 I'm going to give you hundreds of real IELTS speaking questions, but I'm not just going to do that. I want to improve your scores, not just give you a bunch of questions. Band 9 speaking students, and we work with hundreds of them, use questions very differently from students who struggle with the test. So we're going to give you three things on top of giving you all of these questions. Number one, I'm going to show you what Band 9 students do not do with speaking questions. There are some key differences between what they do and what they don't do. So first of all, we're going to go through the don'ts. Then we're going to show you how students actually do use these speaking questions to practice and improve and get the score that they need. Then finally, I'm going to share a VIP strategy with you. This is a strategy that we give our VIP students that uses AI to allow them to practice their speaking questions at home and actually get feedback for free. So you can not only use these real questions, practice and get feedback. All of this is 100% free. But we're not just going to give you a link so that you can go and look at the questions because that is not going to help you improve your scores. You have to watch the whole video to get access to the questions. So without further ado, let's get into it. Let's start off with the don'ts. These are things that you should not do. And these are things that band seven, eight and nine students do not do when they're using IELTS speaking questions. Number one, don't get overwhelmed. Sometimes when we give students hundreds and hundreds of questions, they get completely overwhelmed and they think that their job is to analyze and look at and practice every single question. And they need to be aware of all the different questions. You do not need to do that. Don't look at hundreds of questions and think that you must have an answer for all of them or be aware of all of them. Just use them in the way that we're going to show you in this video. So important, don't get overwhelmed. Number two, don't worry if you see a topic in there that you're not an expert in. Remember that it is a speaking test. It is not a knowledge test or an intelligence test. Number three, you should not try to prepare answers and memorize them and try to improve your speaking score in that way. IELTS examiners are trained to spot this and they can easily spot it. And what they will do is they will ask you other questions that you were not prepared for and they will base your score on those unprepared questions because IELTS is not a test of memorization because it is testing communication. You don't use memorization when you're communicating with people in any language. So don't try to prepare answers for any of them. Number four, don't try and anticipate the different topics that come up. If you go through all of these, you will see that there are no common topics. You could be asked about anything. So you'll see lots of things online by YouTube videos saying these are the common topics that might come up or here are the predicted topics that might come up. This is just to get you to click on those videos. None of those are actually real. So don't try and do that. This is a big one. Don't compare your performance with so-called Band 9 students that you find on YouTube. This is going to damage your confidence and it is also highly misleading. Not to bash any other channels and not doing that or not going to mention specific channels, but just looking at those Band 9 mock speaking tests or Band 8 or whatever they are, the vast majority of them either are not actually Band 9 or Band 8 or the people giving feedback are not real teachers. Those videos are incredibly popular. So what's happening is companies are hiring fake teachers and then hiring models and actresses to make IELTS videos about speaking, but none of them are accurate. So if you're comparing yourself to those people, it's not a fair comparison. And if you're watching too many of those videos, you might be getting bad advice from unqualified teachers. And the last don't is something that a lot of students don't really think about. Don't take these questions and look constantly for feedback. So some students, what they do is they'll look at the questions and then they'll ask their teachers or some online services to just constantly do mock speaking tests and constantly do feedback tests with them and give them lots and lots of feedback. Those things are important. You should be practicing. You should be getting feedback, but the real improvement comes after you get feedback. So if a teacher gives you feedback, for example on pronunciation or fluency or grammar or vocabulary, doing another mock speaking test is not actually going to improve those things at all. There is such a thing as too much feedback. So don't take these and just do lots and lots and lots of feedback sessions. Work on improving the things that you need to work on. And you're going to see far more improvement if you work on your weaknesses. Okay, let's get into the things that band seven, eight and nine students do when they are using these practice questions. Okay, so Chris here, this is how you find the article with all of the practice questions in it. I'm going to show you how to access them in three steps. So step one, what you're going to do is you're going to go to Google and you're going to type in IELTS speaking. Once you have IELTS speaking up in Google, you're going to scroll through all the different websites and go to IELTS advantage. So it might be on the first page, it might be on the second page, probably be in and around the middle of the first page, you're just going to click on IELTS speaking, how to get a band seven or above IELTS advantage, you're going to click on that, that's step one. One of the big things successful students do is they treat each part of the speaking test separately. So part one, part two and part three are very, very different, different types of questions, different types of answers, and the examiners are thinking about different things when they are assessing you. So what you should not do is just take some part one questions, a part two question, some part three questions, and then try and answer them all in the same way. Band seven, eight and nine students don't do that. Keep watching this video, but at the end of the video, I'll give you some links so that you can understand the differences between the different parts. It's very, very important. Number two, band eight and nine students understand the marking criteria. It is far more important that you use these questions to understand the marking criteria than just to go through all of these questions. Use the questions to test yourself, to practice, to think about your performance and think about how are you doing in relation to the marking criteria. That's the only thing that matters, because that's the only thing that the examiners are thinking about on test day, and we'll show you how to do that when we give you the VIP technique at the end. Number three, get your speaking checked at least once by a real IELTS professional. Now I'm not saying that because I want you to buy our services, we're normally completely sold out. I'm saying this because it is so easy to spot if you're a real IELTS professional, an ex examiner, it's so easy to spot little things that the student is doing that will lead to failure, and it's so easy to fix these things. Now many of you don't want to spend any money on this, but it is a lot, lot cheaper than failing your test. And the difference between failing your test and doing a mock speaking test with a real professional is the real test costs a lot more and you get no feedback. If you do a mock speaking test with a real professional, it's much, much cheaper and they are going to give you real, actionable feedback. You're going to know what's going on, what your weaknesses are, what your score is, and how to improve your score. But please be careful. Most people calling themselves ex examiners are not really ex examiners and your local IELTS teacher who has very little experience and has never been an examiner, probably will not give you very good feedback. It is better to find a source that you trust, that you know that they're real ex examiners and they really know what they're talking about. In general, the more expensive ones are going to be more reliable. The cheaper ones are going to be unreliable. We do provide that service, but we're normally sold out. If you want more information, get in touch with us. But before you say, Oh my God, he's only making this video to try and make money from us, I'm going to show you how you can get real feedback, accurate feedback for free at home at zero cost. This is the same technique we give our VIP students that is extremely effective, but you're going to need a few things. We're going to go through it step by step. Step two, it should bring you to this page on our website IELTSpeaking in 2023. This page has a lot of information on it. What you're going to do is you're going to scroll down and you're going to keep scrolling. You're going to keep scrolling. You're going to keep scrolling until you get to IELTSpeaking topics. Now let's go back to the video and I'll show you how to click on the article you need in step three. First of all, you're going to need practice questions, real practice questions. We're going to show you how to access those at the end of the video. So you've got those. The next thing is you're going to need either a phone or a laptop. You're going to need some kind of electronic device that will record your voice. Most laptops, most phones will be able to do this. Please don't ask, should you use a laptop or should you use a phone? It doesn't matter. Just pick something that you have that you can use to record your voice. The next thing you need to do is download some kind of recording app or program to your phone or to your laptop. Now all you have to do is go into your App Store or Google. I'm not going to name specific apps because they change all the time and it's so easy for you to just find this yourself. The next thing you want to do is sign up for a service that automatically transcribes your voice. So let me give you some examples but again these change over time. Do your own research. So on an Apple phone in the notes function you can just press the transcribe button and it will transcribe what you say. There's also a service that you can use on your computer called otter.ai. They have a free version of that software that will record your voice and transcribe it but as I said before do your own research. Find a tool and you'll be able to get this done but you do need one to record your voice so you can listen back and one to transcribe it. There might be some apps out there that do both. If there are put it in the comments. Let people know what you find and help each other. Okay so that's all the tech setup done. Next what you're going to do is you're going to pick one part of the test either part one, part two or part three. Don't do a full test just pick one part and focus on one thing at a time. So for part one you're going to use about nine questions. Part two you're only going to use one question and for part three you're going to pick three or four questions. Make sure that you don't study these questions. We want to recreate the real test as much as possible. Don't look at easy questions and try and prepare answers. Alright just pick questions from the list. Don't look at them. Don't study them. Just pick them. Look at each question and answer it as if an examiner is asking you that question. So read each question and answer it as if you are in the real test. If you mess up don't worry about it this is just practice. Next I want you to download the official marking criteria. I'll put a link below but if you just google speaking marking criteria it should come up on google as well. What you're going to do is you're going to listen back and you're going to think about your performance. You're going to read the marking criteria and think about which band you should get based on your own performance. If you don't understand the marking criteria you don't understand the bands I'll put a link at the end of the video that will show you in more detail what the bands mean. As you're listening back think about your biggest weaknesses. So if you were you couldn't really answer the questions fluency is an issue. If you can't understand anything that you say pronunciation is probably an issue or if you're making lots of vocabulary mistakes or grammar mistakes that's your biggest issue. The great thing about this technique is when you're in the real test you're unaware of the mistakes that you are making but when you're listening back and just focusing on your mistakes and focusing on your performance you'll be able to pick out things that you were completely unaware of and you'll be able to fix those things and that takes us on to our next point. You're going to look at the transcription whatever service you used that will write out your answers and you're going to analyze that in more detail. So the first thing you're going to analyze is did you actually answer the question. Look at the question look at the transcription did you actually answer the question and did you develop your answer enough. You can also analyze your fluency if there are lots of ums and as and pauses in the transcription if you're jumping around a lot then fluency might be an issue for you. If the transcription cannot understand most of the words like the words are completely different then that is a pronunciation issue. You can also analyze your vocabulary. Did you repeat too many words? Are you trying to use words that you don't really understand? Did you struggle with that topic because of a limited vocabulary and then with grammar what you can do is you can put that transcript into something like Grammarly for example or there are lots of other options and it will highlight all of the grammar mistakes that you made and you'll be able to identify your key grammar mistakes. For example if you are using the wrong article before every nine you need to work on articles. So this technique is not actually about improving your speaking yet. This technique is to give you feedback. As I said before feedback doesn't improve your speaking instantly but what you do after does. So for example if you look at the transcript and you messed up every article being aware of that is just the first step. You're not going to magically improve your speaking by just being aware of that but you will magically improve if you work on those things and some of you watching right now might be thinking well that's a lot of work yes it is but it's a lot less work than going and watching a bunch of tips and tricks videos believing that they're going to help you and then failing the test over and over again and not knowing why that is a lot of work. This is actually a lot less stressful because you will be in control and you can do it all for free at home at your own pace. Again we're here to give you things that are actually going to improve your score not tips and tricks that make you happy. So step three you should be here IELTS speaking topics you're going to scroll down and you will see a link IELTS speaking topics the ultimate guide click on that and it will give you access to all of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of questions that you will need for your speaking practice. I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope that you find the questions useful I hope that you use that technique. If you find any useful tools put them in the comments help the other students and I also put up here all the different videos that you might be interested in that will help you with your speaking test and if you need any help in the future always feel free to get in touch thank you very much