 I recently did the IELTS speaking test and I got a band nine in order to test all of the different strategies and techniques that I teach my students on my courses. I've helped thousands of students get seven, eight and nine on the speaking test. So what I thought I would do in this video is just summarize exactly what I did during the test that I got a band nine in and what my students have reported back. What did they do in the test when they have got a band eight or a nine? So we're going to talk about what we did in part one, part two, part three, and then what we did for pronunciation, fluency and coherence, grammar and vocabulary, the four things that every IELTS examiner is thinking about on test day during your speaking test. So for part one I directly answered the question. So if they asked me a question, I directly answered it. And then simply what I did was I added in detail. So this could have been like an explanation or further detail or an example. And you can summarize this by just I helped the examiner. I helped the examiner understand my direct answer to their question. So if they asked me where I was from, I would say I am from and tell them exactly where I'm from. And then I would add a little bit more detail explaining where I'm from and about that place. Importantly, no memorization. One of the big mistakes that you'll see students making who are stuck at a six, five is they memorize part one answers rather than just answering them naturally. And there was no counting sentences. I think one of the key mistakes that a lot of students make is during the test, during part one, their teacher has told them, you know, you must use two sentences or three sentences or four sentences. And they spend that time thinking about the number of sentences rather than just directly answer the question, add a little bit more detail. That might be two sentences, it might be three, it might be four. You're not thinking about this. You're just helping the examiner understand your direct answer to that question. And also remember part one is about you. So it is impossible to get these questions wrong because they're asking about you and you are the world's leading expert on you. Then we move on to part two and what I did was I focused on the main topic. So part two, you'll be given a cue card and it will have a main topic at the top. And then you'll be given a few bullet points. What I did was just spend the whole time focusing on the main topic and I added extra bullet points. So you'll be given a few bullet points below the main topic. I added in some extra bullet points that were related to the main topic that I found easier to talk about because the problem with if you follow the bullet points blindly, some of them you might not be comfortable talking about those or you might talk about them very, very quickly. So I added in extra bullet points and that's what my students do as well. And I did not use all bullet points. We've already talked about this, but many students who are struggling with part two, they have been told by their teacher that you must start with bullet point one, then talk about bullet point two, then talk about bullet point three, then talk about bullet point four. You do not have to do that. And in fact, that causes a lot of problems because students either are talking about things that they're not familiar with, they're not comfortable talking about and they often run out of time. And I just kept speaking until the examiner stopped me. So again, we'll talk more about why this is in terms of fluency. But if you're thinking about number of sentences and you're thinking about bullet points and you're thinking about time, then you're not able to speak as fluently as you would naturally because your brain can't process all of these things simultaneously. It's difficult to multitask and do all of these things at the same time. So what you want to do is just focus on one thing, which is what is the main topic and just speak about that main topic as fluently and as naturally as possible for the two minutes. And the examiner will stop you and believe me, the examiner does not want to be in that room with you any longer than they have to. They will stop you in and around two minutes. So you don't have to worry about time. Then we move on to part three. So again, directly answer question, but more development. So part one, you just have to add in a little bit of detail. Part three, you have to develop your answers a lot more. And so this is particularly explanations and examples. You don't have to give an example if you can't think of one, of course. But you should answer the question directly and then talk about why you think that explain your reasoning. Why do you think that thing is true? So let me give you a quick example. I think I can, if I'm remembering correctly, one of the questions was, do you think people will live on different planets in the future? So I answered the question directly. I said, yes, I think people will live on different planets in the future. I explained why I believe that. Why I believe that is we must leave the earth because what if there is a nuclear war or a terrible disease that kills everybody, then the human species will be wiped out. So it's really important that we have a different base where we can recover from such a catastrophic event. And the example that I used was SpaceX and Elon Musk. That is a real example. That's really what he is doing. And he wants to move to Mars in order to make the human race and interplanetary species. And that's all I did. And that's all of what my Band 8, Band 9 students, that's all they did. And I attempted every single question, even though there were some questions that were odd or quite difficult, I attempted every question. OK, so these are the four marking criteria. I'm not going to go into too much detail about pronunciation. I'm a native English speaker. So what I do, of course, I'm going to get a Band 9 for pronunciation. But what do I get my students who are not native English speakers? What do I get them to focus on? So focus on being as clear as possible. So you don't get high marks for pronunciation for having a British accent or an American accent. You get high marks for pronunciation by being as clear as possible. And in order to get a Band 8, a Band 9, 100% of the words that you say should be understood by the examiner. So we get our students really to focus on this and not focus on accent or anything like that. We also need to talk about something called higher level pronunciation features. These are things like intonation, sentence stress, word stress, connected speech, things like that. If you are at a Band 8 or a Band 9 level, you're going to use these features naturally. And most students who are at that level already do use these naturally. So what we get our students to do is we make them aware of these. But it's very rare for a student at that level to really be focusing on these things rather than this. This is the number one thing that you should be focusing on. And if you are very, very clear, like the examiner can understand 100% of what you're saying, you probably are using these features anyway. So you don't really have to focus on these. I didn't focus on these at all. My students focus on them a little bit, but not that much. The students that really do focus on improving their intonation, their sentence stress, their word stress, tend to not be at the right level yet. So just focus on being clear. This will take care of itself. So fluency and coherence, well, what does coherence mean? So you heard me talking directly answer the question, directly answer the question, focus on the main topic, directly answer the question. Coherence means did you answer the actual question asked? So if they ask you about what did you do last weekend, you better tell them about what you did last weekend, not what you plan to do next weekend. And then coherence also covers development. So did you develop your ideas enough in part three? Did you speak about the topic for around two minutes? And did you answer each question and give a little bit more detail? If you do these things, you will naturally satisfy coherence. So coherence is far more structural. It is just following the particular structures and the things, the dos and don'ts that we talked about here. So I'm not going to go into too much detail. The bigger problem for most students is fluency. So what we get our students to do is I spoke to the examiner naturally, as naturally as possible. A big mistake that we see a lot of students making is they speak to the examiner in a very formal, academic, stressed out, robotic way. So they speak to the examiner and they sound like a robot. Because the test is very stressful and because it's a big occasion and it's a high stakes test, people often do sound very robotic. I spoke to the examiner and my Band 8, Band 9 students speak to the examiner like you would speak to a friend or a colleague or someone you were talking to in a pub or a coffee shop. What this does is it forces you to use natural fluency. So speaking without so much effort and sounding a lot more natural. Fluency is all about speaking at a natural pace without unnatural hesitation, unnatural pausing. I did pause, I did hesitate at times, but not unnaturally. And one of the ways that I also did that and improved my fluency was I avoided complex ideas, vocab and grammar. The students who try to make their ideas more complex and their vocabulary more complex and their grammar more complex and everything more complex, their fluency normally suffers. Because think about it like your brain is a computer. If you have too many programs open at the same time, if you're asking your computer to do too many things, it slows down. Exactly the same thing happens with speech. If you are trying to think of really complex ideas, vocabulary and grammar all at the same time and make everything really complex, you're asking your brain to do too many things at the same time and your fluency suffers. So just speak to the examiner like they're a human being and keep things simple. And that is going to improve your fluency. So for grammar, used functional grammar. What does functional grammar mean and how is it going to help you? So let's say the examiner asks you, what did you do last weekend? You're probably going to use past simple because the function of past simple is to talk about things in the past that happened in the past and are over. And that's going to help you. I went to the park. But then let's say the examiner asks me, well, what's the best park in your local area? Then what they're asking me to do, the function will be to compare two things. So I'm going to use a comparative grammar structure. Phoenix Park is much bigger than Marley Park, for example. Or I might use a superlative. Phoenix Park is the biggest park in the city. So I'm not thinking about what is the most complex grammar and thinking about what is the appropriate grammar to use to answer the question. And if you look through IELTS speaking questions, you'll notice that really what they're doing is prompting you to use particular types of grammar. Why do you think they ask you about past things and then future things and then present things because they're testing whether you can use all of those different grammar structures, not jamming in as many different grammatical functions and structures as possible. So I did not try to make things complex. I kept my grammar as functional and as simple as possible. That's what I did to get a band nine. That's what my students do to get in a band seven, eight, nine in grammar. The other advantage of that is it's going to cut down on the number of errors that you make. If you are just focusing on using simple functional grammar, that's probably grammar that you learned years ago and you're very comfortable using. So that's going to cut down on the number of mistakes. And basically the fewer mistakes that you make, the higher your score is going to be. Vocabulary only used complex slash high level words when I had to. What does this mean? This means that 95% of the words that I used were simple. You as a English learner would understand them. I only used high level words, C1, C2 words. When I absolutely had to. If you want to know what that means, go back, start this video again and think just about the type of words that I used in this video. 95 to 99% of the words that I used were simple. Or just go back and listen to the last two minutes. There are only a very few words that I put in there. So for example, when I was talking about living on a different planet, I used interplanetary. That is a very complex word, but I only used it because there's no simpler way of describing that. So I only used complex or high level words when I had to and that's what my students do as well. That improves their fluency and it also improves their pronunciation as well and improves their grammar. So everything is easier when you do this. But what I did was use topic specific words. So these are words that you normally use when you're discussing or talking about that topic. So let's say the topic is about global warming. You're going to use words like CO2, emissions, global warming, the earth heating up, melting ice caps. None of these words are terribly complex, but you need those topic specific words in order to discuss global warming. Hope that you find that helpful. If you want a whole course, a whole free course on speaking, click below and you will find our speaking course. It's a three lesson short course that teaches you everything you need to know and goes into a lot more detail and shows you a lot more examples and everything. Some of you recently have complained that I don't go into enough detail and I don't show you samples and everything. If you want more detail, more samples, go and look at our free courses. You'll find the speaking one below. You'll find others on our website, islesadvantage.com. Thank you very much. Hope that you enjoyed this video. If you liked it, give it a thumbs up. If you didn't like it, give it a thumbs down. If you have any questions, either comment below and we will answer your question or feel free to get in touch with us via email chris.islesadvantage.com. Thanks very much.