 In this video we're going to focus on IELTS speaking and we're going to show you the difference between what a band seven, eight or nine student does in the IELTS speaking test compared to someone who is struggling and is getting about five to six point five on the IELTS speaking test and the IELTS speaking test is divided into three parts part one part two and part three and there are some things that band nine students do that are very recognisable by examiners and there are also things that a band five to a six point five student that is very very very different in part one part two and part three completely different when it comes to the IELTS speaking test so this video we're going to go through the differences so that you can avoid these things and do more of these things and then improve your IELTS speaking score so one thing that these students do is there are lots of memorised answers the examiners can spot these right away and I'll show you a few other little tricks that the examiner might play on you to really determine whether these are memorised answers or not but it is extremely obvious so part one is the only part of the IELTS speaking test where you can predict the questions so you will probably be asked about whether you work or study your home your hometown things like that what a band five to six point five student will do is they will memorise answers and then just regurgitate them but this is not actually helping them improve their score because think about what is being tested are they testing your ability to memorise answers no they are testing your ability to speak to clearly communicate in English memorisation and clear communication in English are not the same thing linked to this one these students will often give very long answers so you will ask a student for example about their hometown and they will not only just tell you a little bit about their hometown they'll talk about the history and the architecture and the places tourists go to and places where people go to eat and the transportation links and because they have memorised all of these things this is not how you naturally answer a question this will often also lead them to going off topic so again you'll ask them tell me a little bit about your hometown and they'll regurgitate this memorised answer and they will go off topic and they will also sound very formal not always but a lot of the time these students sound very robotic so this might be to do with that they're very nervous they're stressed out often students who feel this way will talk in a very formal academic robotic style or they have been told by their teacher that you know IELTS is a very formal academic test therefore you must speak to the examiner in this way and then also in some cultures that is just how you naturally speak to a teacher or someone in authority again what are they testing they're testing if you move to London or New York or Sydney one of these English speaking places will you be able to talk to people very rarely will you be speaking to people in a very formal academic setting you will normally be speaking to people just normally naturally so this again is an indication to the examiner that you are towards this end of the spectrum and they're not going to give you one of these higher scores band seven eight and nine students it feels like a normal conversation when you are speaking to someone especially at a band nine it doesn't feel like an IELTS test it just feels like you're in a coffee shop with a friend or a colleague and you're just talking naturally about these topics because they are just answering questions directly and they are answering them very naturally and in terms of development in terms of the length of their answer so they are developing their answers enough but not going off topic and generally they don't give very very very long long winded answers in the same way and you know many students would think like the longer my answer the higher my score not necessarily and these students don't really think about length or development at all really they just think about have I adequately answered this question so band seven eight and nine students in part one what they will generally do is answer the question directly and then add a little bit more detail that could be an explanation an example some further detail they're going to give the examiner enough information to judge their pronunciation their fluency their grammar their vocabulary but they're not going to memorize give memorized very very very long answers like these students moving on to part two in part two you will be shown a cue card that will have a main topic and then it will have four bullet points and you'll have one minute to prepare your answer and then the examiner will ask you to speak for up to two minutes so these students what they do is they often rigidly follow the bullet points so you'll get four bullet points and what the students will do is they will often talk about bullet point number one then bullet point number two then bullet point number three then bullet point number four and this is a very unnatural way to speak about a topic and often they will get at least one of the bullet points they don't feel very comfortable talking about and that gets them into all sorts of trouble because they will start to be I don't really know how to deal with this bullet point okay let's move on to the next one and then whenever they finish talking about the fourth bullet point often they have run out of things to say and their fluency goes down even more so they really rely on the bullet points and can't really talk about anything other than the bullet points again this is often not the students fault they have often been taught that you must do this you do not have to do this you can use the bullet points if you want use them to help you if you want but the only thing you need to do is talk about the main topic at the top of the cue card so they will run out of ideas and this will affect their fluency and this can also mean that the rest of their test is just a disaster because they think they have failed at this stage and often they will be speaking for around one minute and then they've nothing else to say and they just get really really stressed out not always but it can affect part three as well because if you're more stressed you are that's going to affect not only your fluency but it can also affect your pronunciation your grammar and your vocabulary the four marking criteria some other students in part two so they use some kind of a trick so they learn some kind of a trick strategy that they think will trick the examiner into giving them a higher score an example of this is something that we often see which is PPF now when I was teaching at the British Council like more than 10 years ago we would teach PPF and which is past present future but we would just use it to help students fill out their answer in part two if they couldn't speak about some of the bullet points but what we see these days is there are many YouTube channels and online resources that teach students just talk about the past then just talk about the present then just talk about the future if you do that it's really easy and you kind of trick the examiner into giving you a high score well the problem is is that you will often get cue cards where you cannot talk about the past or you cannot talk about the present or you cannot talk about the future or it's really really difficult for you to do that and often that leads to a per performance bad fluency students getting stuck so you're not going to trick the examiner into doing anything and to be honest this is probably the most popular way of doing this now these days the examiners hear this like 20 times a day it's not going to trick them into giving you a high score they know what you're doing so if you are memorizing answers in part one and then you think that you're going to trick the examiner using ppf and then some other trick in part three the examiner has seen it a hundred times what band nine students do is the main thing they do is they focus on the main topic so this is the main topic at the top of the cue card for the whole two minutes when they're speaking they will be talking about that main topic so they don't really focus on the bullet points they just speak naturally about the main topic for the two minutes and they use the bullet points but they used to use the bullet points to help them speak naturally so this student is relying exclusively on the bullet points this student is looking at the main topic and talking just naturally about the main topic and they might use some of the bullet points they might not because their main focus is just speaking naturally about the main topic for the whole two minutes then we move on to part three part three they're going to ask you more abstract questions part one is about you part three is more a discussion of ideas part three the questions will be a little bit more difficult and often this results in these students giving very short answers so this is kind of the opposite of what you should be doing in part one the answers don't need to be that long but because they have memorized those answers they give very long answers in part one part three you need to develop your ideas a lot more so you should be giving longer answers but these students are giving very short answers because they don't feel comfortable talking about this because they cannot memorize these part three answers because part one is predictable part three is completely unpredictable so this is the little trick that aisles are playing on you if you are giving very long memorized answers in part one on questions that you predict are coming up they will always ask you questions that are unpredictable that are very strange this is where you often hear people complaining about the speaking test and saying well why are they asking me about hats or cakes or like these very strange topics it's to test you on a range of different topics that you are not expecting and if you're giving these very long memorized answers and then very short answers here it's a clear indication that you are relying on memorization and you don't actually know how to speak in English memorization and actually communicate in English are two very very different things this student will often also memorize lists of vocabulary lists of idioms lists of phrases and this will actually lower their grammar and their vocabulary score because they'll never be able to use them effectively they also might not attempt some answers so part three one of the things that they will do is they will ask you increasingly more difficult questions to really test you know are you a band 6.5 or are you a band 7 are you a band 8 are you a band 9 they will stretch you by asking you more difficult questions if you get to part three and you just shake your head or say I don't know you're basically just saying to the examiner I don't deserve to be here I deserve one of these scores you often get the impression that these students just want it to be over so these students are just exhausted at this stage because the examiner has really stretched them this is getting to like the 12 13 14 minute stage and they you can tell that by giving very short answers or not answering them at all the student just wants this to be over and again that's an indication that you know you don't deserve one of these higher scores and their range will be limited so the examiner will ask you there will be three different topics here a fourth topic here five or the fifth or sixth different topic here what the examiner is doing is they are testing your range of vocabulary and your range of grammar often these students will memorize vocabulary and memorize grammar so when the examiner asks them a question that they weren't expecting their range is obviously very very limited so this is why you should not memorize new words and phrases and idioms you should learn them effectively so if we contrast that with the band seven eight or nine student what they will do in part three of the isle speaking test is they will at least attempt every question even if they don't know the answer they're not familiar with the topic they will at least attempt it this student will often either laugh or say I don't know or just shake their head or just start crying that very rarely happens but I have seen it happen whereas this shouldn't will be you know it's again it's like being in a coffee shop with someone if you were with your friend in a coffee shop and you asked them about a topic they don't know about they would say well I've never even thought about that I don't really know much about that but if I had to give an answer this would be my guess and they will explain what they think based on the knowledge that they have and there will also be lots of development so they will answer the question directly and then again you're talking about ideas so they will explain why they think that or explain why other people think that they will give examples to help provide evidence for their point of view they will really develop those answers and finally they will have no problem or little problem talking about a range of different topics and scenarios so they will get to the end and it will be clear to the examiner you know when we asked you about the three different topics here you'd no problem lots of great topics specific vocabulary in here same with the topic we asked you about here and then there's your two or three different topics in here you'd no problem talking about those and then they're going to ask you about different scenarios requiring you to use different grammatical structures they'll ask you about the past the present the future they'll ask you to compare things to talk give your opinion about things they'll ask you to use conditional structures and these students have no problem answering any of the questions not because they're so familiar with the topics but they have just a great command of English and just like a native English speaker you can ask them about anything and they can comfortably and naturally talk about anything now do you need to be at a native English speaker level to get a band nine no absolutely not certainly not for a band seven or a band eight if you really want a band seven eight or nine in the IELTS speaking test it's as much not so much doing these things as not doing these things if you just avoided all of this and did a little bit more of this you would dramatically improve your score if you want more information on how to improve your IELTS speaking score I have a free course that you can get just go into the description below and click on it and you can join our free IELTS speaking course it goes into all of this in a lot more detail now there are three parts of the speaking test and there are four marking criteria I intentionally didn't go into detail on the four marking criteria I'll do that in another video hope that you enjoyed this if you didn't feel free to give it a dislike unsubscribe go and check out another IELTS channel if you didn't like it if you did like it and you want more information click on the description below and join our free speaking course thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed the video