 You've just found the ultimate guide to IELTSpeaking. This is the longest, most detailed guide to IELTSpeaking you'll find anywhere on the internet. It's going to help you understand things about the format of the test, how you can improve your speaking at home for free and give you the same strategies thousands of my students have used to get a Band 9 on the speaking test. Not only that, we're also going to give you the same grammar and vocabulary that we've only ever shared with our Band 9 VIP students before. And then at the end of the video, we're going to do something very, very special. We're going to share a mock test that we've never shared before. It's from a student who you might have seen before where she got a Band 8. We've showed her lots of the things included in this video and then we invited her back to our studio to see if she could improve from a Band 8 to a Band 9. But let's start by helping you understand the three different parts of the speaking test and share with you those strategies that our Band 9 students have used to succeed. So without further ado, let's jump into it. So let's start off by going through the three different parts of the annual speaking test and also tell you the characteristics of a Band 5 to 6.5 student versus a Band 7, 8 or 9 student. The vast majority of the candidates that the examiner will see will be in and around these scores. These are the average scores and vast majority of examiners are seeing things like this. And these students do very particular things that are very easy for the examiners to spot. They are very, very different from Band 7, 8 and 9 students. So what we're gonna do is first of all, go through each part and tell you what these things are that these students do and then show you one of our students and you can decide whether they are doing these things here or these things. So part one, normally the easiest part but it is where a lot of students mess up and they do a few things that are very avoidable. The most common thing that examiners hear and see is a memorized answer. The reason why they hear so many memorized answers is in part one, because these are quite predictable questions like, tell me about your job, your studies, where you live, where you're from. A lot of students will memorize answers in the hope to impress the examiner, but it's very, very easy to spot these and it actually lowers your score. Related to that are very long answers and these two are related. So often students will go online, they'll go on to YouTube, they'll go on to websites that have these kind of template answers and often those are just way, way too long. You don't have to give very long answers to a question like, do you work or do you study or tell me about where you live? Imagine you are in a normal situation, imagine you are meeting someone for the first time and they say, where are you from? You wouldn't talk for 20 minutes. Also, sometimes these are off topic. So again, these three are kind of related because the examiner will ask you quite predictable questions in part one, but then if they think that you have memorized answers, what they'll do is they're a bit sneaky. They will throw in very unusual questions like, how often do you wear hats? Do you like hats? When was the last time you had a birthday cake? These are all questions that you're not expecting and it's really to catch out people who are just relying on memorized answers and that is a really big sign to the examiner that you don't know what you're doing and you've just memorized a bunch of stuff. The other thing that is quite surprising for many people is that they sound very formal or another way to say this would be, they sound robotic. They sound like you're talking to a robot. Now this could be because of stress, this could be because of nerves, but it also could be that you have just been taught the wrong way. Often teachers with very little experience and students who don't know the test very well think this is a big important test. This is a very formal occasion. I should speak like this, hello, my name is Chris. You do not need to do that. I'm gonna show you some answers from my students and I want you to think about, do they do any of these things or do they do other things? And then we'll talk about the main characteristics of a band seven, eight or nine students. To thank you for watching this video, I wanna give you a free course that has helped thousands of students improve their IELTS speaking score. What it's gonna do is take you through every single part of the test and give you strategies for part one, part two and part three and also allow you to practice at home for free and get feedback. To sign up for that for free, all you have to do is just click the link in the description. Thanks very much and let's get back to the video. Do you ever miss being in high school? I do actually because I started working very early. I did not get to experience the university or college so the memories that I have or the friends I have is from high school and I do think about times where we could just go back and have a reunion and like have that moment again. Do you have any animals in your home as pets? Yes, I have two dogs. They're both from the shelter, the animal shelter, the rescues. Yeah, I've always had pets. Our family really likes keeping animals around. So you can probably hear there that it didn't sound very memorized. It wasn't very long. They stayed on topic and it sounded like a normal conversation, especially band nine students. It doesn't seem like you're talking to an IELTS candidate. It feels like you're talking to a friend or talking to a colleague. They will also always answer the question So if you ask them, do you like hats? It'll be, yes, I like hats. If you ask them, what's your favorite flavor of birthday cake? They will say vanilla or chocolate. Even though they might have never thought of it that before, they will still have enough English and enough ability to answer any question. Now let's talk about seasons of the year. What's your favorite season of the year? Well, I love any time when the sun starts to come out. So around spring or early summer, before it gets too hot, I just love a little bit of vitamin D and it makes me happier as well. So that is definitely better than the winter. What do you do when it gets too hot in the summer? Hide. I tend to also go into any kind of buildings with air conditioning and I have to fan on every night when it's really hot. So yeah, when it gets really hot in the summer, I really need a lot of like fans and kind of just anything I can hold with me when I go out as well. Now none of those answers were very long, but they did develop their answers. So there's enough development. Normally what they do is they will directly answer the question and then they might add in some explanation, an example, maybe a little story, maybe a little bit of extra detail. Again, there's no set number of sentences. You shouldn't go into the exam thinking I must use two sentences or three sentences or I must not go over three or four sentences because that's just too much thinking. We want to remove as much thinking as possible and just allow you to answer questions naturally. A good little tip is if you are confused about this, imagine you're starting a new job and you're meeting your colleagues for the first time and they say to you, you know, where do you live? You probably wouldn't just say London because that's a little bit rude, to be honest. It doesn't really give people a lot to go on. You might say, oh, I've just moved to London. I've actually just moved to an area called Wandsworth. It's really nice. It's close to the river. So you can see there that I didn't really think about how many sentences to use there or whether I should use an example or whether an explanation. I just thought, how do I sound like a normal human being? Okay, so let's move on to part two of the speaking test. Part two, you will get a cue card like this one and you will have one minute to prepare your answer and then you will be asked to speak for up to two minutes and this is slightly different from part one and part three because this is a monologue. The examiner isn't asking you questions. The examiner isn't interacting with you. The examiner is just sitting back and listening to you and it's a really important part for two reasons. Number one, it's very unusual to speak for up to two minutes in a foreign language. Often this is the first time anyone has ever done this so it can be quite daunting. And the second reason is more important is the reason I think they put this part in here is because it gives the examiner a real chance to just focus on what you're saying. Focus on your fluency, your pronunciation, are you answering the question, your grammar, your vocabulary. So it's really important that you do well and you avoid these things that average students do. So the first one might be quite surprising. They rigidly stick to bullet points. So it's important that you understand the bullet points there are there to help you. They're not there to hinder you. So what average students normally do is they will just read bullet point number one. Then, oh, what do I say about bullet point number two? I'll get to bullet point number three. I don't know what to say. Let's go on to bullet point number four. And then before they know it, they have run out of things to say and they're only 30 seconds in, which is going to lower your score. You must speak until the examiner stops you in and around the two minute mark. Band seven, eight and nine students do something very, very different which we'll talk about in a second. We've already mentioned this. They often run out of ideas. This is because they're just sticking to bullet point one, two, three, four. Doesn't really give them enough to go on and they just stop talking. And I often hear students trying to make things way too complicated by using some kind of trick or template that they've memorized. For example, a very popular one is PPF, Past, Present, Future. The intention is to make things easier for you, but it can end up making things more complicated because it's a very unnatural way to answer any question. When have you ever been in a coffee shop and someone has asked you a question and you think, hmm, I'm going to talk about the past. Then I'm going to talk about the present and then maybe compare the present with the past and then talk about the future. You're just doing way too much thinking and often students will get questions that they don't know what they're going to do in the future or the past is just not applicable at all. So this can make things worse and band 789 students don't use this at all. What do they do? Let's listen to one and think about what they do differently. The first time I met a new friend. So I'm going to go way back. It was my first day of school, kindergarten. And I met a girl named Amanpreet Skor. She, we were about, I think we just turned four years old. We met obviously in kindergarten, first day of school. What I liked about her when I first saw her, I mean, we were sitting together with the teacher made us sit next to each other. And she had this long hair and it was like sectioned into two parts and it was just braided all the way down. And she had the cutest face I've ever seen. She had this little fluffy marshmallow like face. I guess that's all it takes when you're a kid to want to be friends with somebody. And then I tried to, so there's like this little thing that kids do where they put their thumb out to show other kids that I want to be your friend. And then if you don't want to be friends with them, you do this, it's like a silly little thing. So I did this to her. I put my thumb out to say, hey, do you want to be friends? And she was like this and I was heartbroken. I was like, how can she know want to be my friend? And then I saw her again the next day and the next day after that and the day after that. And then eventually we ended up becoming best friends. She did it back to me obviously at some point. She was my first best friend that I ever had in life. She was from Punjab, which is a part of India. And her mom used to make the most amazing. It's called paratha. It's like this stuffed bread. It's like they put potato and spices into a flat bread. And my mom used to make something called sira, which is sweet, semolina situation. That's the end of the two minutes. So again, this was very natural. The student just was able to speak naturally. The conversation flowed and they were able to speak quite fluently and easily for up to two minutes. How did they do that? Well, the first thing that they did was they just focused on the main topic. Again, if we look at the cue card, you will have the bullet points here, but at the top, this is the main topic. By just focusing on the main topic, this gives you a lot more freedom to speak fluently and naturally rather than trying to do bullet point one, two, three, four. So again, it sounds like a natural conversation. Because again, they're not using any tricks, any memorized structures or anything like that. It is again, like talking to someone in a coffee shop saying, let's talk about this or what do you think about this? Now, you might be thinking, well, should we not use the bullet points? Well, they do use the bullet points but they only use them when it's appropriate to help them. So they use the bullet points to help them speak naturally. So what does that mean? Well, if they see bullet point number one and they think I can easily talk about that, they talk about that. But if they look at bullet point number two and think, I don't really know about that, I don't feel comfortable talking about that, don't talk about that. And then they can talk maybe about bullet point number three and bullet point number four, but they can add other things below the bullet points, other things related to that main topic. All they're doing is just picking things that make it easy for them to speak like a human being naturally to the examiner. Now, let's move on to part three. Part three, in my opinion, is the most challenging part because it requires the student to do a few special things that most students are not used to doing. So let's look at part three for these band five, 6.5 students. So the biggest difference between part one and part three is part one is just, as I've said, every day getting to know you, chit chat, small talk type questions. Part three are more academic style questions, though it doesn't matter if you're doing academic or general training. The reason why I say they're more academic style questions is they're asking you about more abstract topics. So in part one, they might say something like do you use public transport? That is a question about you, it's impossible to get it wrong. But in part three, they might say something like should governments give citizens public transport for free? Or what are the advantages and disadvantages of using a private car versus buses, for example? These are not really about you, you can't talk about you, but they're more abstract type questions that require a far more developed answer. So what band five, six, 6.5 students are doing is they're often giving very short answers. The examiner is not really interested in the answer to the question. This is not a knowledge test, this is not an IQ test. They are testing your ability to communicate. And part of communication is developing your answer. And we'll talk about how band eight, nine students do that in part three in a second. You'll often hear these students saying things like I don't know anything about that topic or that was a very, very difficult question. And they will often just not attempt an answer at all. Now let me tell you a little secret about IELTS examiners on test day for the speaking test. If they think you're good, they will ask you more and more difficult questions because they have to separate out the band sevens from the band eights from the band nines. So they're going to ask you increasingly difficult questions to see if you can cope with it. If you don't answer the question or you just do something like I've seen students laugh because they're probably nervous, I've seen students just go, I don't know. You are basically telling the examiner, I don't deserve one of these higher bands. I am one of these lower band students. It's also very, very obvious to the examiner that you want the exam to be over. It is a very tiring day. It is a very stressful situation. The examiner is just throwing lots of difficult questions at you. You've been speaking in a foreign language for 15 minutes maybe at this stage. You just want it to be over. What students will do is they will just give very short answers because your brain is screaming at you. Just give the examiner short answers and you can leave and this ordeal can be over. And it's also very obvious to the examiner that your range is limited. What do I mean by range? Well, the examiner will be thinking about your range of grammar and your range of vocabulary. This is an opportunity for them to ask you about lots of different topics and also asking you questions that require more complex grammar structures. Now, they're not doing this to be mean. It's just the best way to test someone's language level. So when they ask you about a more difficult topic, again, students won't be able to answer the question or they will just refuse to answer the question. And then they'll ask you maybe a question that requires a more difficult tense or more difficult grammar structure to answer it effectively. And you're not able to do that. You're just using those basic structures. Let's have a listen to a few answers from our VIP students and think about whether they do these things or whether they do things differently. Is it easy to predict the weather in your country? I suppose it is, yeah. Because like I said earlier, some parts of India, the weather like cannot, the temperature doesn't go over a certain degrees, but where in some parts are really hot and humid throughout the year. So I think it's quite easy to predict, but when it comes to rain or monsoon season, it's very hard. Like last year, sorry, a few months ago, in the north of India, it was raining heavily and the rain did not stop for I'd say two weeks. So that was not predictable. Why do you think some people fail in some careers? I think one of the main drivers, I think for people is money. And when you do anything solely because of money, then it will never work. And the reason people fail, I think, the biggest reason is because they have felt aligned identity with their work. Because we spend a third of our lives in work. So a very big proportion of it needs to feel fulfilled and it can only be fulfilled if you understand what you like authentically inside and then go into a career. But then the reality is that most people then just jump in and figure it out, explore, and then we'll work it out in hindsight. I guess that's what life's about. So as you can probably hear, they attempt every question. Doesn't matter if they're thrown a difficult question, as you heard there, some of the questions were extremely difficult and it was obvious that the student was not an expert on that topic. But again, it's not an IQ test, it's not a knowledge test. The best thing that you can do, even if you know nothing about that topic, is attempt some kind of an answer because you're explaining there to the examiner, okay, I don't know about this topic, but my English is good enough. I can communicate in English and it is an English communication test. And there was lots of development. So they answered the question, but they also explained why they thought that or why other people thought that. They might have thrown in an example or a story related to their life. And what you often hear about seven, eight and nine students doing is showing the other side of the argument. They might say, well, some people think this but other people think this and I agree with this person or I agree with that person. So they're fully exploring that topic. They're not just saying, I think this. And they have no problem with range. Again, it is the intention of the examiner to test your language ability. The best way that they can do that is to throw these more complex topics that require a broader range of grammar, a broader range of vocabulary. And as you can hear about seven, eight and nine students just naturally answer those questions. So now you know what to expect in part one, part two and part three. And that was just a general overview of the difference between your lower level students and higher level students. Now let's look at some very specific common mistakes. Let's get into even more detail so that you can really understand what not to do and then improve your score to about seven, eight and nine. 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? 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? So thank you for making it this far in the video. I want to give you 10% off our VIP course. IELTS VIP course is the most successful IELTS course in the world. That is a fact because we have more about seven, eight and nine success stories than any other IELTS course in the entire world. We do that by simplifying the whole IELTS process. Supporting you with some of the best IELTS teachers in the world and being with you every step of the way until you get the score that you need. All you have to do is just look down in the description, just click that and you can sign up. If you have any questions about the VIP course, always feel free to get in touch with us. We answer 100% of the questions that we get. Hope that you would become a VIP. If not, enjoy the rest of this free video. Dustin 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? So, I mean, 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're going to be, they might ask you follow up questions like why or can you, you know, asking you to develop your answer a little bit more. That might put you off. It might be like, oh, 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. And 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 going to be more difficult than I thought. I thought this was going to 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. So in the comments, what do you think about that one? Was it a memorized answer, trying to impress examiner, too long, too short, robotic delivery? What do you think? And three 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 climb 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 could 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 was 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 buddies 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 the 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? What do you like to do in your free time? So they'll memorize that answer and they'll give 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 and you, 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, and onions, and I just feel fantastic after I have that. Normally I 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. They're 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. It's better to have a good sample. I love to watch US 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? 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 start. So I don't think it's a mandatory for you to think at the beginning. I don't think that that's the 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 use too many apps, I use hundreds of apps. Actually, recently what I've been trying to do is to make my phone a lot healthier for, 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 a lot of the apps 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, 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, they're 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't 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. 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 and an explanation, add an example but not in a formulaic way. Hopefully that makes sense. Coherence, so that's related 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 gonna 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 obviously hopefully my pronunciation is okay. Next, I want to share something very, very special with you. So part two is probably the most challenging part of the speaking test for many, many students. What I've done is I have taken lots of real part two questions and I'm gonna show you how I personally would plan out the entire answer and then show you how I would answer it. This is gonna fill you with confidence because you'll see Eve and I don't really make things really complicated and you don't need a very high level complex answer. You just keep things simple, give the examiners what they're looking for and it can really improve your confidence on test day and your score. So what I'd further ado, let's jump into it. Before I show you each of the cue cards and reveal my band nine sample answer for each of them, I wanna talk about how you can use this video to improve at home. So one thing you can do is you can just sit back, relax and watch the video. That's fine if you want to do that. But if you really want to improve, what you can do is each time I show you the cue card, you could pause the video, spend one minute preparing your own answer and then set two minutes on your phone, record yourself answering the actual question and then listen to my answer and you can compare. Now, if my answer is completely different from yours, that doesn't matter. What matters is you are actually practicing, you are thinking about these questions and you are actually speaking and listening back and thinking about your performance is really, really going to help. So if you want to do that, that is really going to help you improve your speaking or if you just wanna sit back, that's fine as well. So let's have a look at these cue cards. Okay, so talk about a time when you received good news. So that'll be my wife's passport. It was before Easter. Give a background on why it was good news. And what the news was about. So that will include that, and explain why the news was special and will allow us to travel. No need for visas. And then if we have time, we can go into a holiday. So I received amazing news just before Easter this year. My wife got her new passport. Now, for most people, that wouldn't be great news, but for my wife, because she's not from the UK, that was her first passport. So it was an amazing thing to happen. Just to give you some background on why it was so important and so special. If you're not from the UK and you get married to a citizen from the UK, it takes between five and six years before you can get an actual passport. You can live in the UK, but you're not allowed to get a passport. You have to apply multiple times, send them mountains of information and spend thousands of pounds trying to get that done. And what that does is it creates a huge problem because if you have what's called a spouse visa for the UK and you don't have one of the premium passports that allows you to travel around the world, it means you're kind of stuck in the UK. So for about five or six years, we were living in the UK, but my family could only travel to my wife's home country. She couldn't travel to Europe. She couldn't travel to America without going through a very stressful process of applying for visas there. So getting this passport was amazing news because it means that we can go on holiday, we can travel anywhere, pretty much in the world, visa free. And it just opens up, literally opens up the whole world to my family. And to celebrate, I booked a holiday to Portugal. This was the first time my wife had ever been to Portugal and we were able to just breeze through immigration with her British passport. Okay, so I'm gonna go snorkeling, tell story about Barbados. So the first time and then the second time to two-wavy, no, not two-wavy, it's too rough. And let me try scuba. What activity it was, where you did it, when you did it, explain whether you liked it or not. Okay, maybe say why you like it. Okay, so an activity that I took part in, I do ours recently, well a few months ago actually, was snorkeling. So I've never been snorkeling before and in August 2020, we went on holiday in Barbados and we had a house right on the beach and I went swimming every day because the water was right there. And our next door neighbor, it was an American guy, every day he would go in snorkeling and I didn't really think that snorkeling was available. And then on our last day of the holiday, he said you wanna try my snorkel, so I put the snorkel on and I was kind of really surprised and kind of disappointed because there was this amazing coral reef under, right under the sea, stones threw away from my house. So for two weeks I was swimming and could have been watching this amazing scene underneath the water. So we rebooked our holiday to Barbados, we went back again December last year and I brought my snorkel with me. I went to the sport shop and purchased the best snorkel I could buy and brought it in my suitcase with me. And when we got there, we discovered that the sea was too rough. So I couldn't snorkel and the sea was rough and choppy the whole time we were there. So not only could I not snorkel, I couldn't even swim. So I missed that opportunity again. In the future, I hope to snorkel maybe somewhere else that has more reliable snorkelling. But I'd also like to try scuba diving because I think weather doesn't really matter so much because you're underneath the water and it's a far more immersive experience but it does require a lot of training. So maybe I need to do my paddy license. So that was weird on a flight because the flight was canceled. We had to decide, so what? We did right away. Decide Portugal or Spain or stay. Decided to stay. It was great because it was quiet. How far I come? But disappointed because no compensation. Okay, I hope that you're enjoying this video but YouTube can be a little bit confusing and overwhelming. So what we've done is we've created a free IELTS course called IELTS Fundamentals. What IELTS Fundamentals does is it just boils everything down into the most important fundamental things that you need to learn. It's designed to help you remove all of the stress and just get the score that you need in the quickest possible time by just giving you the information that you need. And it covers everything, it's 100% free and it has helped thousands of students get a band seven, eight or nine. If you wanna sign up for IELTS Fundamentals for free click the link in the description. Thanks very much and let's get back to the video. So recently I had to wait nearly one week for a flight. So we were flying back from the south of Portugal, the Algarve from an airport called Ferro. I'm probably mispronouncing that. Apologies to any Portuguese in the audience. But what happened was our flight was at eight PM from Portugal to back to Belfast. And at 10 to eight to 10 minutes before the flight was about to take off, I got a text message saying that the flight was canceled with no explanation at all. I think it was the French traffic controllers. So thanks very much for that. And what happened in the immediate aftermath was we just said, okay, no problem. We went to a hotel and it was actually a bonus because we went to a little town in Portugal that we would never normally go to. And it was amazing because we got to see the real Portugal. They had a fish market and a vegetable market there right beside the water. So it was nice just to go and shop with the locals and have coffee with the locals. So it was actually a blessing in disguise. Later that day, we needed to decide either we had to get a taxi to Spain because there was no flights available that day from Portugal to Belfast or to take a like a four hour taxi ride to Lisbon, the capital. Or just wait for the next available flight which was five days away. So we decided to do that because when we added up all the costs, it was actually cheaper just to stay an extra five days. And that was an amazing experience because we went back to the same resort that we stayed in and because Easter had passed, it was basically just us in the resort. So we got not just five star service, six star service and it was really quiet and beautiful and having our flight canceled was an amazing experience. Okay, there's no one that I can think of that I really want to work with. So I'm just gonna pick someone famous because that's gonna be easy to talk about. So Elon Musk, how you know them, Tesla, Twitter, et cetera. What they do. So that's kind of the same thing. The thing I would like. So it's first principles, thinking and then he makes money by solving problems. And you could learn a lot from him. Then what else could we talk about? Probably the negatives, he's controversial. Don't know why but he is. I suppose if I had to choose one person to work with it would be Elon Musk. Elon Musk is one of the most successful business people in the history of the world. He's one of the richest people in the world. So it's obvious why you would want to work with him because you could learn a huge amount from him. And he's famous because not only has he started one successful company, I think he has started more than 10 successful companies. He's famous for Tesla, which was the first company to successfully start an electric car company, SpaceX. He also bought Twitter but he also set up PayPal. So he not only has been successful, he has been successful in many different domains. And the thing that I would really like to learn from him is how he makes money and makes a profit by trying to solve problems for the planet and for people. Because Tesla makes a lot of money but it is also saving the environment. SpaceX makes a lot of money but it could also save humanity. If there was a natural disaster and we all had to get off the planet, then it's probably the only way we can go is to move to the moon or move to Mars. So his rationale, his modus operandi seems to be find a huge problem, solve that problem, and get paid for it. And I would really, really like to do that. I try and do that in my own business. So the IELTS test is a huge problem for thousands of people all around the world. We try and make it simple and easier for them to get the scores that they need. But I think there's probably bigger problems that I could tackle now that I've solved that IELTS problem. This is actually quite a difficult one because I don't come from a rich family. So I suppose I'll just say that. The only time I can ever remember getting money for my family is communion money. Explain what that is. That's why I received it. It was stolen from me. So, but it makes me very grateful because of why it was stolen in inverted commas. I don't come from a very wealthy family. So I've never been given a huge amount of money in my life. The only time I can remember being given a significant amount of money was for my first Holy Communion. So I'm Irish. I'm from a Catholic background. And if you grew up Catholic, when you're around seven, eight years old, you do your first Holy Communion. And it's like a big milestone in a child's life. And normally family members will give you some money. So I think at the time I was given between 40 and 50 pounds. So in the late 80s, early 90s, I don't remember exactly when that was, early 90s. That was a significant amount of money. But I actually reminded my mother the other day that she took that money from me. I said she stole it from me. And her response was, well, we didn't have any money. So I stole it from you to buy you food and to buy you clothes. So I did feel quite aggrieved at the time because a lot of my richer friends were going and buying toys and things like that. And it was the first time I'd ever had a significant amount of money and then it was taken from me right away. But looking back now, it fills me with gratitude. I'm very grateful that it happened because it shows how much my mother struggled and how hard she worked for me in order to set me up in life. And recently my little boy did his first Holy Communion and he got a lot more than I got. And he wasted it on buying things in a computer game. And it was a good opportunity for us to teach him about money and teach him about not wasting money. Now he wants to buy more things in the computer game, but I told him that he has to work for it and he has to do some jobs around the house if he wants that. Okay, so I'm gonna talk about copyright because that's a law that affects me directly every day. So I'm gonna explain what copyright is. It basically protects IP. I follow it by being original. Protects from people I hate. Let's call this bait-a-spade and explain what should happen if you break that law. So a law that I like is copyright. Copyright protects content creators, people who create things. It protects their intellectual property from being copied without authorization. The reason why I like this law is because my job, principally, 80% of my time is spent making original content. So that could be a blog post, that could be a YouTube video, it could be an image, something like that. And how this law protects me is, on a daily basis, definitely a weekly basis, somebody takes my original work and just copies it completely. And what we can do is we can then tell the platforms or sometimes like YouTube tells us, hey, somebody has copied your work and what that allows us to do is basically get that taken down and then YouTube can either ban them from the platform or what they do is they have a three-strikes policy, I think, where if they do it three times, they're completely banned from the platform. I do like this law, but I think that it isn't enforced enough and it isn't respected enough by other people. Recently we had, or not recently, throughout our whole career, we've had a lot of people not only copying our content, the words and the images and the video, but copying things now like our titles and our thumbnail images, which are all original and they take a lot of creativity and brainpower and time and work. And I absolutely hate the fact that somebody lazy and stupid, to be honest, can just come along and take that and steal it. And when we report people stealing our titles, people stealing our thumbnails, YouTube are less likely to take that down because they don't consider that a copyright violation when, if you follow the letter of the law, it actually is. Okay, so Portuguese fish stew, perfect because restaurants allowed us to take turns. Explain how you felt great because it allowed us to have a good time with our children. An unusual meal I had recently was at a Portuguese restaurant and for the first time my wife and I and my two little boys had Portuguese fish stew. I'll not try and pronounce the Portuguese version of it, but basically it comes in a big cast iron pot and it has rice and prawns and other fish and clams and other shellfish in it. The reason why it was such an unusual experience was it was a restaurant that was completely outside and it was set in a big garden on the ocean, on the Atlantic Ocean and there were cliffs kind of going down to the ocean and it was very special because if you have two young boys they don't want to sit in a fancy restaurant and this allowed our boys to kind of run around the gardens and go and have a look over the cliffs and don't worry it was safe and it allowed myself and my wife to take turns playing with the boys or eating our meal and because this stew was in a big cast iron pot as I said it didn't get cold so I would eat some while my wife was looking after my boys and then my wife would come back and she would eat some and then I would go and play with my boys and they didn't really eat it because they think that prawns and things like that are gross but we really really enjoyed it. I would definitely go back to that restaurant again and I would definitely order that meal. One thing we did miss out on was we as we were leaving we discovered they had a fresh fish counter where the daily catch was brought in and you could actually go and choose your fish and my wife loves seafood and next time we'll get the fish stew but we'll also pick a few other things. So the hiking. I'll explain three places or four places. I normally do it alone because I like to listen to podcasts or to think and then I'll talk about the physical side of it and then talk more about the mental benefits and then if I run out of time or run out of things to say I'll talk about the weather which is kind of a downside of it. Yeah, that should be enough. As you can probably tell from looking at me I'm not the healthiest person in the world but one thing I do enjoy which is quite healthy is hiking. I live in Northern Ireland and I live in a part of Northern Ireland which is world-renowned for its natural beauty so right on our doorstep we have beaches we have two beautiful forest parks we have a beautiful lake and we've got a medieval castle that you can walk around so that means that there's a huge variety of places and even within each of those places like within the forest parks there are different trails you can go down so you're always discovering new places and you never get bored. I like to do this on my own because I don't only do it for the physical health benefits I do it for the mental health benefits so I have quite a busy stressful job and being able to just get out in nature we say it allows you to get your head showered here in Northern Ireland which means just get out and bathe in nature not literally bathe but just surround yourself with nature and it not only helps you with your cardiovascular health it can help with stress and de-stressing as well the only problem with hiking here in Northern Ireland is our weather is notoriously bad so during the winter it can snow but most of the time it is actually just raining and walking in the rain is not especially when it's cold and when it's windy is not a great experience but in the summertime we often get spells of weather maybe two or three weeks where it is nice and dry and that is an amazing time I generally work a lot less during those times and try and get out every day onto one of the hiking trails Istanbul Champions League who you will go with because my son supports Man City why you want to go there to see Man City explain why you want to go for a short period Champions League so there is not much there so I will talk about why it is not suitable for kids and I will talk about other parts of Turkey there is a lot of walking historical stuff cultural stuff yeah so a place I would love to go for a short period of time is Istanbul in Turkey there is a very specific reason for that is in a couple of weeks I think it is two or three weeks they have the Champions League final there my little boy Tom who is eight years old is obsessed with Man City so we watch all the Man City games here in the house and he especially loves the Champions League so if they make it to the final I would love to take him to the Champions League final I don't know if we will be able to go however because tickets are quite hard to come by but if we get the opportunity I would love to go I wouldn't take him there for more than a couple of days I know that Istanbul is an amazing place to visit but I don't think it is suitable for children or not for my kid anyway the things that I would like to do in Istanbul such as experience the wonderful food and historical sites and the religious sites and the cultural things to do there an eight year old is just not really interested in those things so we would probably just fly in stay the night before go to the match and then come back I think the matches are held quite late there because of the temperature so we probably would fly back the next day I would like to take him back to Turkey but probably not to Istanbul for the reasons I just said he doesn't really like big cities but he does like seaside resorts and there are places like Antalya in the south of Turkey and I would like to take him there for a lot longer a week or two so he could experience Turkey and all the wonderful things there that they have for kids this is an old man in the sea I met him in the sea while I was swimming how you met them I met them in the sea what they do so he lived there for more than 80 years in the sea nearly every day told me about the history of the village he was just calm and serene he was a product of his environment and he had also worked tourism so a fascinating man that I met recently back in December so a few months back I was swimming in the Caribbean sea on the west coast of Barberos and there was an old man who was just lying back relaxing in the sea and he started talking to me and I discovered that he lived in a house right on the beach in the village where I was staying he was more than 80 years old and I discovered that he had been in the sea nearly every day of his life and for me that location is one of the most beautiful places in the entire universe and it was quite astounding to meet someone who was doing the thing that I wish that I could do and he'd done that for his entire life and what struck me about this man was he was so calm so serene and when I thought about it he was kind of a product of his environment so I often wondered after meeting him if he grew up in a let's say a poverty stricken part of the world in a very rough inner city neighbourhood would he be that person so it's kind of thinking about that nature versus nurture debate and it was also fascinating to talk to him about the village that he grew up in because I think his grandmother he said owned most of the land around that village and she was such a lovely woman and she just gave plots of land to everybody who needed it so the village kind of grew up around her and he knew everybody in the village and they were all very tight because she had just gifted that land to everybody so fascinating guy most important tips that you need to understand in order to improve so let's hear Priyanka's story and I don't know why help so I replied let's do a one-on-one speaking test and she was right in fact she got a band 6 in fluency, pronunciation grammar and vocabulary but I could tell that if she changed just 4 simple things she was going to get a band 8 on her next test and when I told her this she said do you know my test is in 2 weeks do you know that if I fail this time will I ever be able to move to Canada yes don't worry every band 9 student that I've worked with used these 4 simple tips the first thing we needed to work on was her poor fluency there were more um's and a's in every answer than an Elon Musk interview um um um um um and Priyanka had the exact same problem Elon does when he speaks publicly you see when anybody speaks they make these audible pauses these um's and a's this is totally normal and we all do this when we're thinking of what to say next Elon is thinking of very complex things like how to launch a rocket to Mars so he has more pauses um's and a's because he's thinking a lot about what to say next and this is exactly the same reason why Priyanka's fluency was so bad you see your brain is just like a computer if you're like me you'll have hundreds of tabs open in your browser and what happens when you have hundreds of tabs open your computer slows down so you might have the latest MacBook Pro but if you push it too hard it slows down her fluency wasn't bad she was just trying too hard you see she was taught by other teachers that to get a high score on the IELTS speaking test you need to have impressive ideas what happens when you're speaking in the test and you try and think of complex ideas and she said I freeze and my mind goes completely blank so why try and think of complex ideas the truth is that nowhere in the official IELTS marking criteria does it mention complexity of ideas in fact ideas are not marked at all but just telling students this information doesn't really change their behaviour and their performance on test day so I decided to show Priyanka exactly what to do so I asked her a simple IELTS speaking question and her answer was a complete mess the usual mmms and as and long pauses so I asked her the same question again and I asked her just to change one simple thing and this changed everything she answered the question with band 9 fluency and Priyanka was completely amazed you mean simple ideas increase my score yes if you're trying to use complex ideas in the speaking test you're making your life 10 times more difficult for no gain at all it's like trying to eat a bowl of soup with a swiss army knife instead of just using a simple spoon but just because we fixed her fluency issues doesn't mean she's going to get a high score for grammar so let's look at that next so we did the same thing again I asked her a simple speaking question how has your hometown changed since you were a child and her first answer was long it was complex it had multiple different tenses and multiple different grammar structures in there do you think an answer like this wouldn't get a high score well her answer might be complex it might have a very wide range of grammar but it contained multiple grammar errors so what I did was I asked her the exact same question and I gave her some advice and told her to change just one thing and here is her answer my hometown has changed dramatically since I was a child it used to be a small village but it has grown into a bustling city with new opportunities despite the fast pace a sense of community has remained strong right this example only has two of the most basic tenses in the English language it is much much simpler but it contained zero errors and to get a band 7 or above on your speaking test 50% or more of your sentences must have zero errors to put it simply the more sentences you produce with no grammatical errors the higher your score so which answer do you think would get a higher score the one that has a very wide range of grammar but lots of mistakes or a simpler one with zero mistakes but like many of you Bianca was still very worried and she asked me what about range of grammar aren't I being judged on both range and accuracy well in the test you know the way the examiner asks you a range of different questions well they're doing that to test the range of your grammar just by answering each question naturally and appropriately you'll naturally use a range of different grammar structures and tenses all you have to do is just answer the question so in less than 5 minutes we had fixed 50% of Bianca's problems but she's still worried about her vocabulary and her pronunciation she'd been told by all of her old teachers that she needed to use complex vocabulary and that her accent was a problem and this was going to lower her pronunciation score so I said listen I have good news and I have bad news the good news is you've just fixed your grammar and your fluency issues in less than 5 minutes and you're probably going to get a very high score the bad news is you're going to have to completely change everything about your vocabulary and her reaction was very predictable like nearly every student I tell this to they say but my old teacher told me that I need to make all of my vocabulary complex and this is 100% true most teachers especially on YouTube teach you that complex words equal a higher score but we teach students something completely different think of vocabulary as tools in a toolkit each tool helps you do a job each word you know helps you discuss different topics this tool helps you talk about your home town and this tool helps you talk about where you'd like to live in the future band 8 and 9 students have enough words enough tools so that they can handle any question or any topic you see using fancy vocabulary is like buying a very expensive fancy tool when all you need is a hammer to hit in a nail the truth is that the vast majority of students that we work with have enough vocabulary already to get the score that they need but because they've been taught to use very high level complex words they make lots of mistakes and this actually lowers their score it's like a band 7 is a weight that they can easily lift already but instead of just lifting that weight they try and lift a weight way heavier that they're not capable of lifting and they end up dropping it on their head so did Priyanka just answer some questions and use simple vocabulary and live happily ever after and get the score that she needed no like many students she got very angry with me for criticizing her old teachers they told me that this was going to lead to failure and she ended the call so a few days go past and I don't hear anything from Priyanka finally I checked my email she's booked another one on one speaking test with me but at this point her test is in 24 hours the next day she's not just worried she's completely freaking right so I asked her a simple question are you doing the same thing that you did those four times is going to lead to success you see all these speaking tips and tricks that you'll find online are just ways of you trying to trick the examiner into thinking that you're good enough and that you deserve a higher score than you're really capable of we have a saying here in Ireland you can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig the truth is that you are good enough to get the score that you need at the English level and the words and the grammar and the vocabulary that you already have and show the examiner your real genuine English level so finally Priyanka said let's do a practice test let's do it your way her ideas were simple but relevant her grammar was appropriate and accurate and her vocabulary was wide ranging enough that she could talk about any topic I asked her about and she was able to speak accurately she just left her pronunciation if she couldn't fix her pronunciation issues it doesn't matter how good the rest of it was she would still fail to get the score that she needed and Priyanka's big pronunciation problem was that she spoke too quickly if you speak too quickly it is really difficult for the examiner to understand every word that you're saying and if the examiner doesn't understand every word they give you a lower score but in that final one on one session her pronunciation popped up from a band 6 to a band 8 without me giving her any advice at all she changed one thing without me telling her what to do you see once she answered each question naturally and used the grammar and vocabulary she already knew how to use she relaxed this meant that she made fewer mistakes was less nervous and relaxed even more the more relaxed she was the better her pronunciation by fixing everything and being able to speak to the examiner in the same way that she would speak to a friend or a colleague she slowed everything down I could understand 100% of what she was saying and she instantly improved her pronunciation and a result on test day she got an amazing band 8 she moved to Canada she found a better job she earned more money she never had to think of the silly IELTS test ever again I'm a my role entails in my professional capacity and I am responsible for final answer the correct answer is A I'm a so when asked do you work or study which is the most common question that you'll get in part one of the speaking test the most common response from band 7, 8 and 9 students is simply I'm a teacher worker whatever you do but isn't that a little bit too simple for a band 7, 8 and 9 student well let's continue and we'll explain later in the video question 2 which of these sentence patterns is the most common for band 7, 8 and 9 students in part 1 of the test I originate from I hail from I'm from I am a product of I'm from so like question 1 all of the wrong answers are technically correct the English is absolutely fine but in general students that try and use those more advanced options tend to get a lower score I know that doesn't make any sense right now continue to watch the video and we'll explain how that makes sense and how to improve your score question 3 which of these sentence patterns is the most common for band 7, 8 and 9 students in part 1 I prefer I like I normally I live in final answer and the correct answer is I like but these are actually all very very common sentence patterns in part 1 of the speaking test we use I like and I prefer to discuss things that we like doing we use I normally daily routines and we use I live in to talk about the accommodation that we live in or maybe talk about where we're from again you're probably extremely surprised that these high level students use such simple language it must get more complicated when they start talking in part 2 of the test let's move on to part 2 of the test to find out which of these sentence patterns is most used by band 7, 8 and 9 students in part 2 of the IELTS speaking test we went to we were going they had gone we had been going so this is a tricky one would you like to phone a friend we use things called narrative tenses to tell stories about past experiences and looking at these four options these are all narrative tenses one is past simple one is past continuous one is past perfect and one is past perfect continuous any of these could be used to tell a story about the past but the most common tense among these is past simple so I'm going to go for we went to final answer correct but now that we know that it's very common to use narrative tenses in part 2 let's look at how to use them in question number 5 which of these sentences is incorrect I went to London for 3 years I was watching TV when the phone rang he realised he left his passport at home I've been walking for hours before we found a restaurant final answer and the correct answer is I went to London for 3 years this is very very important because it shows a crucial point about part 2 of the speaking test it is not about which sentences you use or the range of different tenses that you use it is about choosing a sentence that is appropriate and accurate so in part 2 you'll be given a range of different bullet points and the last bullet point the most common one the most popular one will look like this and explain how you felt about that thing so let's move on to question 6 all about how you feel which of these sentence patterns would get the highest score I felt sad I was over moon I have a feeling of overwhelming joy words cannot describe the depths of my feelings so that's a tricky one do you want to ask the audience audience please pick the correct answer and if you want to play along at home in the comments write A, B, C or D so let's look at the results 49% think that it's D 19% C 17% A and 15% think it's B so 49% of you are wrong it's wrong for two reasons one you didn't actually answer the question that's not actually saying how you feel about anything and examiners are trained to spot memorized answers this sounds like a memorized answer so you would actually get a lower score rather than a higher score 19% of you are wrong because this is simply the wrong verb tense remember it's not just whether the sentence is appropriate but it also has to be accurate 15% of you are wrong because this is simply inaccurate it is wrong to say I was over moon it is I was over the moon if you say to the examiner I was over moon again you are lowering your score you're not increasing your score because you used some magic idiom well done to the 17% of you playing at home who got it correct it answers the question and it is grammatically accurate it is better than all of the others therefore so let's move on to the final round where we're going to look at part 3 of the speaking test part 3 is the most challenging it is the most difficult it has the most difficult questions and requires the most complex answers of the whole test so question 7 what was the most common sentence pattern for band 7, 8 and 9 students in part 3 of the speaking test I totally agree not necessarily it's possible that in my opinion so all of these are very very common but let's look at what they do so I totally agree we use that functional language to do the job of agreeing with someone not necessarily again the function of that sentence pattern is to disagree with someone it's possible that the function of that is slightly different it's possible that is to consider someone else's opinion and in my opinion you are expressing your opinion band 7, 8 and 9 students use this type of language this functional language all the time because it helps them do things they're not thinking about the most advanced pattern to use or the most high level structure to use they're thinking what do I want to say and what sentence pattern helps me do that in other words they're just solely focused on clearly answering the question and the most common one is in my opinion because you will be giving your opinion a lot but you're not done there you can't just give lots and lots of opinions and get a high score you must back it up with explaining your point of view question 8 which of these is the most common way band 7, 8 and 9 students explain things like in other words that is to say that because now all of these are actually fine to use all of them are correct all of them can be used to explain why you believe something is true or why you have that opinion but the most common way is because too simple well no because because is the most common way native English speakers use that's the most common sentence pattern that they use to explain things would a native English speaker get a low score because they use everyday normal English like because so will you get a band 9 we're down to the final question question 9 so you've stated your opinion you've explained that opinion but you need to go even further and there are a few options open for you to help you expand your part 3 answers even more question 9 which of these sentence patterns is the most common way for band 7, 8 and 9 students to expand their answer even further in part 3 on other hand for example to sum up in nutshell you're probably going to need a 50-50 for that one do you want to take a 50-50 computer please take away two wrong answers so they've got rid of to sum up why is to sum up wrong well again think back to what we talked about functional language to sum up is to summarize something it is actually quite rare for high level students to summarize what they're saying in part 3 so to sum up isn't technically wrong it is just quite rare for a student to do that in nutshell again we would use that to summarize something we don't normally summarize things as we just said but in nutshell is wrong because it is inaccurate it is not in nutshell it's in a nutshell so that leaves us with one wrong answer and one correct answer will you get them all right on other hand is good showing the other side of the argument is one of the best ways that you can expand your answer even further in part 3 so you talk about one side of the argument and then you talk about the other side of the argument if you can think of it so it's good but it's not right because it's not on other hand it is on the other hand again this is why a lot of students mess up because they go and memorize a bunch of sentence patterns before the test and that's why they clicked on the video isn't it and they use them incorrectly so the correct answer is for example which is just a nice simple way of giving an example so if you use the sentences the sentence patterns in this video are you guaranteed to get a bad nine absolutely not the reason why you clicked on this video is because you want to memorize things many of you have been brought up in education systems where you have been taught memorization is a skill unfortunately IELTS is not a memorization test it is an English communication test memorization is the opposite of clear communication the key for the speaking test is to understand what type of questions might come up and then have appropriate and accurate simple correct ways of dealing with all the most common questions that is why band 7, 8 and 9 students use simple language most people think that the secret to IELTS speaking success is learning how to do a few things really well but after helping thousands of students get a bad nine in IELTS speaking I can tell you the opposite is actually true the real secret is band 9 students avoid traps set for them by IELTS speaking examiner and if you fall for them you will fail this video will show you how those traps are, how to spot them and how to avoid them so that you can massively increase your score and at the end of the video I'm going to reveal the biggest IELTS speaking secret that's contained in one of my favorite movies understanding the secret has done more to help my students get a band 9 than anything else and you can learn it instantly the first trick they play is really sneaky and it's the same trick my dad used to play when he worked here as a chef the chef would come into his kitchen and ask him for a job sure my dad would say come back tomorrow cook me something if I like it you can have a job and just before they left he'd say is there anything you do not like to cook and when they arrive the next day for the cooking demonstration he'd ask them to cook the thing they hate it so what has my sneaky father got to do with IELTS speaking will definitely come up on test day you'll find these three topics but if you look at the official Cambridge questions you'll find very unusual topics that you weren't expecting you see when IELTS examiners ask about your home or your work or your hometown they often get answers like this I am over the moon that you ask me about my hometown it is only once in a blue moon that I get to talk about a topic close to my heart there are a plethora of reasons why one would enjoy my hometown let's talk first about the 18th century architecture but if the examiner was to ask them about a topic they weren't expecting such as wigs the examiner might hear an answer like this I don't know anything about wigs I've never worn a wig in my entire life and things are going to get much worse for this student examiners are trained to spot memorised answers and what they will do if they think that you are giving memorised answers for example about your hometown they will ask you more and more difficult questions and unusual topics and here's the scary part the examiner has your memorised answer and your answer to the questions you weren't expecting they will not base their score on this answer because as my father used to say a chef is only as good as their worst dish not their best dish your memorised answers are not your real level your real speaking level is dealing with questions you were not expecting so if you do get an unusual question on test day answer it like this no I've never worn a wig I think that people who wear wigs sound and look ridiculous I think they really just do it for attention or to be funny which isn't funny at all to be honest now if you thought the examiners were sneaky in part 1 you're really going to hate them after I reveal their sneaky trap in part 3 of the test now before I tell you what it is let me tell you why they do it because once you understand the why you'll be able to spot it immediately and deal with it much more easily so when I was a kid in primary school I really struggled academically I couldn't even write my own name properly I couldn't understand most of the lessons and I wasn't allowed to sit with the other kids but despite all this I was able to eventually graduate from one of the best law schools in the world you see when I did a test I got all the easy questions wrong but the few really difficult questions at the end of the test that no other students could get correct I would always get those correct and this is exactly what the examiners are trained to do in part 3 of the speaking test if they believe that you are at one of the lower bands let's say a band 4 or a band 5 they will ask you quite easy questions like these ones but if they think that you deserve one of the higher bands a band 7, 8 or even 9 they will ask you more and more difficult questions notice how in the book here the questions get more and more difficult but the key here is how you react to these more difficult questions these questions will come at the very end of the speaking test when you are stressed you are tired and you just want the test end and when the examiner asks these questions often students will give answers like yes I don't know the thing you have to remember with these questions is the examiner is testing you they are testing are you capable of answering these band 7, 8 and 9 questions because they have to separate out the band 7s from the band 8s from the band 9s one of the ways they are trained to do that is ask these really really difficult questions and then see how you react to them so what if you know nothing about the topic or you just find that question really really challenging are you going to automatically get a low score no let me show you how to cope with those questions so if I was doing the test and I got this question and I know nothing about this topic I am a complete idiot when it comes to this topic I could say something like this to be honest I don't know anything about this topic I'm not from India and I don't know much about cooking but if I had to give an answer it's very difficult to predict the future but what I would say is maybe AI will change how the restaurants take orders and how they deliver the food to their customers but that's just a complete guess now is that the best answer in the world no but it is much better than and by attempting an answer and telling the examiner what I think about that topic even though I know nothing about it I have indicated to the examiner that I am good enough to deal with those questions and they might then steer the conversation to a topic that I'm more comfortable with and then I can really show them how good I am now the last trap is the sneakiest of them all and it's got to do with how they test your vocabulary there are thousands of words in the English language and the examiners only have between 10 and 15 minutes to test your ability to use English vocabulary so they came up with a genius way of testing it in around 10 minutes some words we use to talk about this topic some words this topic and some words this topic but if we try to use these words to talk about this topic it doesn't work these are called topic specific words and we can use them to talk about different topics knowing this information is crucial for two reasons first the examiners are trained to ask you a range of different topics on test day so that you can't just memorize a list of band 9 words and put them into every answer and cheat the test in that way secondly the examiners are more impressed with a simple topic specific word than a more complex word that doesn't really help you answer the question this is why so many students fail the test when they were expecting to get a really high score because they memorized lists of band 9 words and this is why so many of our VIP students get a band 7, 8 and 9 not by memorizing lists of high level band 9 words but using the simple topic specific words they already know it's actually impossible it's actually possible to avoid 100% of the traps that might come up in the speaking test not just the speaking test but all areas of the IELTS test every part of IELTS test reading, listening, writing has traps contained within it but there is one way that you can spot all of them and avoid all of them and massively increase your score in the movie catch me if you can Leonardo DiCaprio plays a criminal that is being chased by FBI man Tom Hanks Leo's character plays a criminal who pretends to be an airline pilot and a doctor and a lawyer he also steals money making fake checks and stealing credit cards the crucial scene in this movie comes when Tom Hanks asks Leo how did he fake passing the bar exam? the bar exam is an exam all lawyers have to take before they can become a lawyer it is one of the most difficult tests in the entire world and Tom Hanks can't figure out how a criminal, how a con man would be able to fake passing this test and here's how he did it I didn't cheat I studied for two weeks and I passed you see he didn't need to fake becoming a doctor or a lawyer or an airline pilot he didn't need to steal money to become rich he was already talented and smart and intelligent enough to do all of these things without cheating, without stealing he just needed to stop cheating all of the aisles traps are used to catch cheaters like Leo's character most aisle students don't cheat because they are bad people they cheat because they lack confidence, they are scared that they're going to fail and then they get desperate and resort to listening to these tricks and cheats and hacks and the most fascinating thing is this movie is a true story he now actually works for the FBI and credit card companies have paid him millions of dollars to help prevent future criminals taking advantage of the system if you believe that you're good enough and you don't cheat the examiner is going to give you your real score on test day and you'll be rewarded with a new life in a new country getting paid way more than you currently are you are more than capable of doing that you just have to show them made it across the thin die I'm going to give you the most common idioms used by real band 9 students and for each idiom I'll also give you a band 9 sample answer we've helped hundreds of students get a band 9 in the IELTS speaking test and we took all of their practice tests and analysed them using AI and identified the most common idioms that they used and at the end of the video we're going to show you the number of idioms the band 9 students actually use hint it is much much lower than you think and reveal the biggest mistake that students make when it comes to idioms so that you can avoid that and improve your score so without further ado let's get into it so the first idiom is to bite the bullet bite as in to bite something and a bullet, something that you put in a gun to bite the bullet what to bite the bullet means is to do something difficult or unpleasant with bravery so you don't want to do something something very very difficult or unpleasant but you do it anyway you're brave and you do it so where does this come from well this actually comes from the battlefield from war so many many years ago if you had a wound if you were shot or stabbed or whatever it is and you needed a very unpleasant procedure from the doctor there wasn't any anesthetic there wasn't any painkillers so what they would do is they would give you a bullet and tell you to bite down on that bullet I don't know if this helps or not but that is where it comes from and understanding where idioms comes from really helps you remember them and use them properly so let's pick a real question and I'll answer it and use to bite the bullet I didn't really want to study law but I was the only one in my family ever to get high grades in their A levels so my mother sat me down one day and said it's either medicine or law so I went to a hospital on work experience and fainted when I saw the sight of blood I'm too squeamish for medicine so I decided just to bite the bullet and study law some common collocations of this idiom are to bite the bullet it's normally to bite the bullet not bite the bullet I decided to bite the bullet I chose to bite the bullet and I had to bite the bullet and the correct pronunciation of this is to stress or emphasize bite bite the bullet not bite the bullet the next idiom is a piece of cake a piece of cake means that something is very easy we often use this when we are reassuring someone who is worried about something so if my little boy was worried about his maths test I would say don't worry it's going to be a piece of cake you don't always use it to help someone or give advice to someone we normally talk about it just when we are describing something that is simple, that is easy to do where does this come from? well there's quite a debate about where this comes from but the easiest way to think about a piece of cake is that it's pleasant it is easy to eat a piece of cake it is a very nice thing you might also hear the idiom it was a cake walk that means walking around looking at cakes a very pleasant nice easy thing to do to be honest compared to practicing law teaching English is a piece of cake to give you a concrete example to qualify as a lawyer it takes around 6 years of study and work experience to qualify as an English teacher only takes 6 weeks the pay obviously isn't as good but the students the clients are much nicer and friendlier a common mistake that we hear a lot with a piece of cake is to drop the article to just say it's piece of cake if you make that mistake it's not going to improve your IELTS score it's going to lower your IELTS score so don't just pick these and use them without really learning them properly and again the pronunciation is a piece of cake you're stressing piece rather than cake next is a very very old idiom kill two birds with one stone what this means is to accomplish two goals with one action and this actually comes from Greek mythology it is thousands of years old and the story of Icarus they killed a bird with one stone but they were able to get the feathers that's one goal and to build wings to fly out of a cave that's another goal but a good way to remember this is just think of something in your everyday simple life and think of one action that you take that achieves two different goals so let's get a real question and I will use this idiom in the answer I actually bought my wife a diamond ring last Christmas so my wife's birthday is in November and Christmas is obviously in December so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and buy one present for her birthday and Christmas and she was very happy with that because she got one nice expensive ring rather than two less expensive gifts a common mistake that we see with this one is to use kill in its present simple form rather than killed k-i-l-l-e-d in its past form so if you're talking about the past just like I did in that question or that answer I used killed two birds with one stone not kill two birds with one stone you could also say I decided to kill two birds with one stone or I chose to kill two birds with one stone just to make sure that you're not taking the idiom and inserting it into the sentence without thinking about tense without thinking about grammar the next idiom is to let the cat out of the bag to let the cat out of the bag is to reveal a secret often by mistake where does this come from well think about it if you had a cat in a bag and it was let out of the bag would it be easy to put that cat back into the bag it would be very very difficult and this is the same with secrets once you reveal a secret once it is out there into the world you cannot take it back so that is where to let the cat out of the bag comes from if you count watches as jewelry then yes for my last birthday, my 40th birthday my wife bought me a very special watch that I've been looking at and desiring for many many years the funny story about that is that my credit card and my wife's credit card are the same so whenever my wife bought it it pinged on my phone and I got an alert from my favorite watch boutique and it was the exact amount of money that was for this watch because I've been looking at this watch for ages so the phone kind of let the cat out of the bag a little bit but it was still a very nice gift and a nice surprise the pronunciation of this is to stress or emphasize cat and bag let the cat out of the bag common mistake that we see with this one is again missing out the articles let cat out of bag you shouldn't take the idiom and then say it you know partly you shouldn't use it incorrectly a lot of students believe that if you just use idioms and it doesn't matter if you use them correctly or not you're going to get bonus points and you're going to get a high score again if you use it incorrectly you're lowering your score not improving your score the next idiom is don't put all your eggs in one basket what this means is don't concentrate all of your resources or all of your effort into one single area in order to minimize risk where does this come from? well quite literally if you had lots of chickens lots of hens that were laying eggs and you put all of your eggs if you dropped the basket all of your eggs would be destroyed we often use this to talk about our careers or work or investment strategy for example you know don't put all of your money into one stock don't put all your eggs into one basket put them into many many different places and then you're minimizing risk it's basically about diversification probably not because with the developments in AI recently I don't think there are going to be IELTS teachers or even any teachers in the future I think it would be very foolish for me to put all my eggs in one basket and just hope for the best and hope that IELTS and teaching lasts forever but honestly I don't think it will the next idiom is once in a blue moon which means it happens rarely so you're talking about frequency you're talking about how often it happens and this thing happens rarely probably less than once a year this is quite a literal idiom because literally it is rare to have a blue moon but it does happen sometimes this refers to I think it happens once every three years or once every two or three years you will have two moons in one calendar month means something that doesn't happen very often I used to go out nearly every night but since I've had kids it's really once in a blue moon most of my friends have either settled down with kids like me or they have moved away so it's quite rare to have an occasion where a group of friends are all together at the same time sometimes a Christmas when a lot of our friends visit Ireland or in the summertime when a lot of our friends have time off I might go out but it is quite a rare occasion these days a common mistake that we see with once in a blue moon is trying to use it when it's not really appropriate to use it a lot of students have been taught that if you use this idiom and it's really easy to use because it's talking about frequency which is quite a basic function of English it's not like you want to automatically bump your scores it's kind of like easy points students will insert this in unusual situations remember you're only using it when the examiner asks you how often do you do that this might come up in part 1 it might come up in part 2 it might come up in part 3 but probably part 1 but if you don't get a question remember because you didn't use once in a blue moon only use it when you can use it and when you are actually talking about something that happens very very rarely like once every few years the next one I'm going to give you two idioms in one burn the midnight oil and burn the candle at both ends they have similar meanings but are slightly different so I'm going to answer a question in the same answer so burn the midnight oil is talking about things that are difficult, you are working hard on something you are literally sitting up at midnight working on something so we would often talk about work or studying and burning the midnight oil that means that you are working very very hard at something doesn't have to be at night time just means that you are working very very hard on something and where does this come from electricity? our main source of light would have been oil lamps so you would have lit an oil lamp and used that oil so if you were burning the midnight oil it means that you weren't sleeping it means that you were working at midnight meaning you are working very hard burning the midnight oil now to burn the candle at both ends has a similar meaning but slightly different burning the midnight oil doesn't mean that it's a bad thing it isn't negative per se it's quite positive you are working hard on something burning the candle at both ends means that you are working too much you are exhausting yourself now where does this come from it actually comes from France where they would like everywhere else use candles for light but if you were an aristocrat if you were very very rich you wouldn't burn the candle on one end you would turn the candle horizontal and you would light both ends and what this meant was that you were wasteful that you were rich and you were just wasteful for waste's sake but over the years the meaning has changed to mean that you are working too hard and you are exhausting yourself it's often used in the context of people who work very hard so they spend a lot of time and energy in work and then they party too much after typical lawyer for example or a banker who is working very very hard all day and then going out all night they are burning the candle at both ends and they are going to exhaust themselves yes I used to burn the candle at both ends I had a very much work hard play hard attitude because I was a lawyer lawyers are expected to work 80 to 100 hours a week but we would often go out to bars and restaurants after work to blow off steam and to de-stress which isn't really sustainable now I do still burn the midnight oil I work very very hard on my career but you are more likely to find me tucked up in bed by 9pm than to be out partying the next idiom is at the drop of a hat and this means to do something quickly immediately and without any hesitation so without even thinking about it without debating it in your mind you just do it where does this come from well many many years ago hundreds of years ago everybody wore hats if you look at pictures from a long time ago you will see that everyone on this country anyway wore hats and if people were going to fight or run a race or compete in some way what people would do is they would take their hat off and when they dropped their hat that was the sign the fight was going to begin or the race was about to begin so people would drop their hat and you started immediately without thinking about it we actually rent our home we could afford to buy a home but we really value our independence and freedom if you own a home you are kind of stuck in that location because it can take a very long time to sell that home but if you rent you can move anywhere at the drop of a hat and this means not to waste time thinking about something thinking negative thoughts about something that you cannot change that has already happened where does this come from literally if you spill milk is there any point in crying about spilling milk no you can't put it back into the bottle you can't change that scenario the thing I dislike most about my job is dealing with people who only focus on the negative especially when they are giving negative feedback that could be students that could be employees but people who make mistakes and don't learn from them so for example I give a lot of feedback on student essays and some students see mistakes and they're like great now I know what my mistakes are and I can improve other students will just cry about it for days and I'll cry about it for weeks but I'm going to fail it's like there's no point crying over spilt milk you made the mistake now I learn from it the next idiom is you can't judge a book by its cover this means that you should not judge people or things based on their appearance normally people but can also include things the origin of this is quite obvious if you go into a bookshop you will see lots of covers of books but you actually need to read the book to judge it you can't go in and say I don't like that book I think it will be terrible based on the cover because you actually have to read it to understand it and we apply this to people you can't judge a person based on their appearance very rarely actually because I'm a firm believer in you can't judge a book by its cover and we should judge people not on what clothes they wear in their appearance but by their character and the things that come out of their mouth my wife firmly disagrees with this because she says someone who gets millions of views on youtube shouldn't be wearing the same shirt every day so she does encourage me to go and buy new clothes but I do it begrudgingly the next one is don't count your chickens before they hatch another chicken idiom and this means don't assume something will be successful or something will happen until it actually occurs so you shouldn't assume that watching this video and using these idioms is going to guarantee a band nine you should actually go and do the test and see if you get a band nine don't count your chickens now the full version of this idiom is don't count your chickens before they hatch but English speakers normally just say don't count your chickens you can use either of them in the test but I think it's just simpler to remember and use the shorter form don't count your chickens now this actually comes from asops fables about a milkmaid this milkmaid was going to use milk to make butter and then she was going to sell the butter to buy eggs and then she was going to hatch the eggs and raise chickens and then sell the chickens to buy a new dress unfortunately it didn't work out she didn't get her dress so don't count your chickens I prefer to buy luxury watches than jewelry I'm not sure if you can count a luxury watch as jewelry but the thing about jewelry is like diamond rings necklaces things like that often as soon as you buy them as soon as you walk out of the jewelers they lose value whereas many of the watches that I've purchased have actually gone up in value I don't want to count my chickens but if I were to sell these watches I probably would make a lot more money on them than I paid for them so that's why I prefer luxury timepieces over simple jewelry the next idiom is to go the extra mile and this means to put more effort or to work harder than what is required so for example instead of making an IELTS idioms video where I just say all the idioms and go through them quickly go the extra mile and talk about the origin and give you example sentences this is actually a biblical reference from the sermon on the mount and in the bible it says if anyone forces you to go one mile go with them two miles and many people interpret this as you should always do more than is required of you my wife does the vast majority of the cooking not because she's necessarily a better cook but the thing I love about my wife is in whatever she does she goes the extra mile so if I was cooking steak I would just cook the steak and eat it with a little bit of bread but my wife will have like three different sauces and balsamic vinegar and two different olive oils and four different types of potato she really does go the extra mile when it comes to cooking in our house there's a bit of a debate about where this comes from and it's quite unusual but the one that I find that helps you remember it and it's a very vivid image is back in the day many many years ago it's a very vivid image it's a very vivid image it's a very vivid image it's a very vivid image it's a very vivid image and it is back in the day many many years ago countries and cities didn't have the same drainage that we have these days and when it would rain hard, when it would rain heavy the city streets would flood what are the most common pets in most countries? cats and dogs so those cats and dogs would actually drown where people would go into the streets and there would be cats and dogs lying lifeless all over the place they had drowned it's not a very nice image but you'll definitely remember it yes and no, where I live is one of the most beautiful places in the world we're spoiled for choice in terms of outdoor activities and beautiful places on our doorstep we have beaches, forests, lakes mountains so it's normally raining cats and dogs so you don't really get to enjoy it a big mistake that I see with this one is getting the cats and dogs mixed up and saying dogs and cats when students don't really learn this properly and just see a list of idioms they go into the test and they're like it was raining dogs and cats a native English speaker or someone with a very high level of English will spot this immediately and it is basically you holding up a sign saying I'm not very good at English so make sure you use it properly I also see students using the wrong tense of rain so it rained cats and dogs if you're talking about the past to talk about something that normally happens so it's normally raining cats and dogs or it rains cats and dogs you need to understand the verb tense of the word rain and use it correctly again if you're saying it's raining cats and dogs yesterday that's incorrect and it's a big flag to the examiner that you don't really know what you're talking about the next idiom is to throw in the towel so a towel that you use to dry yourself after a shower and this means to stop something that is either very very difficult or has become impossible to throw in the towel it comes from boxing so if guys are boxing and one boxer is getting so beat up that it is impossible for them to continue you know continuing is not going to result in victory it is going to result in them getting badly injured their corner, their trainer will throw a towel into the ring and whenever a towel is thrown into the ring the referee stops it immediately as you can tell from looking at me no I don't have a very healthy diet I do try I normally get up in the morning and have a healthy breakfast and have a healthy lunch but it's so easy just to throw in the towel when you get home after a hard day's work and you know your wife has a beautiful meal prepared there's a bottle of wine on the table and your kids half eating chocolate is lying all around the kitchen so I do quite well most of the day and then fail in the evenings the next idiom is cross that bridge when you come to it people often say we will or we'll cross that bridge when we come to it or I will I'll cross that bridge when I come to it and what this means is to deal with a problem or a situation when it actually occurs in the future not to worry about something that has not happened yet so imagine you are out for a walk and someone starts talking about a bridge that is miles away and they're worrying about crossing that bridge you would say let's cross that bridge when we come to it so where this comes from is many many years ago bridges weren't free and they weren't reliable so often people would collect tolls collect taxes to cross a bridge or the bridge wasn't very sturdy and crossing that bridge could result in you falling off or the bridge collapsing and you dying so it's talking about an unpleasant or difficult situation that is coming up in the future but you shouldn't worry about that you know we'll worry about that when we get there let's just focus on the here and now it's not something I really like to think about because in the back of my mind I know IELTS teachers and all educators are doomed because AI is going to replace them why would a student hire a human that is not as good as a machine that can do it at half the price or a fraction of the price and do it much more effectively you know we'll cross that bridge when we come to it but I don't think it's that far away but in the meantime I'm just going to enjoy teaching as long as I can next we have two Roman idioms or idioms that originate from the city of Rome Rome obviously was one of the greatest empires that the world has ever seen and it has a huge influence on the English language and a huge number of languages to this day and the first one is Rome wasn't built in a day and this means that significant accomplishments so to accomplish something big a big goal takes time it takes a long time to achieve something significant so back in the day many many years ago Rome was the greatest city in the world but it was built over centuries it took a very very very long time to build Rome into the greatest city in the world and we often use this when someone is trying to get us to do something too quickly so if somebody said to me you need to have the best biggest YouTube channel in the world Rome wasn't built in a day we'll do it one video at a time it's often used as well to console someone who is feeling bad about not achieving something so if my little boy was like we lost a football match I'm not very good at football Rome wasn't built in a day you will get better at football right now you need to keep working consistently hard into the future and then you will be a footballing superstar the thing I hate about social media is the fact that these companies have so much power to change their systems and change their algorithms but they decide not to for money so to give you an example from my work and my job to become a famous IELTS YouTuber is actually quite easy all you have to do is come up with some clickbait titles like hacks and tricks and predictions and things like that and put a pretty girl on the thumbnail but that doesn't mean that the person making that video knows anything about IELTS it just means that they know how to trick the algorithm I understand Rome wasn't built in a day it was time to fix platforms and change algorithms but these are sometimes trillion dollar companies if they wanted to get these people off their platform they could but they decide not to because popular is more important than educating the public properly the next one is when in Rome do what the Romans do but this is often shortened to when in Rome very rarely here native English speakers say when in Rome do what the Romans do just say when in Rome and what this means is that when you are visiting a foreign place when you are a tourist or a visitor in a country that you're not from you should respect the customs and I respect the religion the culture, the customs of that place and this comes from the Catholic faith where Milan and Rome had different days for fasting so in many religions you have fast days where you don't eat anything and in Milan it was on a Sunday but in Rome it was on a Saturday so they were talking about like when do you fast do you fast on a Saturday or fast on a Sunday when in Rome you should respect their culture and you should fast on their fast day when you're home do it normally no I actually hate it and it makes me feel very uncomfortable I'm from Ireland and in Ireland it is quite rare for someone to take your photo and if they want to take your photo it is rude to just take it without asking you so it's customary just to say do you mind if I take a photo and if somebody says yes you can take it but if they say no you should definitely not take it my wife who is from Vietnam in Vietnam they have a very very different culture they are taking photos all of the time and they will think nothing of just taking a photo of you and if I get angry with someone for taking a photo they'll think that I'm the problem and I'm being rude so you know when in Rome so now you know all of these different idioms that band 9 students use does that mean that you can use them in the IELTS test and automatically get a higher score yes and no and this is the most important point in the video if you don't watch this bit you probably will mess up your test fail waste a lot of money please do watch it so what I'm about to say is very different from most IELTS youtubers and most IELTS teachers so let's just look at data and facts none of this is my opinion all the things I'm about to tell you are straight facts so when we analysed all of our band 9 students who got band 9 in the real IELTS speaking test what were the number of idioms that they actually used and the number is quite shocking 1.2 on average this means that many of them didn't use idioms at all most of them never used 1 or 2 but there was quite a variation and it was quite rare for students to use say more than 4 or 5 why is this and why are many of you typing in the comments right now that is wrong you must use idioms to get a higher score let me explain so if you go to the official band descriptors for IELTS speaking you'll find them online what it says for lexical resource which is basically a fancy way of saying vocabulary for band 7 is uses some less common and idiomatic vocabulary and shows some awareness of style and collocation with some inappropriate choices so what you'll hear from most IELTS YouTubers is you must use idioms to get a 7 or above and this is a misconception it is a misunderstanding of the official marking criteria most IELTS YouTubers have not been examiners and they don't really know what these actually mean let's look up the dictionary definition for idiomatic what does idiomatic actually mean because most YouTubers and most students think that idiomatic means idioms just use lots of idioms you'll get a band 7, 8 or 9 does it actually mean that well if we look at Cambridge dictionary the definition of idiomatic is containing expressions that are natural and correct and this is what idiomatic actually means for the purposes of IELTS idiomatic means natural English in other words English that a native English speaker would use natural idiomatic expressions it does contain idioms but it also contains slang, phrasal verbs informal words colloquialisms and many other forms of natural English because if you are studying English in school and you're just using textbooks that is not the most natural English that you will hear it's only when you move to a native English speaking country and start copying these idiomatic phrases and expressions and you sound like a native English speaker and that is what the examiners are listening out for they're not listening for how many idioms did you use they are listening to your whole performance and then thinking are they using some idiomatic expressions or not and that includes idioms but it includes many, many other things so have I just wasted your time with this lesson you're telling us that you should learn these idioms and then you're telling us not to learn these idioms so let me tell you what we tell our VIP students when we're teaching them vocabulary we use something called the birthday cake analogy or the birthday cake method if you think about a birthday cake it looks very fancy and it looks very very impressive but if you think about the ingredients of a fancy looking birthday cake they are the most basic foods the most basic ingredients in the world things like milk, sugar flour, water, butter these are things that can be found in any shop in any country in the world they are simple, they are basic most birthday cakes are made up 98, 97% of the simple basic ingredients but the sprinkles on top make it look fancy that's the exact approach that we teach our VIP students 97%, 98% of the words that you use are going to be simple everyday basic words because that is how the English language functions that is how any language functions then you can use some high level words you could use some idioms you should use some phrasal verbs you could sprinkle those on top but it's going to actually be quite rare when you use them the examiner is not looking for you to use them in every single sentence now if you go back in this video and listen to my answers even though I tried to use idioms in every single answer if you broke down the words of all of those answers 90, 95% of the words that I use are simple basic everyday words remember the birthday cake analogy so it is great having idioms in your toolkit and you can use them appropriately and accurately but you don't have to use them you know if you are building a house would you rather have a massive toolkit that allows you to do many many things or would you just like to have a hammer teaching you these idioms is about expanding the vocabulary you know how to use and the keyword there is use you are not learning vocabulary you are learning to use vocabulary effectively please please do not do two things number one do not memorize these idioms and try and insert them force them into every single answer you are going to fail because it will be inappropriate you will use them too much and you will use them incorrectly you know the words will be incorrect the collocations will be incorrect and the pronunciation probably will be incorrect and try to incorporate them into your everyday use of the English language use them properly and use them appropriately that is the difference between a band 6 student and a band 9 student the second thing you should not do is learn lists of idioms the reason why this is a very very long video and why I am talking a lot and explaining all of this to you and why I didn't just give you a list of idioms and just round them off the examples was to demonstrate to you that you should use them appropriately I could not take those idioms and do a speaking test and use all of them in the speaking test in fact when I did the speaking test I got a band 9 because I am a native English speaker of course but I used zero idioms that is because I am not being judged on my use of idioms alone I am being judged on all of the words that I am using not just the fancy high level idioms well done for making it this far in the video by this stage you should be ready to start taking some practice questions and start practicing at home and we are going to give you more than a thousand of them in the following part of this video but not only that we are not just going to give you a bunch of questions we are going to show you how to use practice questions at home to really really improve your score so don't just skip ahead in the video and find the link and download all the questions and start practicing watch the next part of the video that is going to show you what not to do how not to practice and how to practice kind of simple dos and don'ts for practicing at home it is really going to accelerate your speaking ability and improve your score in a much shorter period of time let's start off with the don'ts these are things that you should not do and these are things that band 7, 8 and 9 students do not do when they are 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 are going to show you in this video so important don't get overwhelmed number 2 don't worry if you see a topic in there that you are not an expert in remember that it is a speaking test it is not a knowledge test or an intelligence test number 3 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 are 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 are communicating with people in any language so don't try to prepare answers for any of them number 4 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 will see lots of things online about you know youtube videos saying these are the common topics that might come up or here are the predicted topics 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 mocks 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 is 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 are comparing yourself to those people it is not a fair comparison and if you are 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 will look at the questions and then they will 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 practising 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 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 7, 8 and 9 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 3 steps so step 1 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 in and around the middle of the first page you're just going to click on IELTS speaking how to get a band 7 or above IELTS Advantage you're going to click on that that's step 1 one of the big things successful students do is they treat each part of the speaking test separately so part 1 part 2 and part 3 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 1 questions a part 2 question some part 3 questions and then try and answer them all in the same way band 7, 8 and 9 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 band 8 and 9 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 3, 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 will lead to failure and it's so easy to fix these things 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 2 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 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 3 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 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 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 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 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 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 analyse that in more detail so the first thing you're going to analyse 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 analyse 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 analyse 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 read 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 of questions that you will need for your speaking practice well done you made it to the last part of the video so we're going to do something we've never done before so you've probably seen that we do lots of mock speaking tests here in our studio but this is the first time that we've brought a student back so before we had this student who got a band eight but I thought that she was actually capable of a much much higher band a band nine which is a huge improvement so she went through a lot of the same lessons in this video that you have just went through and I want to show you the massive improvement that she made just by following the steps in this video let's look and see if she did get her band nine let's start off by talking about exercise how often do you exercise? when you talk about exercise I don't really exercise that much but then I do other forms of exercise if you can take that into the category exercise so I like to dance I like to do yoga I like to go for a walk so I'm sure that's included in exercise so if you talk about that I think at least an hour I do like to take care of my body and I do like to invest in my body what's your favorite exercise? so I think I'd like to say dance because it's funny because it's mindless you don't realize you're exercising when you're dancing it's just one hour of catharsis you're just going and sweating it out and you don't realize that you worked out for an hour so I think I'll say dance are there any exercises you do not like? I wouldn't say I don't like I do like lifting weights but it's not one of my favorite part of the exercise it's something which I find monotonous something which I find cumbersome something which I find boring so yes lifting weights do you prefer to exercise indoors or outdoors? I think both when the weather allows then outdoors but otherwise I'm more of an indoor person I don't mind doing yoga every single day in my room I know like a lot of people don't enjoy that they need an environment they need a setup they need to go to the gym which is also indoors but I do enjoy indoors and I do enjoy just exercising in my home in my room and that being said I also enjoy working out in outside facility as well like I like going for walks I like going for a run so yeah I think both now let's talk about weekends how do you normally spend your weekends? weekends I usually have more classes I'm a yoga teacher so my weekends are not a normal weekend for other people where they go out for lunches, dinners and celebrate for me weekends are more heavy on work but if I can say that Monday is my weekend or Tuesday is my weekend movies I really like watching Netflix and I like to spend time with my husband I also like cooking and that's the time which I get for myself so yes I think I like spending it in the house and really giving that time to myself and my husband do you like to spend your weekends in your local area or do you like to travel so it depends it's both if I have a lot of time to myself in the sense if I have 2 days off or 3 days off I like to go out on a vacation like a mini trip so I like to go out probably do like a picnic go out to a park or maybe explore any other countryside any other city but if it's a short duration if it's only a day then probably spend it in the house like I mentioned earlier are there any interesting things to do in your local area on the weekend? yes there are a lot of coffee shops and there's a coffee shop right beneath my house which is very popular in London it's called Gales so yeah there are a lot of nice places around my neighbourhood but I wouldn't say that I like going to those places because they are very familiar I would like to go to places which are a little away so I would like to travel a little bit and enjoy the entire journey of reaching a place but yes my neighbourhood is also quite friendly and social do you prefer to go out or stay in at the weekend? so like I mentioned earlier if it's a short weekend if it's only a day off then staying in is better for me and because there are a lot of things that I need to finish so I prefer staying in but if it is a longer weekend like in the sense that you also have a Friday Saturday Sunday it's a 3D then I like to probably step out and probably explore other neighbourhood cities and towns and villages yeah now let's talk about reading what was your favourite book when you were a child? I can't go back that far like when I was a child but I do remember somewhere in school probably towards the end of school I loved this book called Many Masters, Many Lives and I think I like to call myself an old soul because when I was a child I still was very inclined towards spirituality and I really liked to know where we've come from where would we go after life before death you know those kind of things so after death after life so yes so that's a book which rings a bell which I always get reminded of. How often do you read? So as of now my reading is very education based I have a lot of books on yoga a lot of books on spirituality I'm very less on fiction but I try and listen a little bit of fiction as well so I listen to the audio books it's called Audible so I have that up with me so I think when I'm on the tube when I'm travelling it's always the Audible the book I listen to and when I'm at home and when I'm trying to educate myself and I'm trying to know more about yoga then it's probably I think overall an hour a day or maybe sometimes an hour in two days Do you like to read when on holiday? It depends like I said most of my reading is education based so I need to dedicate time to it to just the reading part of it but when I'm on vacation then I don't like to read myself so it depends but sometimes I do like to read I think when I'm on a vacation I'd rather go for just listening to a book And do you prefer to read physical books or e-books? I think I prefer to read physical books I do have a Kindle as well but I think it's the longest that I've touched it I like to have the feel of it to turn the pages in real so I do prefer a physical book Now let's talk about history Do you enjoy watching TV shows Yes but I'd like to put it this way I enjoy history but I like more of the crime based histories there are a lot of events which have happened in certain countries certain part of towns so I like to know more about that I'm very heavy on crime based series so yes and sometimes I also like to watch just the history bit as well like I think I've seen that entire show on Netflix called The Roman Empire or something like that but that's also because it's very heavy on drama it's very heavy on the crime based as well so I think I do have an inclination towards that Did you enjoy studying history in school? As far as I remember I don't really have a clear memory of reading or learning history in school which of course we did it was there in our textbooks but I think I grew more fond and more interested in history way later when I started reading about civilizations when I started reading about different areas and regions and how the world was divided and then you know invaded by different kingships if I can call that so yes it was only later that I started getting interested in history so it says describe a time when you were late for something so I'm usually a very punctual person and I can't think of any time when I was really late but there have been a few instances and one such instance was when I got really really late was for my work so I'm new to London and I started teaching yoga over here it's been about six to eight months and I'm still understanding the tube work like how does the commute work over here how does the bus work over here and also the timings and everything so I'm still adjusting myself to the city so there was this one class I was supposed to reach after two classes which I was always already taking in Angel so there was this one area called Angel I was taking two classes over there right after that there was another class in another area and I was supposed to reach there this another class was in mind so I was covering for someone and I got like a last moment notification that can you take this class and I accepted it really vouching for it and really saying that I will be there it was very disheartening for me because by the time I wrapped up the studio and I left from there I couldn't make it on time and this is a big professional setback on my end because I shouldn't be doing that and what happened was that I went for I thought I'll take a bus so I took a bus and by the time I was about to reach a certain location I realized I've taken the wrong bus so I got down and then I tried to take a train so by the time I tried to reach the next best train location I realized that the train station was shut that is when I started panicking I started looking for a cab and I started contacting my DM which is like a manager who's always on call and checking if you're on time or not and the DM told me this is really sad because it looks like I'll not be able to reach on time and even 5 minutes late is late for students so they started asking questions like why is it that the train station is stopped like in the sense it's shut because probably I think they weren't believing me in that moment but later when I described everything I clicked pictures and finally they believed me and when I reached that's the two minutes are up okay you've been telling me about a time when you were late and we're now going to discuss arriving late and being punctual right is it rude to be late if you're meeting a friend in a way yes because I think I'll say if you're constantly late if you're always late it's yes it is rude because you're playing with someone's time someone has specially dedicated their time to you and vice versa even you've dedicated your time to them so in a way yes because that person could have done a lot of things in that much time but also sometimes no because you never know what is that person going through I mean in the sense it's a friend right it's not a profession sometimes I've had my friends complaining that it's alright I mean you can't chill because we're just meeting for a coffee so it's okay they get a little bit late if it's only like 10-15 minutes it's fine what should happen to people if they are consistently late for work well I think it's a big no because you're answerable for a lot of people and you have to deliver a job a product or something in that profession and if you get late it's not only you who's suffering but it's also the entire company who's suffering because of you so I think they need to learn how to manage their time well and there should be some kind of a caution for that so that they are being more careful and mindful in the future what can people do to become more punctual okay so I have this trick which is a lot of times I've noticed that people who are constantly late they take the deadline as the deadline for example if they have to be somewhere at 10 they'll think okay I have to be there at 10 I'd like to put it the other way I'll say keep your time 15 minutes earlier say that you have to reach there by 9.45 or probably 9.30 if you have a habit of constantly being late that ways you'll start early getting you'll start getting ready earlier you'll leave the place earlier you're home earlier and probably you'll be on time you can set a time alarm you can set a timer you can really make use of these things in order to be on time I think now let's talk about work productivity is it better to work for long interrupted periods of time or to take multiple small breaks in my opinion I think to take many multiple breaks because it doesn't matter how long you're working if you've refreshed yourself and if you have come to your full capacity mental capacity to work even if you work in short bursts that could be more productive and yes I think that's what I think about work productivity our open plan is good for productivity what do you mean by open plan? so some offices have cubicles and they're closed or offices that are closed and then some offices are just tables in a big room and everyone can see each other working alright well it depends I'm not really sure how it works because either it works for them because it's a very simple environment you can relax and you're not like really just into work because that can also play with your stress maybe but in a way also no because then you can get you have the chances to get distracted sooner and if you're working in a closed environment then you can probably take out that small burst of time which I was talking about and just dedicate it to your work some people believe companies should move to a four day week do you think this would improve productivity? I think I'm a big advocate for that because I really feel there should be a good work life balance where you're working and also you have time for yourself when you're constantly only working which is like six days a week probably that's that ways you don't have time for yourself you don't have time for your family you don't have time for your hobbies and interests which plays a big role in your stress so if you have four days a week that means that you have you have more time for yourself by default you will be able to focus on your work because you've been able to take care of other parts and categories in your life now let's talk about AI in the workplace which jobs are most likely to be affected by AI in the future? I'm not sure but I think maybe the film industry I feel that a lot of the editing will be taken care of by AI because I have noticed I've come across a lot of people who are using only AI for editing on Instagram so that just rang a bell in my head because I thought oh if that is the case then probably the film industry will be the one which will suffer because most of their jobs are done by human labour right so if AI takes over then it will make their jobs easier but also take away jobs from their hands if AI takes millions of people's jobs in the future will society change? Financially I'm not very sure because that will reduce the jobs for a lot of people but I also feel that people will have more time to themselves and people will have more space to figure out the other kind of jobs that they should be doing so in a way a lot of work load if you look with a positive perspective a lot of work load will be taken away from them and will give them more space to decide what would they want to do with their time Are there any positive consequences of AI replacing millions of work groups? I think this is very similar to what I just mentioned that yes you can look at it positively as well but I did mention that I'm not very sure how will it play financially on people but the positive side effect or positive effect can be that it can unburden or take away the burden from a lot of people and give them more space and time to utilise in other activities of their life so you're hoping to get a band 9 which is a very very high score what I will do is I'll give you feedback on part 1, part 2 and part 3 of the test and then I'll give you feedback on the 4 marking criteria so to get a band 9 you need top marks in fluency and coherence, grammar vocabulary and pronunciation so part 1 what the examiner is looking for is for you to answer the question and develop it a little bit I think the key hallmark of a band 9 candidate in part 1 is it's like talking to a friend or it's like talking to a colleague and that's how it felt talking to you so you were able to answer each question naturally and develop them, you had no problem talking about any of those topics and I really like the way you used your own experiences in that so it didn't feel like speaking to a robot who prepared answers it felt like talking to a real human being who is at a very very high level of English, I also threw in some more unusual topics in there and you were able to cope with those perfectly so part 1, I have no negative feedback, all very very good part 2 is probably the most challenging part for a lot of students because it's a monologue so you have to speak for up to 2 minutes what you did was you decided to choose a real story from your own life that was a very good choice because it led to a very fluent coherent answer so it's much easier to talk about an experience from your own life than it is to make up a story or to talk about something a little bit more abstract so we would always suggest to students to try and choose something in part 2 related to your own life and then it's much easier than to use vocabulary and grammar as well especially vocabulary because you're talking about real things and real experiences and you weren't trying to, we would say fetch the language you weren't thinking of the correct word or the correct grammar structure or the correct tense you were just talking very coherently and naturally again and I didn't have to encourage you to speak more a problem with many students is they'll speak for 1 minute or 1 minute 30 seconds and then you have to encourage them to speak I had to do the opposite I had to stop you which was very very good in my opinion part 3 is the most challenging part because these topics like arriving late work productivity, AI in the workplace these are more abstract academic type topics when you compare them to part 1 and you did very very well what the examiner is looking for is development and answering the question and then really developing it you did that multiple times by showing both sides of the argument by using examples sometimes you use real examples from your own life and you had no problem with any of those topics the reason why towards the end I asked you more and more difficult questions is the examiner will think that you're a very good candidate so they will ask you more and more difficult questions to see how you cope with them so even when I asked you about societal changes in the future from AI like that is a very very difficult question many students in that position would just say I don't know or that's difficult or I have no idea you attempted the answer and you gave a very coherent answer that's related to that topic and you really developed it well you could see at the end that you were struggling a little bit with those ideas but the thing to remember is that it is not an ideas test it is a test of your English and you did really really well now let's move on to your scores for each part so fluency and coherence we can break that down coherence is all about did you answer the question so if I asked you about is it rude to be late if you're meeting a friend you talk about meeting a friend you don't talk about being late for work for example and every question that I asked you you answered exactly how it was supposed to be answered you really stuck to that topic the other part of coherence is development so did you develop your answer with explanations example stories things like that for every part you did a really good job with that so full marks for coherence fluency is not speaking quickly or not speaking slowly but really speaking without effort someone who is at a lower band like a band 6 or a band 7 even they will often be searching for the correct word to use or am I using the correct grammar structure so they'll have a lot of audible pauses things like that and they'll also be trying to think of ideas because your English level is so high you pretty much never had to do that there was never any real pauses where I was like she doesn't really know that word and she's trying to fetch that word from her brain you spoke effortlessly about a range of different topics without any audible pauses really when I say without any audible pauses I'm talking about unnatural audible pauses because while I'm speaking now as a native English speaker and as an IELTS teacher I'm pausing sometimes that is natural unnatural is as I just said you're like thinking oh what's that way to say you know to say this you never do that so for fluency and coherence you would get a bad mind you would get full marks but that's native English speaker level which is very very good for pronunciation there's two things that the examiners thinking about pronunciation this is the most important which is clarity can I understand everything that you're saying and I could understand 100% of what you were saying so first boxes is ticked you have no problem in that area the second is something called higher level pronunciation features and those are things like intonation as your voice goes up and your voice goes down naturally lower level students will speak very monotone like this everything is very flat whereas native speakers will go up and down in order to convey meaning I can understand 100% of what you're saying using intonation at a very high level you're using connected speech you're using sentence stress word stress all very very naturally which allows me to understand you even more a lot of people confuse a high pronunciation score with a British accent or an American accent or an Irish accent the examiner is not really thinking about how British you sound or how American you sound the examiner is thinking about the clarity of your speech so you have an Indian accent and you should be very proud of your Indian accent but there's some people when they speak with not just an Indian accent but any accent sometimes that accent will interfere with the listener's ability to understand what you're saying at no point does your accent interfere with what you're saying you are from India and in India you guys speak very very quickly to each other it's not a criticism it's just naturally a lot of you guys do speak like that would you agree and also being in a test situation you're nervous we speak a little bit more quickly now sometimes especially with Indian students when you combine the accent with speaking very very quickly that can sometimes cause a problem for the listener but it doesn't with you you're nervous a little bit sometimes and you do speak a little bit quickly if you were doing the test soon I would suggest that that's the one thing that you would just be careful of is if you go into the test you're very very nervous and you speak really really quickly that could affect your pronunciation score slightly but I don't think that's I'm being overly cautious with my feedback you mixed up your Vuh-Wuh sounds a little bit it's very common with German speakers it's very common with Indian speakers but it wasn't to the extent where I couldn't I didn't understand what you were saying for example Spanish speakers will say I watched a video I watched a video on YouTube some German speakers will say I watched a video now that if it was extreme could lower your score but you had just a very slight mix up between those two sounds if every time you were trying to pronounce Vuh you said Wuh that would lower your score because that is a systematic error that just keeps happening every time you use that sound but that's not the case at all with you so you would get a band 9 for pronunciation the next is vocabulary so there's two things that the examiner is thinking about when it comes to vocabulary the first is accuracy did you use the correct words basically or are you getting words mixed up so for example you could say this is a phone which is correct or you could say this is an electronic device which is correct but phone would be a little bit more precise but we wouldn't say that this is a sitting device this is a chair or if you got these mixed up it's like I'm sitting on a phone that is completely wrong so you are using vocabulary correctly and precisely accuracy you have no problems there you're also using a lot of topic specific vocabulary topic specific vocabulary is for example to talk about phones we would talk about a screen we would talk about the resolution of that screen we would talk about the memory and how many megabytes or gigabytes of the memory but we couldn't use gigabytes to talk about a pen for example we couldn't talk about the resolution of a pen but we would talk about ink but we can't use the word ink to talk about phones so these are very topic specific words as you can see no matter what topic we ask you about you are able to pull those topic specific words and that indicates that no matter what topic we ask you about you will be able to talk about that topic so that's the second thing that's your range so it's not like you can only talk about arriving late but you can't talk about AI you can talk about any topic so the range of your vocabulary is very very high and the accuracy of your vocabulary is very very high so you get a bad nine last but not least is grammar so your grammar again is being assessed by accuracy and range the range of your grammar is very good you pick the most appropriate structures and tenses to use so as you can see what you do is you don't just answer every question with the present simple tense for example you use the appropriate tense the appropriate structure to answer each question which indicates you have a very wide range of grammar now a lot of people think that to get a bad nine for grammar the accuracy needs to be 100% but that's not actually true what it says in the official marking criteria is that you can have a few slips some examiners would listen to you and think yep you made a few tiny little slips like this one however under exam conditions if you're stressed you can often make little mistakes that you wouldn't normally make and some examiners might think that you're making a few too many of these small grammatical errors if that was the case where they thought that you were making a few too many small grammatical errors you would get about eight not about nine and four grammar but I think that you will be on the side of it just being a few slips where you would get a bad nine so I think overall you probably would get a bad nine I think the lowest you would get would be an 8.5 overall but I would be quite confident that you would get a bad nine if you had that performance thank you any questions well done thank you so much so hope you enjoyed this video it was very very long but I hope that you will agree that it is going to really really improve your speaking score if you need more help with not just your speaking preparation but your writing, your listening, your reading this is my email address we answer 100% of the emails that we receive so if you just need a little bit of help or you have a question or you want to work with us let us know via email and we will be back in touch with you or if you just want to continue on your journey with us here on YouTube this video should help you out