 First of all, what is part one? What is the rationale behind the style of questions and what the examiners are gonna be asking you? What the examiners are gonna be thinking about? Importantly, what we're gonna look at secondly is what not to worry about. Looking at, if you look at YouTube or Facebook or just Google, you know, speaking part one, you'll find a lot of misinformation. You'll find a lot of things that people say are really, really, really important when they're not important at all. Contribute zero to your score. So it's really important that you understand what not to worry about so that you can focus on the things that will actually improve your score. Because one of the keys to success is focusing on the things that will improve your score and ignoring the things that don't improve your score. We're gonna look at some common mistakes. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get Justin who's here with me to ask me some random questions. I haven't told him which questions to ask or anything like that. He's gonna throw these questions at me and I'm going to pretend to be a student making some of these common mistakes and in the comments you guys are going to tell me which common mistakes I'm making. Then we're going to look at the flip side of that which is he's gonna ask me more questions and I'm gonna try and demo what a good student would do or what a student at a seven, eight, or nine would be doing and then from that we'll take some best practices. So things that you should be thinking about, things that you should be doing on test day. Finally, we're gonna give you a PDF download with lots of the common topics that you'll get in part one of the speaking test and some sample answers for those. Not to be copied, of course, but just so you can give you an idea and solidify the things that we've been talking about today. So what is part one? It's really, really, really important that you understand that part one is about you. Why am I saying that? Why is that important? Well, one of the common things that students say about the speaking test is what happens if they ask me about something I know nothing about or I can't talk about? Well, all of the questions are about you so it's impossible to get them wrong because they're asking about you. So the best thing that you can do for part one is just answer the questions naturally. How you would speak to a friend or a colleague or a teacher if they asked you one of these questions because they're just normal everyday questions that they might ask you about you. And also importantly, if they ask you a question that you just have no idea about you can honestly answer because it's about you. I don't know about that and explain why you don't know it and we'll look at some examples of that because remember it's not a knowledge test or an IQ test or how much do you know about this topic test? It's a speaking test. So remember that and remember that the questions in part one are about you. Part two, part three, a little bit different but part one they're about you so don't worry about the content. Don't worry about having knowledge about these topics. This part's gonna last around four to five minutes and the examiner is gonna ask you a range of different questions. They can't just ask you like one or two questions and hope that you speak for a very, very long time and you'll see the significance of this in a second when we talk about what things you should be doing what things you shouldn't be doing. So be aware that they'll ask you a range of topics and a range of questions within each of those topics and it'll take about four to five minutes and this will be obviously the first part of the speaking test. So do not worry about the following things. You might think that these things sound like I've made these up or these are things that I'm just passing the time by telling you these things or to be entertaining or something like that but these are things that you will actually find on the internet. You will find these in Facebook groups you'll find these on blogs you'll find these on YouTube channels especially YouTube channels for some reason telling you that these things are really, really, really important especially for part one. None of these things are important at all. There is a real article from a real school telling you which clothes that you should wear in order to improve your speaking score. I'm not making this up, I found this myself I posted it about six months ago or nine months ago. It is a school actually wrote what clothes you should wear in order to improve your speaking score. We got a question a week ago from a student who asked is it okay to wear trainers and not formal shoes in the speaking test? Would that lower his score if he was wearing like sports shoes? You do not need to worry about your attire do not worry about this. And why am I even talking about this? To make you laugh? No, it's because if you're worrying about things like this then you're not worrying about the things that actually matter which is very, very, very important. Do not worry at all about how you greet the examiner. There are whole YouTube videos dedicated to how you greet the examiner. It does not matter. It really, really, really does not matter at all how you greet the examiner. When you're greeting the examiner the test is not going on. The test does not start until part one starts and you've already greeted the examiner. So like, obviously you don't want to go in and punch the examiner in the face or anything like that, but like, you know, under normal circumstances you're not going to do that. So you'll be absolutely fine. Greet the examiner in the same way you would greet anybody else. Yeah, that's all you have to worry about. And if you greet him incorrectly I don't think there's any incorrect way of doing that. It really doesn't matter. Again, don't waste 15 minutes. I saw a 15 minute YouTube video on how to greet the examiner. Do not waste 15 minutes of your time talking about that. Also, you'll see a lot of people asking like, did I get a low score because my body language wasn't right or because my eye contact wasn't right or because I didn't use enough hand gestures or too many hand gestures. Like, you'll get a lot of students coming into the test and they'll maintain eye contact with you for a very, very long time and they'll do weird things with their hands. You're like, oh, okay, it's not the student's fault. It's because the teacher told them that these things are important. They're not important at all. Why? Because these things have nothing to do with your ability to speak English. It doesn't matter what your body language is like. It doesn't matter what your eye contact is like. It doesn't matter what your hand gestures are like. They don't contribute to your score in any way. Importantly also, don't worry about the examiner. Examiners are human beings. Just like going into McDonald's, sometimes you'll get a server in McDonald's who's really, really friendly and really nice and sometimes you'll get one who is not friendly and not nice and is rude. It's exactly the same with examiners. Is it part of their job to be friendly and to be nice? Kind of, I suppose. But really their job is to listen to you and give you an accurate score on your speaking test. That is their job. That's the most important thing that they need to do. We will get a lot of emails from people saying, I think I failed my test because my examiner didn't like me. Whether they like you or not has no bearing on your score whatsoever. Or we'll get someone saying, I think I failed my test because my examiner was rude to me or was unfriendly. You know, they might have had an argument with their husband or their wife or their girlfriend or their boyfriend or they might be just in a bad mood. They might be hungover. They might have had a, you know, been sitting in traffic before getting there and being just in a bad mood. The examiner's demeanor, whether they smile at you or whether they don't, has nothing to do with your score. Also, if they are doing their job correctly, they might be focusing on your pronunciation and your fluency and your coherence and your grammar and vocabulary. Obviously, they might not have a big cheesy smile on their face while they're doing that because they're focusing on what they need to do. They might be serious about what they're doing. So don't worry about any of these things. And importantly, if you go to a school and they start teaching you about body language and hand gestures and what clothes to wear and how to greet the examiner, you leave that school because they're not focusing on the things that matter. The things that matter are these four things and these four things only. These are what the examiners are going to be listening out for during your speaking test and during part one, but throughout all the parts. Pronunciation, fluency and coherence, vocabulary and grammar. So what do these things mean? I could do a whole video on, you know, a whole 30 minute video on each of these, but just to summarize very, very quickly, can the examiner understand what you're saying? All right, do they understand 100% of what you're saying? If they can, you're on your way to getting a seven or above for pronunciation. You do need to worry about some higher level pronunciation features like intonation and connected speech and things like that. But just for the purposes of this video and to be concise, just worry about them understanding what you're saying. Grammar and vocabulary, you do have to worry about range a little bit, but for most students, accuracy is the real reason why you're not getting the score you need. Focus on your grammar being accurate and your vocabulary being accurate. Fluency, are you able to speak at a natural pace or do you have a lot of pauses and hesitations? Uncoherence, are you answering the question? Are you developing your answer enough for the examiner to understand the answer to your question, the point you're trying to get across? Those are the things that you really, really need to be thinking about. Not these things. Do not worry about these. So here are some common mistakes. Okay, so what we're gonna do is talk about these very, very briefly. Then I'm gonna get my glamorous assistant here to ask me a question. I haven't prepared any answers or anything like that. I want it to be as natural as possible. And I will pretend to be a student who is doing one of these common mistakes. In the comments, what I want you to tell me is which of these am I doing? Why am I doing this? To make the lesson as interactive as possible. If you just sit back and watch a video, you'll maybe learn 10, 20%, but if you're thinking about it and engaging with the lesson, you're going to learn more. And that's the reason why we make these videos is to help you guys learn and to improve your scores. So robotic delivery, so speaking like a robot, memorized answers. So looking at a very, very, we'll not talk about it because I don't wanna give you too many clues, but memorizing an answer and giving a memorized answer instead of just a normal answer. Trying to impress the examiners. So think about the things that people try and do to impress the examiners. Way too long and way too short. Okay, so think about these. It might be multiple ones or it might just be one, but let's start with the first question. My favorite website is IELTS Advantage because it helps me with my IELTS scores. Okay, so that's the first one. What do you think would be the problem with that one? Justin asked me, what's my favorite website? And I said, my favorite website is IELTS Advantage because it helps me with my IELTS scores. Which of these things do you think is the problem? In the comments, let me know. Okay, so it's pretty obvious. It's too short, but why is that a problem? The grammar was fine, the vocabulary was fine, the fluency was fine, pronunciation was fine. Why is that a problem? Well, you're not really giving the examiner enough to go on if you give a really, really, really short answer to a question. And they might ask you follow up questions like why or asking you to develop your answer a little bit more. That might put you off. It might be like, am I doing something wrong? It'll cause extra stress. You want to be developing your answer a little bit more than that. Now for part one, you don't have to develop it much more than that, but just giving a one sentence answer wouldn't really be enough. You'd have to add a little bit more detail or an explanation or example or something like that just to develop it a little bit more. This is gonna be more difficult than I thought. I thought this was gonna be really easy, but trying to answer a question and pretend to be someone else is more difficult than I thought. All right, so give me another one. My favorite kind of weather is cold weather because I do not like to be cold. When I am cold, I feel bad and I shiver because it is very cold. I always like warm weather. Warm weather is nice. That's why I like the summertime. Okay, so in the comments, what do you think about that one? Was it my memorized answer or trying to impress examiner too long too short robotic delivery? What do you think? And do we chances robotic delivery? Yeah, so I mean, this is not really a student's fault. It can be a couple of things. Number one, it can be because you're really stressed out. It is a very stressful exam. Obviously, you might have a lot of pressure in terms of it might cost you your job. It might lead to your family being upset with you. You might have a visa waiting for you. It is a very, very high stakes test. So what happens is people just kind of clam up and speak in a very, very robotic way. So that is a problem because you're not being as fluent as you could be. Also, if you are so stressed out that you are speaking in that way, then people tend to make in my experience more grammar and vocabulary mistakes because they're just not relaxed and speaking in a natural way. And also sometimes it can cause pronunciation issues for the same reason because a lot of people, when they're speaking in that way, can speak in a very quiet way, like inside their mouth is how I always describe it rather than projecting their voice so it might make it a little bit difficult for the examiner. So there's lots and lots of problems you can have there. The other reason is a lot of people have been taught that the IELTS speaking test is a formal academic test and you should speak in a formal academic way. It's not. It's a speaking test about how you would speak to a normal person in a normal situation. You're not going to speak in that overly formal, overly academic robotic way because that's not how you would speak to someone. Like imagine if Justin and I were having a meeting and I said like, how is your weekend? My weekend was good. I went like, he wouldn't really talk like that. So one of the key pieces of advice is just speak to the examiner in the same way that you would speak to a friend or a colleague or a classmate or a teacher. Someone who you know when you're not speaking in a really, really informal or formal way, just in a normal way would be good. So you could say that I'm a real fashionista and I wouldn't really dress down once in a blue moon because I am a real fashionaholic and fashion is my life. I would die for fashion. So when I'm in the mood, I go to the shopping center with my bodies and we buy the place out and we spend lots of money buying new clothes. Okay, so in the comments, what would you say is the problem there? Trying to impress, yeah. So that person is trying to impress the examiner and what they're doing is they're just thinking of as many big words and idioms and fancy vocabulary as they can. They are not answering the question. They're not thinking about answering the question. They're approaching the test as if it is a vocabulary test. You can also try and impress the examiner with fancy grammar structures and things like that, but that person was principally thinking that the test wasn't a speaking test, it was a vocabulary test and ignoring these things. All right, so when you're doing that, when you're focusing just on vocabulary, then you're not really focusing on being coherent and answering the question. So there's a relationship between these two and you shouldn't worry about one more than the other. For example, if you are just focusing on grammar and being 100% accurate all the time, then your fluency tends to go down, all right? Because you can't think of the perfect grammar every single sentence and hope to have really, really good fluency. Same with your vocabulary. If you're just focusing on vocabulary, then your fluency and your coherence tend to be affected. So there is a relationship between these two. Remember it's a speaking test and these are components of speaking. It's not just a pronunciation test or just a vocabulary test or just a grammar test or just a fluency test. So we talked about robotic delivery. We talked about trying to impress examiner. We've talked about being too short. Memorized answers, this is when obviously you memorize an answer and this really tricks people or trips people up because what you'll do is you'll memorize an answer for a common question like, tell me about your hometown or describe your home or one of these quick, what is your job? Do you, what do you like to do in your free time? So the memorize that answer and they'll give a normally a very, very, very, very long answer to a question. And I'm sure you've heard people do this. What that means is two things. Normally that will affect your coherence because you're not really answering the question because you'll ask someone like a really good example was on Friday I was working with a student and I asked them, is your hometown a good place to grow up? And they told me about the architecture in their hometown, the transport system in their hometown, their, what else did they talk about? Education system, like telling me everything about their hometown. And I said to them, you just memorized an answer about your hometown and you've given me that. So that obviously affected their coherence. What will also happen when you memorize an answer is the examiner will not think, oh my God, this person is amazing. The examiner will think, this person has memorized an answer, I'm pretty sure. Let's ask them a more difficult question or a question on a different topic or a follow-up question and see how they cope with that. They'll ask you a different question and what people who memorize answers normally do is like, I don't know how to answer that because it's not a, because I haven't memorized an answer. So you're not fooling the examiner. They're trained in these things. They know what you're doing. They do it for a job. Could someone come into your job and try and trick you on something as silly as that? Hopefully not. So why do you think the examiners would fall for that? So you've just demonstrated that you can't speak English. You've demonstrated that you can memorize answers and give very, very long answers, but it's not a memorization test, all right? It's a speaking test. Let's look now at best practices. So I'm not gonna give you the best practices. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to ask Justin again to ask me some questions. I'm going to pretend that I am a student in the test, all right, and I'm gonna answer them as best I can. Demonstrate what I would do and then we're gonna come up as a group in the comments you're gonna tell me some of the things that you think I did right. Remember, we're gonna be basing everything on the pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, fluency, and coherence. So and compare them also with the bad examples that we showed you here, okay? I would have to say hands down my favorite food is steak. So my wife cooks this for me every Friday. Normally I go for a workout, been lifting weights and running around and I'm really, really hungry. So what I get is steak with chips, mushrooms, onions. I just feel fantastic after I have that. I normally have a little glass of red wine to go along with that as well. So in the comments, tell me some of the things that you think I did well and how could we create some best practices in the comments? And that wasn't like a, by the way, that wasn't a perfect answer or an answer that you should copy or an answer that, you know, that's the only way to answer that. What's your favorite food? There are a million ways that you could answer that that could get you a band nine. There are a million ways you could answer it to get you a band five. The content wasn't important. What we're trying to get are these best practices. The things that you can learn from so that you can not copy that answer but model it and learn from it. So a lot of you are saying that the answer was too long. What a lot of people learn from teachers and from online resources is that you should use a set number of sentences. That like you should say three sentences or you should say a set number of words. Like it should be 50 words long. That is not how you should think about it. You should think about the answer as how can I answer this question naturally? If somebody asked me this question under normal circumstances, how would I answer it? Don't be thinking of number of sentences or anything like that. So a reason, so put explanation here. Good coherence, which I think what you mean is that I actually answered the question. I got to the point and I answered it fully. So developed, specific. Okay, rather than just give one answer, I'll give a few different answers and then you can judge just better to have a good sample. I love to watch U.S. crime dramas. So there's a few of those that I've really become addicted to in the past, principally Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad. So these are all very, very long series and what I like about them is they're very episodic so that you can just go from episode to episode to episode. And it's try and watch like one or two a night but sometimes it goes a little bit over that because they are very, very addictive. Again, from that, what would you say are the good things that you could use to model as well? If someone said the idea generation was good, I wouldn't really say idea generation for the speaking test so much because remember part one is about you. You can't get it wrong. So you're not thinking of an idea like making something up really. What you're doing is just talking honestly about what you're, like that was my favorite food. That were, those were my favorite TV programs. And those are much, much easier to talk about than to make something up like to generate ideas. Sometimes you'll have to do that but most of the time it's better just to speak naturally. A little pause for thinking. Yeah, so fluency does not mean speaking without pausing ever. You do need to think, all right? It is better to think for a couple of seconds and then give your answer than to immediately begin talking and then get lost and, you know, so I don't think it's, you know, mandatory for you to think at the beginning. I don't think that's a best practice but I think the point I'm trying to make is fluency does not mean that you never pause. It's a bad fluency is when you're pausing at a non-natural rate. Examples, grammar, I'm fluent, okay. So I'll give one more example and then we can talk about what I did. I used too many apps, I used hundreds of apps. Actually, recently what I've been trying to do is to make my phone a lot healthier to make me more productive. So what I mean by that is in the past I had a lot of social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and that wasted a huge amount of time so I deleted all of those from my phone and now I use apps that can track my number of steps that I'm taking, my sleep, general exercise, calorie intake, things like that so that will help me improve in the future rather than just waste time with apps that don't really improve my life at all. Again, what do you think about that one? So all of them have some common things, all right? And that's what you wanna do. You don't wanna be copying the content or thinking this is exactly what he said or this is exactly what he did. Just think about the common things amongst them. So definitely a lot of you talked about that they were natural and yes, these are about me. There are questions that are asking about me. When you are in the test or asking about you so just ask them naturally or answer them naturally and that is going to help your fluency but I also think it helps your grammar, your pronunciation and your vocabulary as well because you're not thinking too much because it's just easier to talk about yourself and to talk naturally. Also, I wasn't talking in a very robotic way. I wasn't trying to impress the examiner. I wasn't trying to insert lots of fancy words or anything like that. I was just speaking, obviously I'm a native English speaker so that obviously helps but if you need a seven or above you should be at a high level of English anyway. So just speaking in the same way as imagine you, it's your first day of a new class and you're speaking to your classmates. How would you answer those questions? So a lot of you talked about the questions or developed, I gave some explanations, some examples. Again, going back to this, answering it naturally. I don't think it is a good idea to answer part one questions in a very formulaic way. What do I mean by that? So what a lot of people will do is suggest that you answer explanation and then example, that is a very, very formulaic way of answering a question. Can that help you? Sure, it can help you but do you answer questions in your native language in that way? Like imagine you're speaking to your brother or your sister or your friend tonight and they asked you, what's your favorite TV program or what's your favorite food? You wouldn't think like my favorite food is steak. Explain, okay, it's my favorite food because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Example, last week you wouldn't really do that. Does that mean that you should never use explanations and examples? No, but just have them as like tools in your toolkit. Think about it when you're developing things. I need to give the examiner enough information so that they can understand what I think about this but don't think about it in a formulaic way, like a mathematical formula. You can add a little bit more detail, add an explanation, add an example but not in a formulaic way. Hopefully that makes sense. Coherence, so that's really to, I developed the answer and I answered the specific question. When they ask you about your favorite food, tell them about your favorite food. They ask you about apps, talk about apps. Answer the specific question that they're asking you. And also, again, developing it will help with your coherence. I'm a native English speaker, so I don't wanna say my grammar was great or my vocabulary was great because I was born speaking English, obviously as well with fluency. So we're not wanna talk too much about those. I'm not gonna pat myself on the back by saying my English is great when I'm a native English speaker, of course. But what you will find there was, I didn't try and focus on using really, really impressive grammar, impressive vocabulary. What I did was just answer the questions naturally and by doing that, the grammar and the vocabulary and the fluency just flowed from that. If your grammar and your vocabulary and your fluency is good enough and you just answer the questions naturally, these will take care of themselves. But if you go into, okay, he asked me about my favorite food, what are some big adjectives I can think of or what are some idioms I can use? Then your fluency is gonna suffer because you're thinking way too much and you're probably going to make lots of grammar and vocabulary mistakes because you'll be thinking about grammar and vocabulary that's beyond your level that you're not able to use yet. So use the grammar and vocabulary that you are comfortable using to fluently develop your answer and then everything kind of looks after itself. Pronunciation will not talk about that because I'm a native English speaker and I obviously, hopefully my pronunciation is okay. I'm gonna give you a free topics and sample answers download. You can Google our website, IELTS Advantage and go to this speaking section. So you can Google that or just click the link and if you comment here, speaking part one, download your free PDF guide so you can just click that, enter your email and I believe that it just downloads automatically or is sent to your email as well. So what you'll get there are lots and lots of sample answers, sample questions, common topics. Again, you're not going to copy these. These are not so you can copy them. These are not so you can take the, even taking the vocabulary and stuff where you can learn from it but you're not going to answer it like this because it's about you. You're going to answer them based on you and your experience because that's what it's about. You're not going to copy someone else but these will give you a good idea and you can also relate it back to these best practices talking about development and how I answer the questions. So that will help you out. An exercise you can do is take each of the questions and just write them down on a piece of paper or have it on your phone or something like that. Look at each question and answer it how you would answer it and then record yourself and then listen back and think about the best practices and the common mistakes that people make and you can critique your own work and get better on your own and do some practice at home. And if you do that, you'll really, really improve. Thank you very much guys. Give us some feedback on the lesson if there was something that you liked, tell us if there's something that you didn't like, tell us if there's something extra that you need, feel free to tell us and it's always good to get feedback and these lessons are free. All we ask is that you give it a like or say thank you in the comments and that's all we ask for. Thank you very much guys.