 Hey there Chris here from IELTS Advantage and today we're going to move on with our IELTS Vocabulary Mini Course and we'll move on into day two and day two is answering this question what does band seven vocabulary look like? So you'll hear a lot of people talking about high level vocabulary and complex words and simple words so we're going to actually look at what these things are and we're going to give you a really cool online tool that you can use to analyze your own essay so it's just totally free and you can look at the level of the different words. So what does band seven vocabulary look like? When you talk to most students they'll say things like big words, long words, complex words, high level words but when students normally ask me about this or when we're talking about this and they say how can I use more big words or how can I use more complex words what I'll normally ask them is well what's a small word what's a simple word what's a low-level word and most students the problem is that they have no idea what the difference is between a high level word and a low level word so we're going to look at that today and we're going to look at like what is the key to getting a band seven or above when it comes to vocabulary. So a little test before we move into the detail here we have a list of words on the left hand side and here we have a list of words on the right hand side what I'd like you to do in the comments is tell me which one is higher level all right which words do you think are higher level or more complex or we get you a higher score on the IELTS test if you're doing the speaking test or the writing test if you think the words on the left are higher level say left and if you think the words on the right or higher level say right all right and we'll come back and I'll look at the comments in a second and I'll reveal the answer in a minute so take a second have a look left in the comments if you think left is higher level right if you think those are higher level it'll be interesting to see your answers because they're all linked to this so this is the CEFR common european framework and you can look this up just type in CEFR and you'll get the different levels of English so we have C2 C1 B2 B1 and then it goes down to like A2 A1 and they are equivalent to different levels in IELTS so most of you watching this video want to band 7 all right so band 7 according to this this is from Cambridge I believe or the British council it's around a C1 level band 8 band 8.5 band 9 around a C2 level so your proficient so band 7 is advanced level so if we think about those words again some of these words are C1 and C2 words some of these words are B1 and B2 words so some of these words are around here advanced proficient and some of these words are here B1 B2 so down band 4 4.5 5 5.5 6 the bands you probably don't want to to get so again left or right well let's have a look left C1 and C2 words right B1 and B2 words so let's have a look and see whether you thought left or right let's have a little look I'll be very disappointed if I'm wrong but I think most of you would have said this side so right right right right right left so about 80 percent of you said right so about 80 percent of you are wrong and that's not your fault I might have played a little bit of a trick on you because I put in words that are quite short and here words that are quite long but this proves my point that most of you think that high level vocabulary means long complex words and low level vocabulary means quite simple short words and that's actually not the case so how do you find out you know what level a word is well there's a really really easy way of doing that just go to Cambridge online dictionary so just go to Google and type in Cambridge online dictionary and put in any word and beside the word you'll see C1 C2 B1 B2 A2 A1 it'll tell you the level of that word so so what what does this mean well when you hear people talking about using high level words or using complex words they probably don't know what they're talking about and you should only use the real evidence the real facts to guide you on this don't listen to someone who says like as we looked at in video one learn these five words and you'll get a high score that's absolute nonsense so can we get a high score by using lots of C1 and C2 words most of you watching this video now are like hmm all I have to do is just learn lots of C1 and C2 words put them into my essay or use them in the speaking test and I'll get a high score right well not so much let's have a look so what I'm going to show you now is a really great online tool that you can use and it's produced by Cambridge English so the people who write the the IELTS test so you know that it's relevant and it's reliable and if you type in Cambridge text inspector or Cambridge English profile text inspector what you can do is you can put in a text so you could take the text from the Wall Street Journal here just as an example put it in and it will look at all of the words and it will give you a bar chart or a pie chart telling you which words are A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 so you would think that really good writing means that there are lots of C1 and C2 words and quite a few B1 and B2 words and not many A1 and A2 words because they're simple right so what I did was just take a random article from the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street Journal is quite you know it's quite high-brow the the vocabulary in it it's quite specific it's quite high level and put it in here and what I find was and this is pretty much the same of any good journal article or good newspaper 36 percent of the words were A1 and 13 percent were A2 so 50 percent of the words were what most students would say are low level so does that mean the people at the Wall Street Journal are like band 5 IELTS writers I don't think so and 14 percent B1 10 percent B2 23 percent the the text inspector didn't recognize the words but here C1 was 3 percent and the highest level C2 was just 1 percent all right and if you go and download or look at some like really really high level academic scientific journal articles or any sort of journal articles and put it into that you'll find this kind of pattern a tiny percentage of the total words are so called high level and the vast majority of the words are not and if you showed that to most IELTS students or and some IELTS teachers they would say oh the vocabulary is not very good and it's not high level enough so that's kind of flawed logic and we can look at something else what I'm going to show you now is from IELTS 11 so I just picked one of my official Cambridge IELTS books randomly and this is a student sample that they give at the at the end of the book so at the end of the book I'm sure a lot of you have used these they have student samples I took part of a paragraph and one that said it was band seven so it's probably band seven vocabulary and let's look at this one is it full of high level words well let's have a look and see so let's have a look let's get it read as character is concerned and there's some grammar mistakes and everything because that's what that's that's what most band seven essays would have they would have some grammar mistakes so we have the wearer of clothes follower of fashion another aspect clean ironed grubby very casual smart concerned so the vocabulary that they're using I wouldn't say most people would look at that and say oh it's really really high level some of it actually is some of those words such as grubby ironed follower of fashion is a nice phrase most of the some of these words are quite high level but the vast majority of the words are not they are a one and a two words so what does this tell us about getting a band seven on the IELTS test to get a band seven on the IELTS test when it comes to vocabulary you need to focus on the basics first you need to be able to do the a1 and the a2 and the b1 and the b2 stuff first before you even think about trying to go up to the c1 and the c2 words it's not like the examiner is going to look at your essay and you've made a bunch of mistakes with quite simple a1 a2 b1 b2 words and you have you know five c2 words and use those correctly examiners not going to look at those c2 words and think this person's vocabulary is amazing they're just going to think this person has memorized a bunch of high level words and put them into their essay and they're not silly and if you look at the vocabulary here follower of fashion ironed grubby smart very casual these are all wearer of clothes these are all words and phrases related to one topic which is fashion and this is what the examiners will be looking at more than using a couple of high level words they'll be looking for your ability to use topic specific words because that will show them that it that you have a wide ranging vocabulary because if you can use lots of fashion words does that mean that you just study lots of fashion well maybe if you really love fashion but if you know a lot of fashion vocabulary it's highly likely that you know a lot of other vocabulary about many other topics so on the speaking test they're going to ask you about a range of different topics why do you think that is to test your vocabulary for one reason because if you can talk about fashion and maybe the environment and maybe education and maybe technology and use topic specific words for all of those topics you're proving that you have a very wide ranging vocabulary not memorizing just a few high level words which might not even be high level in the first place as we demonstrated but learning vocabulary properly and using it properly so what can you do number one don't learn lists of words they're completely useless we talked about that on day one if you haven't seen lesson one go and check it out on the youtube channel or the facebook page don't try and impress the examiner you're not going to fill the examiner you're not going to trick the examiner into thinking that by using you know five or six words that are high level that your vocabulary is great walk before you can run the number of people i see trying to use very high level vocabulary but getting the basics wrong is unbelievable so focus on the basics first you cannot learn how to run before you can walk you can't learn how to walk before you can crawl and so focus on that first and then build up and obviously improve your vocabulary and that's what we're going to look at on Friday at 11 a.m on lesson three the final day of our vocabulary mini course we're going to look at a step by step guide for improving your vocabulary if you want more information about vocabulary go to aislesadvantage.com slash vocabulary or just google aislesadvantage vocabulary you'll get a lot of information there and check out our word circles a lot of students really like those this shows you a great way to record vocabulary and if you want our help with anything feel free to email us chris at aislesadvantage.com thank you very much guys hope you enjoyed that let me know if you did or if you still have questions about vocabulary let me know in the comments and either myself or one of the team will get back to you thanks very much bye