 We researched the most popular IELTS-speaking tips and tricks so you don't have to. We're also going to show you whether these seven tips lower your score or increase your score, so you have the confidence on test day to use them or not use them. I'm going to show you exactly what IDP and the British Council have to say about these tips and tricks so that you know what we're saying is true and correct. And if any of these tips and lower your score, I'm going to give you some advice on what to do instead so that you can again have the confidence on test day to give the examiners what they're looking for and improve your score. So without further ado, let's go. So when doing this research, the most popular tips are be polite, be friendly, use eye contact, hand gestures, body language, and that is going to help improve your score. Is this actually correct or not? So if you go on to YouTube, you'll find the most popular video on this topic has 13 million views. So millions of people have watched this video and in it it says that it's important to be friendly, it's important to smile, that your body language is important, and your eye contact is important. And it's not only this video, you'll find thousands of videos and online blogs giving this advice. So what do IDP and the British Council have to say about this? So on IDP's website, you'll find an article called How to Prepare for the IELTS Speaking Test. And in it, it says this, every examiner is trained and monitored closely to be fair to every candidate and to assess your level of English. The examiners will not give you more or fewer marks if you are smiling and laughing. It is best to try and relax as much as you can and communicate in a natural way. So during examiner training, the examiners are told to assess students on their speaking ability and their speaking ability only. And if you look at the official marking criteria, it doesn't say anything about the candidate being friendly or polite, and it also doesn't say anything about body language or hand gestures or eye contact. None of these things are actually assessed during the speaking test. Let's have a look at what IDP said in another article called Nine Myths About the IELTS Speaking Test to Debug. This is what they said, being polite, courteous and smiling should be part of basic manners when engaging with anyone in a conversation. It does help the interaction move forward, however, it is not part of the evaluation criteria. You should not worry about being overly polite but focus on the conversation and topic at hand. So you'll find thousands of videos online that talk about how to greet the examiner, how to impress the examiner, that the examiner's mood and what they think about you as a person. All of this is important. What IDP is saying is none of this is important and none of it is actually assessed. We can also look at a video by the British Council called IELTS Improve English and Prepare for IELTS Speaking Fluency Coherence and in that video it states students are not assessed on appearance or body language. So these tips and tricks related to being friendly, polite, body language, etc. are completely wrong. Now many of you might be thinking well it's not doing any harm, well it actually is because if you go and look at lots of the popular IELTS Speaking Feedback videos, those one-on-one videos, you will hear those teachers giving the students feedback on their body language and their hand gestures and their eye contact and whether they were friendly. This means that your teacher is giving you feedback on things that do not matter which also means that they are not giving you feedback on things that do matter because as a student if you believe that what is important is using your hands and looking into the eyes of the examiner it means that you are not focusing on the important things which are fluency and coherence, grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. Those are the only four things that your examiner and your teacher should be thinking about because you as a student you are not aware of what is being assessed. So if you're listening to your teacher talking about all of these things that don't matter then you're not spending enough time and not focusing on the things that do matter. So what should you do instead? Well number one only focus on what is in the marking criteria. There are things in the marking criteria that you need to spend time on and you need to work on. Body language and hand gestures are not some of those things. The second thing to think about is is your teacher actually qualified and do they know what they're talking about if they are giving you feedback on these things and especially if they tell you that they are an X examiner. Real X examiners know what the test is about and what the marking criteria says. The second popular tip that we see a lot is that the IELTS speaking test is an academic test and you need to be very academic and formal and you should avoid things like slang and informal language. Is this actually true? So for example if we go on to YouTube we'll find this teacher with nearly one million subscribers clearly stating do not use slang and you'll find many other videos like this saying that you should use formal language and don't be informal and things like that. So if we go on to the British Council website and have a look at an article there called IELTS test format explained it states the content of the IELTS speaking test is the same for both the IELTS academic and IELTS general training tests and this is correct. If you have a look at the official marking criteria for IELTS speaking it is exactly the same for general training students and for academic students. So this should be an indication that it is not an overly formal academic test but let's have a look at what IDP say. A very interesting article on the IDP website is called formal and informal English on IELTS and it starts off with you wanna nine in IELTS? You might think the above sentence will give you a low score on an IELTS test however you might be wrong. IELTS tests your English language skills and yes this includes both formal and informal English. So this tip that you should not use informal English and that the test is a very formal academic test is completely wrong. The speaking test is testing your ability to speak normally in everyday situations to other people. It is actually quite rare to speak to people in a very formal academic context. I would say that less than one percent of interactions are actually really formal and academic. Therefore it would be completely unrealistic to test people on academic formal English when the vast majority of English is normal everyday English which includes things like slang, phrasal verbs, idiomatic language, things like that. So what should you do instead? First of all do not try to learn and memorize lots of academic or formal phrases and include them in your speaking test. They will sound extremely unnatural and you will also sound very robotic. Secondly relax. My number one piece of advice for students the day before their test if a student asks me my test is tomorrow what should I do it's speak to the examiner like they are a human being like they are your friend or someone you know that is going to help you relax and it is helping you give the examiner what they're looking for. Normal everyday English is also a lot simpler and easier to use which is going to actually improve your grammar your vocabulary your fluency and your pronunciation because your brain is going to be automatically relaxed and you're going to use words and phrases and sentences that are actually correct. If you do the opposite and you try and remove all of this everyday English then you're putting too much pressure on yourself to use these overly rarely used academic phrases and then you are going to get in trouble and make lots of mistakes so just relax chill out and you will be much better off. The third most popular tip that we see for IELTS speaking is use lots of uncommon big fancy words and memorize lists of words and somehow these big fancy words are going to get you a high score. Is this actually true? So if we go on to YouTube you'll find lots of videos like this so for example this one with nearly one million views is called IELTS speaking vocabulary just eight words to score seven plus bands. So what they are saying is you're going to be speaking for 15 minutes and somehow eight of those words that you say in those 15 minutes are going to magically help you get about seven eight and nine. Is this actually true? So if we go on to the British Council website and we look at their video called Lexis and Vocabulary so it's all about how to use vocabulary on the IELTS test. It states many candidates memorize impressive lists of vocabulary but often end up using them in the wrong way because they haven't understood them properly. This is why you should never try and memorize lists and never try and use words you're not comfortable using because you're going to make lots of mistakes which will lower your score not improve your score. Let's see what IDP have to say about this in their article 10 tips IELTS speaking. They state quite clearly don't use big and unfamiliar words. They say you might want to impress the examiner with big and complex words in your speaking test but to be safe avoid using words you are not familiar with. There is a higher chance of making mistakes by either mispronouncing words or using them in the wrong context. Mistakes can affect your final band score and this sums it up perfectly. By watching these videos that encourage you to use big fancy vocabulary you are actually lowering your score because you are making lots and lots of mistakes. What should you do instead? Well during your preparation you should be trying to improve your vocabulary by learning new words learning new phrases but on test day play it safe. What we say to our VIP students is use the 100% rule which is if you understand the word 100% you know the meaning you know how to use it you know the context to use it in and in the speaking test you know how to pronounce that word correctly then you use it but if you're unsure of the meaning or you're unsure how to use that word or you just learned it last week then you're probably not using it or pronouncing it correctly so play it safe and you will be fine. One of the reasons why I dislike videos like this that encourage you to learn all this fancy vocabulary is what they are telling you is your vocabulary is not good enough you're not good enough yet which for the vast majority of students is incorrect for the vast majority of students we work with on our VIP course we do not actually give them extra vocabulary to learn we give them the confidence that their existing vocabulary is good enough more than 95% of the students that we work with who need like a band 7 for example their vocabulary is already at a band 7 level so it's not about learning new things it's about unlearning undoing all of these bad habits and the biggest bad habit for vocabulary in the speaking test is thinking you're not good enough and you need to learn all of these fancy words the opposite is true your current vocabulary is probably fine you're just not using it and not only will this affect your vocabulary score but if you are trying to use big fancy words then your fluency is going to suffer because you're doing more thinking than actually just speaking naturally and your pronunciation score will lower because you're making lots of pronunciation errors with unfamiliar words and your grammar score will also probably go down because you're using unusual words you're not comfortable using which will often lead to grammar mistakes so play it safe number four learn common topics and learn common questions does this actually help so you'll find lots and lots of videos like this one on youtube they talk about the 11 most common questions or the most common topics so this person has more than a million subscribers and in this video when he's talking about the 11 most common questions he doesn't give any guidance on whether these are guaranteed to come up or what chance there are that these questions will come up there's no advice on that so from the perspective of you from the perspective of a student if you see a video called 11 common questions or you might see a video called 20 common topics or something like that you are not an isle expert so you're going to assume that this person with more than a million subscribers knows what they're talking about and what you will do is you will go into the test thinking these are the questions that are going to come up is this actually true so if we look at a blog article on the isle's official website called isle speaking test topics they do give examples of some questions that could come up but they don't give any common questions there is a massive difference between an article giving you common questions which you think are definitely going to come up and example questions example questions are there just to give you an idea of what might come up and this is actually correct this is the best way to teach this to students which is these things might come up but they might not come up you might get asked different things this is very very different from a video which states common questions or most common questions or most common topics if we go on to the idp website there's an article which states in part one the examiner will ask you about yourself and general questions from common topics like work family studies interests and hobbies and this is actually true you are likely to get a question on work family studies interest hobbies everyday topics but they might also in part one ask you a completely random question like birthday cakes or hats or something like that so you should not prepare for just these common questions to come up you should expect anything to come up and to be able to deal with anything and it also says in part two of the speaking test you will be given a card with a topic and ask to talk about it for two minutes you will have one minute to prepare for your topic and a pencil and paper to draft your response it doesn't talk about common topics for part two here because there are no common topics for part two if you are preparing common topics common questions you are wasting your time for part two it goes on to say part three is a two-way conversation and the examiner will ask questions related to the topic discussed in part two so exactly the same advice for part three there are no common topics it is a waste of time to do this now you might be thinking well there's no harm in preparing common topics that is preparation that is going to help me if one of these common questions or common topics comes up well actually it does not and it is actually very damaging to you and will probably lead to failure and to explain that let's move on to the fifth tip which is memorize phrases and memorize sentences and then i'll explain how preparing common topics will actually lower your score once we go through this fifth tip memorizing phrases so you'll find many many videos on youtube that give you phrases for example this video with 1.2 million encourages you to memorize 35 phrases so what this video encourages students to think is that if you use these 35 phrases if you memorize them that you're magically going to improve your score is this actually true well if we look at a british council article called eight ways to boost your isle speaking score it states while it certainly pays off equipping yourself with relevant vocabulary and common phrases and collocations it's important to avoid memorizing large chunks of speech examiners are trained to identify memorized responses and will mark you down for that i repeat examiners are trained to identify memorized responses and will mark you down for this it is extremely easy for an examiner to spot the fact that you have prepared questions because you think that it's a common question or a common topic or you have memorized lists of sentences and lists of phrases they are trained to do it it is extremely easy to spot you are not outsmarting anyone and you are just cheating yourself because you are lowering your score the second thing i want you to think about is what are the most common phrases that examiners will hear well they are the phrases in the most popular youtube videos so if you are watching some of these very very very popular videos with millions of views that are talking about common topics and memorized answers and memorize phrases those are the phrases that examiners hear every single day so let's say for example in part one you have memorized a full answer for tell me about your hometown or tell me about your hobbies and you give an amazing memorized answer this is exactly what the examiner is going to think that person memorized that answer so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to ask them a completely different question on a completely different topic that they were not able to memorize and not able to prepare for so they might ask you something about pens do you use pens what do you use pens for have you ever bought an expensive pen what do you think about people who buy luxurious pens made of precious metals so you've gone from a prepared answer to talking about platinum precious metal pens they are going to base your score not on your memorized answer but on the answer you are not expecting because that is your real speaking level remember what are they testing they're testing when you move to london or new york or sydney how are you able to speak to people in everyday normal situations everyday normal situations are not about tell me about your hometown they are going to be unexpected questions that come up so that is your real speaking level so if you are relying on these gurus that are teaching you all of these different topics and prepared questions and prepared phrases you are going down a very dark road so what should you do instead well you should get your english level and your speaking ability to the level where it doesn't matter what question comes up if i was to do the speaking test today and they asked me about something that i know nothing about let's say they asked me about indian cooking i've never been to india i don't really eat indian food i'm sure it's lovely i'm not criticizing indian food in any way but i just don't know anything about it but if they asked me about how to cook indian food i would be able to give some sort of an answer even if it's just something like i don't know i've never cooked indian food before and i visited a couple of indian restaurants in my life but it's not something that i do very often that is giving them an answer they are not testing my ability or my knowledge of indian cooking they're testing my ability to use words effectively vocabulary that are grammatically correct grammar that i can pronounce it in a way that the examiner can understand and i can do so fluently and coherently you don't need any knowledge or prepared answers to do any of that so focus on getting your grammar vocabulary pronunciation and fluency to the level where it doesn't matter what question comes up number six is if you use lots of idioms and idiomatic language you are going to get a high score and there are certain videos that even say that you have to use a specific number of idioms or specific idioms to get a high score and really what this comes down to is a misunderstanding of the marking criteria so you'll find lots and lots of videos on youtube for example this one with a quarter of a million views a quarter of a million students have watched this video called seven idioms to score seven plus in isle speaking and it's quite interesting if you go to this video and scroll across you'll be able to find by scrolling across on the timeline you'll be able to see the most replayed part of that video and it's actually the end where you can see all of the idioms on the board because when students see this video or and videos like it they don't watch the whole video they just go to the end look at the idioms memorize them and then try and use them on test day and do you think students who look at that video look at seven idioms and use them in the test do you think they actually get a good score well we'll talk about that in a second but before we talk about that the reason why these gurus make these videos well the first is because they know that they'll get lots of clicks and that's really their motivation their motivation is to get clicks so they can make money from youtube but secondly it's because they have misunderstood the official marking criteria if you go to the official marking criteria under lexical resource which is vocabulary for a band seven it says uses some less common and idiomatic vocabulary and shows some awareness of style and collocation with some inappropriate choices so gurus who don't know what they're doing look at that see band seven idiomatic and they automatically think if you use idioms you will get a band seven this is actually not true because idiomatic does not mean just idioms if we look at the definition of the word idiomatic in carlin's dictionary it says idiomatic language uses words in a way that sounds natural to native speakers of the language and if we look at the cambridge dictionary definition it says containing expressions that are natural and correct so to summarize what idiomatic means idiomatic means words and expressions that native english speakers would use in this context so that does include idioms but it also includes phrasal verbs and it includes slang colloquialisms all sorts of things so what the official marking criteria is saying is that a person at a band seven uses some of the language that a native english speaker would use but they don't use it completely accurately there's there are some inappropriate choices so band seven students are attempting to use idiomatic language but not completely successfully now that is completely different from what these online gurus are teaching you which is all you have to do is memorize a bunch of idioms and you'll get a high score well that's just my opinion what do idp say about this well idp have an article on their website called how to use idioms and in it it states in english we use idioms and phrasal verbs to express ourselves this idiomatic language is used frequently in our everyday communication so it's very important that we understand what idioms are and how to use them so is this saying that just use lots of idioms and you'll get a high score well it goes on to say this we mentioned that native speakers use idioms naturally keyword there naturally so be very careful not to over use them and to make sure that the idiom matches the topic area you are speaking about using seven idioms in 15 minutes is extremely unnatural and i guarantee that the seven idioms that you see in a video are not going to be appropriate they won't match the topic so you'll often hear students say like you'll ask them about a pen do you like pens oh i am over the moon that you have asked me this question about pens a native english speaker would never ever ever say that you're not demonstrating to the examiner that you know how to use over the moon correctly you're demonstrating that you know what it means but you don't know how to use it appropriately and they know because they hear it every day that you have just watched one of these videos with millions of views and this is exactly what this article says be careful not to use some that are overused and sound forced a quick internet search will produce hundreds of idioms the best advice is to listen to native speakers by chatting to them or by watching english speaking movies and to copy phrases that have been used and also learn your phrasal verbs so you know which prepositions go with certain verbs so what should you do well learning lists of idioms is going to lower your score but you should try and use some idiomatic language language that native english speakers use if you hope to get about seven eight or nine so you can do two things if you're worried about this get a podcast that you enjoy listening to probably a conversational podcast with two or more people who are native english speakers talking to each other and i want you just to listen to it and note down how many times they use idioms it will actually be extremely rare then note down how many times they use phrasal verbs or slang it will be a little bit more common than idioms but they don't use them that much this will give you the confidence that you don't need to go into the test and try and force this idiomatic language down the throat of the examiner if you are at a band seven level you will naturally use idiomatic language in your speech don't even try and think about it don't try and force it in there because if you're truly at a seven eight or nine level you will use some of these things you'll definitely use phrasal verbs but the students that are most successful go in think about the question and answer the question naturally as if they were not doing a test as if they were just talking to a friend or a colleague if you do that idiomatic language will come up and you'll probably use it correctly so don't put yourself under so much pressure on test day to go like oh i'm so over the moon you asked me about pens it was raining cats and dogs today and i thought about it like that just sounds crazy so you've heard me say this many many times what should you do speak to the examiner like they're a human being not a idiom recording device so tip number seven relates to part two i want to talk about this specifically because part two is not only the area that students worry about the most but that they do badly because of bad advice and the most common tip and trick that i see for part two is that you must talk about each bullet point and this is very very common and you'll also see students being told by teachers that you must talk about this bullet point for a certain amount of time and then the next bullet point for a certain amount of time for example this video with 3.9 million views states that you must cover every point so you must talk about each bullet point and it also says point to point as you talk so what it's encouraging you to do is point to bullet point number one talk about that then point to bullet point number two talk about that point to bullet point number three talk about that and then point to four talk about that is this a good way to answer your part two question well if we look at the idp website it says what if i only talk about the first two bullet points in the two minutes and don't cover all the questions so in other words what if i don't mention all the bullet points and what it says here is test takers sometimes worry that they have not covered all the points on their task card and right of time remember that the examiner will interrupt you at the two minute mark don't worry if this happens as you have already shown the examiner that you can speak at length appropriately extending your description so what this is saying is your job is to speak about the topic fluently for two minutes your job is not to speak about the bullet points or speak about them in order the bullet points are there to help you so this is quite frustrating for idp the british council Cambridge examiners because they're using these bullet points to help you answer the question and what many of these online gurus are doing is messing that up completely so they've taken something that is used to help you and they've turned it into something that is used to damage your score because what happens with most students is they will look at those four bullet points and at least one of the bullet points will be something that they're uncomfortable talking about so if you're uncomfortable talking about one or more of those bullet points your fluency is really going to suffer also what will happen is many students will talk about one or more of the bullet points very very quickly and there's nothing wrong with that because it might say you know talk about a pen where did you get the pen my wife got it for me for christmas like that's less than 10 seconds so when students exhaust and use all of the bullet points then they start to get nervous they run out of time so what should you do instead if you can talk about the bullet points talk about them but you can also talk about other things related to that topic the only thing you need to do for part two is talk about the main topic on the q-card you can mention many other things related to that topic and my suggestion would be to pick the things that you're most comfortable talking about again and i've repeated myself many many times the goal is to show the examiner that you can speak in everyday normal situations to normal human beings the examiner is not testing can you talk about this bullet point then that one then that one then that one because that will never ever ever happen in real life so make things easy for yourself don't make things more difficult and really to summarize this whole video why is there so much bad advice online especially on youtube because years ago these people who originally made these videos made them without really having any expertise or experience with actually helping students improve their score they just threw them up on youtube without thinking does this actually help students and then new generations of iELTS youtube gurus come along and what they do is just copy the existing videos so you get a copy of nonsense and then another copy of nonsense and then another copy of nonsense so it's just a bad copy after a bad copy after a bad copy because what these gurus think is millions of views good millions of views does not equate to good advice the best advice is extremely boring and is not very complicated so it doesn't do very well on youtube but tips and tricks will always get clicks that actually rhymes so you always should remember that just because something has lots of views or your favorite youtuber has millions of subscribers doesn't mean that they actually know what they're talking about if you found this video useful you'll probably find our writing tips and tricks video useful as well where we go through the exact same process and we show you whether the most popular writing tips are true or not