 Hey there, Chris here and welcome to day three of our IELTS Grammar mini course. So make sure that you check out day one and day two, you'll find them either on Facebook or YouTube. There's some really, really important information in there but I think this one is going to have the biggest impact on scores because we're going to show you exactly what to do to improve your grammar and specifically how to improve the accuracy of your grammar. We talked a lot in lessons one and two about the difference between range and accuracy and I told you that the most challenging thing for students is more accuracy than range. So this is all to do with how to improve the accuracy of your grammar. So what are we going to do in this lesson? We're going to look at the single biggest mistake that students make that we see every single day because people email us every day saying how can I improve my grammar and they go away and they do this big mistake and then they come back and they haven't improved. We're going to give you a little bit of a talk on strategy and how to think strategically about improving your grammar and then we're going to go into step by step how to improve your grammar. So the single biggest mistake that we see is trying to improve your grammar by reading a whole grammar book. So we get I'd say 10 to 20 emails a day from students and that goes something like this. Hi Chris, tell me how to improve my grammar and we actually give them this grammar improvement plan and then they reply and they say I don't want that will you just tell me a grammar book and they go away and they read the whole grammar book and then they email us after they fail the test again and they say why didn't I improve my grammar by reading this whole grammar book. I'm not saying that grammar books are not useful and we will actually include using grammar books in the plan but just sitting down with a whole grammar book and trying to read it is kind of like trying to improve your vocabulary by reading a whole dictionary. For one it's very very boring you're not going to get through a whole grammar book in one go you're going to lose focus because it is incredibly boring and also I'm going to show you in a second you need to be more strategic than just getting a whole grammar book and reading the whole thing and because it's a big waste of time if you actually do that. So let's look at an analogy. All right so imagine you go to the doctors and you say I feel unwell. All right so the doctor wouldn't say to you oh well you feel unwell just you know go at the back and we'll shoot you in the head and that will be the end of it. No what they would do is they would try and figure out the part of your body or the system or exactly what is wrong with you. So imagine you have a problem with your liver. All right. Imagine you drink too much alcohol. They're not going to try and work on your teeth. They're not going to try and work on your eyes. They're not going to try and work on your skin or your heart. They're principally going to focus on the liver because that is the actual problem. So what a lot of people do is they think that improving their grammar the best way to do that is to read the whole grammar book. You need to be a lot more strategic about that in the same way that a doctor would be strategic and find out exactly what is wrong with you. So let's say I go into the doctors and I say I'm feeling really unwell. The first thing they would do is identify what the actual problem is. So the actual problem is my liver and then they would tell me what to do. So they would say quit drinking. They would say lose some fat, maybe my liver is too fatty. And then they maybe say exercise to lose some lose some fat from my liver. But then once they've identified that and they've told me what to do, it's up to me to then go and do these things. So I have to quit drinking. I have to lose fat by exercising and eating more healthy. And if I don't do these things, this is not going to fix anything. It's going to I'm going to remain sick. So if you just read a whole grammar book, but you don't actually do anything with that grammar book, you don't actually do any practice or actually try and fix anything or learn the actual rules or just sitting reading a grammar book and not really thinking about it. It's exactly the same as going to the doctor and them telling you what to do and you're not doing it. And we'll come back to this metaphor at the end. So step one, just as going to the doctor and finding out what is actually wrong with you, the first stage, the first step in the improvement plan is identify your main weaknesses. So there's no point in trying to improve every area of grammar. And this is not students fault for because a lot of this comes from textbooks and courses. If you go to a textbook, what they do is they don't tell you your specific areas of weakness, they'll just teach you everything about grammar. If you go to a course in your local area, they'll and it's a grammar course or a general English course, they won't often tell you exactly what you need to work on and just focus on that. They'll teach you everything to do with grammar and a lot of the time that's a waste of your time, especially in the context of IELTS because you there are certain areas of grammar and I don't know what those are for you, but it's probably one of these could be verb subject agreement, tenses, articles, conditionals, prepositions, countable and countable lines, punctuation. You need to figure out which of these areas it could be other areas, but most of the time it's one of these or two of these or three of these. Which of these areas is the main problem? And then you're going to attack that problem just in the same way as if you went to the doctor, you're not going to try and improve everything unless you're incredibly sick. You're going to improve one or two areas that are actually causing the problem. So the first stage to improve your IELTS grammar scores is to identify the exact areas of weakness. What do you have a problem with? You could be aware of this yourself or you can get like a friend who's very good at English or a native English speaker or a teacher just to look at your writing or to, you know, look at your or listen to you speaking and they should be able to identify pretty quickly what the problems are with the students that I work with. Just listening to them for, you know, one or two minutes or looking at one essay, you can identify what their main issues are. So let's have a look at this set. There are these two sentences to show you to demonstrate why this is a problem. So I just literally took a book off my shelf, a random book, and this was the first the first two sentences from this book. So some revolutions begin with a gunshot, others with a party. This one kicked off on a Friday night in downtown Athens in 415 BCE. So imagine that I'm writing this sentence, but I have a big problem with articles. So here's an article. Here's an article. Here's an article. This one kicked off on a Friday night. OK, so most sentences have articles in them. Imagine I have a problem with articles and I don't know how to use them. Most of my sentences are going to have mistakes in them. All right. So that's a major problem. Imagine that I have a problem with prepositions. Again, multiple prepositions in just two random sentences. If you had a problem with prepositions, most of your sentences would have problems. And there's so many other areas of grammar. That's just two out of these. Imagine you have a problem with punctuation. So here we are. So those are just three areas. Imagine you really struggle with those three areas, articles, prepositions and punctuation. You would have multiple, multiple mistakes in multiple sentences. You are not going to be getting a seven or above in your writing or your speaking if that was the case. So what would we do? We would attack those areas. So let's say, for example, you need to work on this. You need to work on this and you need to work on this. But you're pretty good at this. You're pretty good at this. You're pretty good at this. That's no problem. And that's no problem. So what we've done is instead of focusing on everything, we're just targeting our weak areas in exactly the same way that a doctor would treat a patient, they would attack the weak areas or treat the weak areas. And that is what you're going to do. That is the first step. Step two, learn the rules of that grammar. Grammar is simply the rules or the law of a language. All right. That's all it is. So it's not very interesting. It's not very sexy. It's not very, you know, fun, but that's what it is. It is the law of the language. It is the rules of the language. But luckily, rules can be learned. All right. The law of something can be learned. It is pretty easy to do it. You just have to put the work in and do it. I'm a former lawyer. I can tell you that it is not that complicated. You just have to sit down and learn the rules of something. And there is a huge amount of online resources. Waiting for you. British Council has some great and free resources and just breaking down the rules and in particular areas of grammar. And all you have to do is look at them or you can go and get a good grammar book. Most grammar books will be pretty much exactly the same because they're talking about the exactly the same thing, the rules of that grammar. Another way to think about it is to use logic. IFTTT. Some of you will know what this means. If this, then that it's a really good way to think about programming language. If you're a programmer and this is a good way to think about it. For example, you could apply this to articles. Do I need an article before nine? If you don't zero article. If you do, then it's going to be either a definite article, the or indefinite article or it could be or it could be on. Within these, there's so many if this, then that, for example, if it was United Kingdom, right? That is a group of nations. So you're going to put the United Kingdom because that's the rules, the United States, the Philippines. Or if you are going to, let's say, I'm going to see a movie. There is a rule on why I say a movie instead of the movie or zero articles. And you can break it down into this kind of logical way of thinking thinking about things or just look at the rules. It's not terribly exciting, but it has to be done. So again, looking at this, why? Let's say we're looking at articles again. Why are we going to use this one here? Why are why here? Is there any other articles? So why are these the indefinite article instead of and why is it instead of there? Why is it zero article? There are rules, definite rules that you can look up and reference that will tell you why that is. You could do it now in two seconds by googling it, googling the rules of that and thinking about it. And that's what you have to do. I'm afraid. Again, not terribly exciting, but it's there for you if you want to learn it. And what happens is a lot of people who are frustrated with learning grammar, the main issue is they just don't want to learn the rules. They want to learn a quick fix or get a quick like a hack or a shortcut. There's no way of doing that. You can't immediately learn all the rules of a specific area of grammar by, you know, learning some quick trick. You just have to sit down and work them out. Step three, practice those rules. That's just the first step, sitting down and figuring out what the rules are. Now you have to practice them, because if you don't practice them, you won't be able to use them because when it's not testing your knowledge of all the rules, it's testing your ability to use those rules. And luckily, you'll find a huge number of free practice activities online. Ask Google. Don't ask me. I'm not Google. Google knows a lot more than me. Ask Google and go and find article practice activities, preposition practice activities, present tense, past tense, whatever you want to learn. Just put it into Google and you'll be able to find it. It's pretty easy. Step four, produce, try and produce error free sentences. So you're going to learn the rules. Then you're going to practice those using practice activities. But then you need to produce full sentences using that area of grammar. If it's something like articles or prepositions or punctuation, pretty much every sentence is going to contain them. So it's all you have to do is produce sentences. So you can do this when you're doing a writing practice or you're speaking practice. And if you don't do that, you're never going to be able to do the thing on test day because it's remember, it's not a knowledge test. It's a doing test. Can you produce the actual grammar in sentences? So you need to work on that. And step five, feedback. All right. So when you produce the sentence, are you using that area of grammar correctly? And you can use self correction. So you could one thing that you could do is use your phone and just literally every phone these days has a recording option. Download an app that allows you to record your voice and get some practice questions and then listen back and self correct those areas of grammar, or you can do a essay under exam conditions and then look back and try and figure out what the mistakes are or you can hire a teacher or you could use a friend or a family member who is a very high level English learner or a native English speaker if you know one of them to give you feedback on that. But the key is to view each mistake as an opportunity. Every mistake that you make is an opportunity for you to improve your grammar. You should see mistakes as a really good thing. So we often work with with students and we send them like a full report on their grammar on our grammar course. When somebody joins that, we get them to write us an essay and then we go through and we tell them every single mistake that they made. And a lot of students when they get that report, like every sentence has multiple mistakes in it and they're like, oh, my God, I'm never going to get better and I'm terrible. It's like, no, this is great. Now, you know exactly what is wrong and now you can learn from those mistakes and improve them. So here is the grammar improvement plan. Identify your weaknesses. Once you have identified those areas of grammar that you need to work on, could be one, could be two, could be three, could be four, but try and maybe limit it to the maximum three or four because you don't want to, you know, try and learn everything. Normally, people have one or two areas of grammar that they they really struggle with and they need to work on. Learn the rules. It's free for you online. You can find that by Googling it or you can get a grammar book. Number three, practice. Again, loads of free practice material online and in books as well, produce, produce sentences with that grammar and get feedback and learn from errors. All right. One thing I just add, do not use artificial intelligence like Grammarly or something like that to try and correct your own. Grammarly is for native English speakers who know when they've made a mistake. Grammarly cannot tell you why you made that mistake and help you figure out why you did that. And that's not really useful. Again, you can self correct. The best way is to actually get a teacher to help you with that. You know, you wouldn't try and fix your own car. You wouldn't try and like if you went to the doctor, you go to a doctor, if you had a medical problem, why would you try and fix your own grammar if you can hire someone to help you with that? So exactly the same. We'll go back to this. Imagine I go to the doctor and there is nothing wrong with my liver, hopefully. But imagine I do and I say that I'm really sick. First of all, they would identify that the problem is here. Then I would learn what to do. The doctor would tell me what I need to do. Then I would need to do those things. And then a few weeks or a few months later, I would go back to the doctor and they would say, you didn't you didn't stop drinking or you didn't do this or well done, you did and you would get feedback and you can apply that system exactly the same way to your grammar or pretty much any any other part of language. So hopefully you enjoyed that mini grammar course. If you didn't watch lesson one or lesson two, feel free to go back and please do email me in a few weeks or a few months after you have implemented that grammar improvement plan. It's always great to hear people who hear from people who do actually put these things into place and actually do them. But the key guys is actually doing it. You would not believe the number of people who we give this system to and then they do nothing with it. All right. There's no point in watching any of these videos that if you don't do anything, it is very, very simple. Anybody can do that. Anybody, it's free. All right. There's no barriers, but it's not easy. There are no easy ways to learn grammar. And that's what you have to do. So thank you very much, guys. It was a pleasure teaching you this week. And if you need anything, feel free to get in touch with us. There's my email, either myself or one of my team will get back to you if we have time. And if you have any questions about grammar or anything like that, feel free to post in the comments. Thank you very much, guys, and see you soon. Bye.