topic specific words. Are you able to use topic specific words for a range of different topics? Just learning five words is not going to help you with that. And is saying a word evidence of a wide vocabulary? No, memorizing a word, just thinking about a word and using a word is not evidence that you have a wide ranging vocabulary. You need to know how to use a range of different words, not just five words. So 2.4 million people who follow this video and if you look at the comments everybody is saying thank you and how amazing it is because people are desperate, they really want some sort of magic system that's going to mean that they don't have to do any work and get the score that they need. And that's just BS. Because there are no high level words, there are no magic words, there are no diamond words, there are no golden words, band line words or impressive words. If you are watching videos that talk about these then just switch them off and they are not showing you the right way to do things. If you are at a school and I've seen this many times where schools will get a booklet or like a, like they'll create their own textbook and call it like diamond words or band line words and give it to their students, it's just a list of words. That school is more interested in your money than there are in your IELTS results. There are appropriate words, there are accurate words and that's it, that's the only way to think about it. Think about how you speak in your native language. Think about the last conversation you had with someone. Did you go into that conversation and think how many diamond words can I use or how many high level words can I use? No, you just use the words that were appropriate and hopefully you use them accurately. Those are the only two things that you think about when you are speaking in your native language or you're writing in your native language. So why do you think this is any different when you're doing IELTS test? It really comes from people looking for an easy way out, a shortcut, a magic solution because IELTS is very hard and it's a very high stakes test. People are pretty desperate and they will listen to people who are basically lying to them. If somebody is talking about these things, they're lying to you, they're marketing to you. They're not interested in helping you. This is a very good quote. You can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig. You might have heard of this quote before. I can take a pig and put lipstick on it, it's still a pig. I can take a student who is at a band five and I can give them five words and even teach them how to use those five words perfectly but they're still a band five student. They're going to move from a band five to a band seven until their whole vocabulary moves up to that level. Teaching them five words is like putting lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig. By the way, do not, again, do not go to the person who made that video and start saying nasty things to them. That's not what it's about. It's about helping you guys as much as possible. So that one is nonsense. What about this one? Memorize 1800 words in 18 hours. So you can probably tell from the title that this might not be that reliable. So is learning a list of words a good idea? So ignore the fact that this video is about learning 1800 words in 18 hours. Most of the advice out there, most of the schools out there are teaching IELTS vocabulary in this way. Learning some sort of list of words. So either a list of words with the meanings in English or a list of words with the translations in it, does this actually help? So these are the questions that I would ask those people making those videos. Number one, is it a memorization test? Is IELTS a memorization test? Are they testing memorization? No, it's a language test. You cannot improve your language ability. You cannot improve your ability to produce language and discuss topics by memorizing stuff. It's just not a memorization test. It's like trying to put a square peg into a round hole. Do you have to use the word? Yes, and the key there is use. There's a massive difference between learning a list of words and learning the meanings and being able to use those words. You have to understand way more than that. For example, spelling, pronunciation, style, use, grammar, collocations. None of these are taught when you learn a list of words because you're learning those words out of context. You're not actually learning them in the way that most people learn new vocabulary. My son is four years old and I read to him every night. One of the reasons why I read to him every night is to improve his vocabulary. What I don't do is go home and say, Tom, here's a list of 10 words to read. Please memorize these. I've even seen this with some parents show their kids these videos to just say, like, duck, ball, trying to teach them English. That's not really helping them. Does it take time to learn vocabulary? Yes, most people, many, many studies, academic studies have shown, most people can only learn between 10 and 20 words a day. Some people even fewer than that. Do you think you could learn 1800 words in 18 hours? No. And why do people believe that? Again, they're desperate. They want a shortcut. They want an easy way of doing things. And another quote, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Like, imagine that I got this camera. I could take this camera and give it to a stranger walking past my office and say, watch one YouTube video on photography. Like, they could get that little bit of knowledge and would they be able to then become a professional photographer? No, learning lists of words is a dangerous thing. A little bit of knowledge is a very, very dangerous thing. So the top three ways to summarize, the top three ways to lower your score, if you're doing these things, you are lowering your score. Number one, focus on a small number of high level or band nine or high level words or band, diamond words or whatever your school calls them is a terrible idea. You are not improving your vocabulary and you're probably using those words incorrectly. Memorizing lists of words is a terrible idea because again, you're not using those words correctly. You have to use the words, not memorize them. And number three, focusing on speed, trying to do things as quickly as possible. Try and apply that to any other job that you're trying to do. Is doing things as quickly as possible a good way to do things? Not when you're trying to learn how to do things properly. So instead of focusing on speed, focus on trying to do things effectively. What does band seven vocabulary look like when you talk to most students? They'll say things like big words, long words, complex words, high level words. But when students normally ask me about this or when we're talking about this and they say, how can I use more big words or how can I use more complex words? What I'll normally ask them is, well, what's a small word? What's a simple word? What's a low level word? And most students, the problem is that they have no idea what the difference is between a high level word and a low level word. So we're gonna look at that today and we're gonna look at what is the key to getting a band seven or above when it comes to vocabulary. So this is the CEFR, Common European Framework. And you can look this up, just type in CEFR and you'll get the different levels of English. So we have C2, C1, B2, B1, and then it goes down to like A2, A1. And they are equivalent to different levels in IELTS. So most of you watching this video want a band seven. All right, so band seven, according to this, this is from Cambridge, I believe, or the British Council, it's around a C1 level. Band eight, band 8.5, band nine, around a C2 level, so you're proficient. So band seven is advanced level. So most of you think that high level vocabulary means long, complex words. And low level vocabulary means quite simple, short words. And that's actually not the case. So how do you find out what level a word is? Well, there's a really, really easy way of doing that. Just go to Cambridge Online Dictionary. So just go to Google and type in Cambridge Online Dictionary and put in any word. And beside the word, you'll see C1, C2, B1, B2, A2, A1. It'll tell you the level of that word. So what does this mean? Well, when you hear people talking about using high level words or using complex words, they probably don't know what they're talking about. And you should only use the real evidence, the real facts to guide you on this. Don't listen to someone who says, like as we looked at in video one, learn these five words and you'll get a high score, that's absolute nonsense. So can we get a high score by using lots of C1 and C2 words? Most of you watching this video now are like, hmm, all I have to do is just learn lots of C1 and C2 words, put them into my essay, or use them in the speaking test and I'll get a high score, right? Well, not so much. Let's have a look. So what I'm going to show you now is a really great online tool that you can use. And it's produced by Cambridge English, so the people who write the IELTS test so you know that it's relevant and it's reliable. And if you type in Cambridge Text Inspector or Cambridge English Profile Text Inspector, what you can do is you can put in a text. So you could take the text from the Wall Street Journal here, just as an example, put it in and it will look at all of the words and it will give you a bar chart or a pie chart telling you which words are A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2. So you would think that really good writing means that there are lots of C1 and C2 words and quite a few B1 and B2 words and not many A1 and A2 words, because they're simple, right? So what I did was just take a random article from the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street Journal is quite, it's quite high-brow, the vocabulary in it, it's quite specific, it's quite high-level and put it in here. And what I find was, and this is pretty much the same of any good journal article or good newspaper, 36% of the words were A1 and 13% were A2. So 50% of the words were what most students would say are low-level. So does that mean that people at the Wall Street Journal are like band five IELTS writers? I don't think so. And 14% B1, 10% B2, 23% the text inspector didn't recognize the words. But here, C1 was 3% and the highest level, C2, one was 3% and the highest level, C2, was just 1%. All right, and if you go and download or look at some really, really high-level academic scientific journal articles or any sort of journal articles and put it into that, you'll find this kind of pattern, a tiny percentage of the total words are so-called high-level and the vast majority of the words are not. And if you showed that to most IELTS students and some IELTS teachers, they would say, oh, the vocabulary is not very good. It's not high-level enough. So that's kind of flawed logic. And we can look at something else. What I'm gonna show you now is from IELTS 11. So I just picked one of my official Cambridge IELTS books randomly, and this is a student sample that they give at the end of the book. So at the end of the book, I'm sure a lot of you have used these, they have student samples. I took part of a paragraph and one that said it was band seven. So it's probably band seven vocabulary. And let's look at this one. Is it full of high-level words? Well, let's have a look and see. So, let's have a look at, let's get it read. As character is concerned, and there's some grammar mistakes and everything because that's what most band seven essays would have. They would have some grammar mistakes. So we have the wearer of clothes, follower of fashion, another aspect, clean, ironed, grubby, very casual, smart, concerned. So the vocabulary that they're using, I wouldn't say most people would look at that and say, oh, it's really, really high-level. Some of it actually is. Some of those words, such as grubby, ironed, follower of fashion is a nice phrase. Most of these, some of these words are quite high-level, but the vast majority of the words are not. They are A1 and A2 words. So what does this tell us about getting a band seven on the IELTS test? To get a band seven on the IELTS test when it comes to vocabulary, you need to focus on the basics first. You need to be able to do the A1 and the A2 and the B1 and the B2 stuff first before you even think about trying to go up to the C1 and the C2 words. It's not like the examiner is going to look at your essay and you've made a bunch of mistakes with quite simple A1, A2, B1, B2 words and you have five C2 words and you use those correctly. Examiner's not going to look at those C2 words and think this person's vocabulary is amazing. They're just going to think this person has memorized a bunch of high-level words and put them into their essay. They're not silly. And if you look at the vocabulary here, follower of fashion, ironed, grubby, smart, very casual, these are all wearer of clothes. These are all words and phrases related to one topic, which is fashion. And this is what the examiners will be looking at more than using a couple of high-level words. They'll be looking for your ability to use topic-specific words because that will show them that you have a wide-ranging vocabulary because if you can use lots of fashion words, does that mean that you just studied lots of fashion? Well, maybe if you really love fashion, but if you know a lot of fashion vocabulary, it's highly likely that you know a lot of other vocabulary about many other topics. So on the speaking test, they're going to ask you about a range of different topics. Why do you think that is? To test your vocabulary for one reason because if you can talk about fashion and maybe the environment and maybe education and maybe technology and use topic-specific words for all of those topics, you're proving that you have a very wide-ranging vocabulary, not memorizing just a few high-level words which might not even be high-level in the first place as we demonstrated, but learning vocabulary properly and using it properly. So what can you do? Number one, don't learn lists of words. They're completely useless. Don't try and impress the examiner. You're not going to fill the examiner. You're not going to trick the examiner into thinking that by using five or six words at a high level that your vocabulary is great. Walk before you can run. The number of people I see trying to use very high-level vocabulary but getting the basics wrong is unbelievable. So focus on the basics first. You cannot learn how to run before you can walk. You can't learn how to walk before you can crawl. So focus on that first and then build up and obviously improve your vocabulary. How will I actually improve my vocabulary? What will I do each day to expand the range of my vocabulary and improve my use of vocabulary so that I can improve my reading, my speaking, my writing, and my listening? Everything on IELTS test is affected by your vocabulary level. So step one, if you want to improve your vocabulary you need input. You need to input some vocabulary into your brain and the best way to do that is either reading books or listening. Doesn't have to be books, can be reading articles on a website, doesn't really matter but you need some sort of input. What doesn't work is getting a list of vocabulary. A list of vocabulary with meanings or a list of vocabulary with translations into your own language, that does not work at all. You need to learn and notice new words in context. So that means basically reading books or reading any sort of material as long as in English if you want to improve your English vocabulary and listening to something. Again, it doesn't matter just as long as it is genuine English, real English, not a list of words. And if you really want to improve your IELTS scores you should be reading and listening to English every single day anyway. The number of people that come to me and say I want to improve my reading, I want to improve my listening and they just never read or listen to English is stunning. And this could just be five minute a day or 10 minute a day on your way to work or before you go to bed or when you get up or on your lunch break but find some time each day to read and listen. The question that everybody asks when we say read and listen is what do I read and listen to? Many students think that there's some like specific books or specific podcast or specific shows that they could listen to that is going to magically improve the vocabulary. Number one, the main thing is just read something you enjoy reading or listen to something you enjoy listening to. Why is that? Because you're going to have to do this over a long period of time. You're going to have to do it every day or four or five times a week. If you're reading something really boring are you going to do that every day? No, and you're not going to really enjoy doing it and our brains just don't really process information and learn as quickly as when we are enjoying something as opposed to doing something when you're really, really bored. Doesn't matter if it is a book about cricket or gardening or football or celebrity gossip it doesn't really matter as long as it's in English and you really enjoy it. The other thing that you can do if you're specifically trying to improve your vocabulary for writing is look at some of the common task two writing topics. So it doesn't have to be the BBC News it can be any news site in English but if you look at any news site and I just took today's BBC News you'll have a look up here. Education, health, science, technology, business these are all common topics especially education, health, science, technology these come up on task two all the time. So what do you do? Click on those and you'll find a range of different stories that you can read every single day. So if you just spent five or 10 minutes every day reading these how much better would your vocabulary become and how much better would your idea generation and developing your arguments and thinking of explanations and examples is going to help everything when it comes to writing and again it doesn't have to be the BBC News it can be anything but just get reading get doing something. So step two, notice and guess. So let's say you went into here and you clicked on technology. So I clicked on here and I found this article about SpaceX sending their capsule up to the International Space Station. All right so it's about space exploration which is actually a topic that comes up quite a bit on task two. So when I'm reading and I'm trying to improve my vocabulary what I'm doing is I'm noticing any new words or words that seem a little bit strange that I don't quite understand. So imagine I'm reading this and I see commercial astronaut America's new commercial astronaut capsule. So that seems a little bit strange commercial like a TV commercial. Why are they talking about a TV commercial when it comes to that? Or maybe it's something different. So what I would do is I would first underline it or if you're listening you could just note it down and then what I'm going to do is very, very important. I'm not going to take that and just highlight it on my phone and immediately look at the meaning because that's not going to really help us and this is going to teach us a very important skill not only for the IELTS test but for when you move to an English-speaking country because on the IELTS test and when you move to an English-speaking country you're going to notice and hear new words all the time that you don't understand. So it's really important that you get used to guessing what they mean from the context. All right, guessing what they mean from the words around it, from the title, from the paragraph, from the words around it and try and guess what that means. Doesn't mean that you'll be able to accurately guess every single time but you need to develop that skill. One, you'll develop that skill which is really important but two, by guessing the meaning it's going to help you remember the word and use the word more effectively in the future. So what I would do is, so this is the word it might be multiple words in one article that you don't really understand. So let's say I don't know what this word means and I don't know what this word means. So try and guess what they mean and then we'll move on to step three, which is note them down. Now, there are many ways that you could note new vocabulary down. You could go to a dictionary like I have here and just copy and paste the dictionary definition and all the information you need and paste that into an online document or some app on your phone. I think actually the best thing to do is to get a notebook, like a traditional paper notebook and actually write this down and you'll have a notebook that is your vocabulary notebook. Like there's nothing else in it, only new words and then you have it in one place and you can review it at your leisure. And it's just a nice feeling to have a notebook of all your new words and you can see that accomplishment and it'll keep you going and keep you motivated. But what you wanna do is have some sort of either an electronic or paper note of each word. So I've taken the word from this commercial and I figured out that it's not a TV commercial, it's actually an adjective. So they're describing something and look at all the information that they give you here. So this is from Cambridge online. So they've given you the type of word, they've given you the pronunciation, you can listen to the pronunciation, they've given you the level of the word, they've obviously the definition, they've given you some examples here, some more examples, some different ways of using this word, so the use. But you could also add in importantly here, synonyms, antonyms, collocations, more examples, using it in context. You could other word forms like when it's used as a line because this is the amount of information that you need in order to remember the word, but more importantly to be able to use the word and review all of your new words. This is why having a list of words with translations or meanings is pretty much useless because it'll go in this year and out this year, you're not going to remember it and you're not going to be able to use it. And that is the goal, especially in the speaking and writing test of the IELTS test, we want to be able to use the vocabulary in a sentence correctly after all. So get yourself the best students that I've worked with, the most successful students, any students who join my VIP course, one of the first things that we tell them, get yourself a notebook, a vocabulary notebook, read every day, listen every day, note your new words down. But that's not the final step, obviously. Final step is review, all right? So imagine you have five new words a day or 10 new words a day. After six weeks, you're going to have, you know, your vocabulary book is going to become pretty full, but you need to review these words because again, the goal is to be able to use them in sentences and there are a few things that we need to consider when reviewing. First of all, your repetition, you're going to have to do this regularly. So you don't have to do it every day, but you could do it, you know, once a week and then review them again a week later or a month, but you're going to have to do them over and over again. That is not exciting. You're going to have to be disciplined, but that is how our brains are going to remember these words and not just looking at them, not just reading them, that isn't going to help you. You have to be able to use them in context. So this word, commercial, so how could I use this? How could I write a sentence or how could I talk about this in context, the context that is normally used to talk about commercial as an adjective? So I would write sentences or I would talk about it and you can make up games or you can do all sorts of things with multiple words in your vocabulary notebook. This is an optional step, but a very, very important step which is get feedback on your use of those words or are the collocations correct? Is your use correct? Is the grammar correct? And that feedback is really going to help you. So you can get feedback just yourself by writing an essay and trying to use as many of those words as you can or recording yourself speaking and then checking the grammar and the vocabulary. Or you can get a teacher or a native English speaker or a very high level English learner to help you with that. But that is really the thing that is going to make the most difference, getting the feedback that you need. So to summarize, input, reading, listening, notice, new words, guess what they mean, note them down with all the information that you need and review and most importantly, use those words and make this a habit, all right? So make it like, let's say you have 30 minutes a day to do these, spend 15 minutes, for example, you don't have to do exactly this and just talking theoretically, but let's say you have 30 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes reading and noticing new words and noting down new words and then 15 minutes trying to use those words and reviewing the words that you have. If you did that every day over an extended period of time, how great is your vocabulary going to be? Much, much better than going to some school that gives you a list of golden words or diamond words which is a complete waste of time. And many of you are probably thinking, is there a faster way? So you're thinking, that seems like a lot of work and it seems like it's gonna take a lot of time. If you think there's a faster way, let me know in the comments. I don't think there is. I've never met a student who got a high band score by, for example, looking at a list of words or memorizing five words and using them on the test but feel free to disagree with me. But if you think this is a waste of time, then that's kind of like going to a gym and saying that you want to build muscles but you don't want to lift any weights and you want it immediately. Things take time. You need to follow a process. There's no magic hack. There's no magic shortcut that you can take but this is not only going to improve your IELTS scores but when you move to that English speaking country of your dreams, you're going to be able to have a much richer life because you'll be able to actually communicate with people effectively because that is what having a wide-ranging vocabulary will help you do. So I've added all of this information into a free guide for you. So if you go to ieltsadvantage.com slash vocabulary, so if you put that into Google or put it into your browser, you'll go to this page, scroll down, click on this button and you can add in your email and your name and you can download it pretty much immediately. If you need help with anything else, if you're struggling with anything or you're really worried about the IELTS test or there's some part of the IELTS test you're really, really struggling with or worried about, feel free to send me an email chrisadialtsadvantage.com either myself or one of my team will get back to you as soon as we can.