 In this video I'm going to show you how band eight and nine students remember and use vocabulary using a pair of scissors, some pens and paper. So recently I asked some of our students who got a band eight or a band nine in their IELTS speaking and writing how do they use vocabulary and one of the key things that they do is they use one of these four techniques for reviewing and remembering and then using vocabulary and these four techniques I'm going to share them with you today and anyone can use them just using these easy things that all of you have. Okay so the first technique that I'm going to show you is something called matching so get your piece of paper and write some of the words that you have recently discovered so here we have innovate develop device modify breakthrough obsolete intuitive and censorship so this student was reading an article on technology and they noticed these new words so they wrote down these new words in their vocabulary notebook and one of the review techniques that we show them is we get them to write synonyms of each of these words beside the new words that they have learned so not only are they learning one new word they're learning a additional new word that is a synonym synonyms are extremely important not only for writing and speaking but also for reading and listening to so how we get the students to remember these words is we get them to cut up these new words and make them into cards so now we have all of these words on cards and what you can do is you can spread these out and what you do is you match them all right so we have antiquated all right which one is antiquated obsolete all right and we could check the meaning of those so the meaning is on the back obsolete means not in use anymore antiquated not in use anymore so this is correct and then we match these up and then we just keep going so modify develop no breakthrough no adapt so adapt the verb adapt and modify these match together and then we just keep going until we have matched all of them together and this is really going to help you remember these synonyms what we have also done so the second technique so we have the meaning of these words on the back of these cards so what you could do is put these with the word facing down and the meaning facing up so we'll just use a few of them and then what you can do is you can just read the meaning of the word and then okay what is that word so simple to use what word could that be I'm going to guess intuitive yeah I got that one correct not in use anymore obsolete yeah I got that one correct using new methods or ideas mmm original no innovative okay so by doing that I am checking the meaning and remembering the meaning the next thing that we can do is we can categorize these words so there's different things that we could categorize we could categorize them by topic so let's say you have some words that are related to technology some words are related to education some words are related to the environment you could categorize them by that or you could categorize them by word form there are nouns adjectives and verbs here so device is a noun so we're going to put the nouns here original is an adjective develop is a verb obsolete adjective restriction non discovery known as you can see we are just categorizing them by the different word types the different word forms you could even categorize by pronunciation or number of synonyms there's lots of different things that you can do to categorize and categorization really helps our brains remember and then use these words effectively on test day but we do always need to remember that we are not going to simply remember these words remembering the words is okay for listening or reading but remember for speaking and writing we actually have to use these words so how we can do that is we could take some of these words and tell a story so let's take just a few of these words randomly this was actually done to me in a job interview once when I was applying for a job as a lawyer they gave me four random words and says okay create a story so let's take four random words so we're going to have this one obsolete this one modify this one restriction and this one innate and then what you could do is think about the meaning of these words and then create a just a very short story that uses these words effectively so you could practice your writing doing this or you could practice your speaking doing this and you could actually record yourself on your phone and listen back and think about did I use these words effectively or not so what I would like you to do in the comments pause the video can you write a story like one or two paragraphs using these words effectively I'm going to think about this for about 10 seconds and then create my own story so I recently switched from an iphone to a google phone the reason why I did that is lots of people said that when you switch to a google or an android phone you can do lots of modifications you can modify many of the things within the ecosystem because the problem with iPhones is they put lots of restrictions in place and they restrict the amount of things that you can change in the operating system however after using my google phone for about a week it was pretty obsolete for me because I was so used to iOS and the operating system that it just made using the google phone useless and I couldn't use it at all because I've been so used to using this operating system for so long that it is innate and so intuitive and easy for me to use the iphone that I had to switch back so as you can see what I did was just take those four words randomly and believe me this is random I didn't spend you know two hours thinking of that story as you could probably tell from how bad the story was it doesn't matter how good the story is it doesn't need to be you know a hollywood blockbuster and level story all you're trying to do is just understand how to use these words in a sentence and then you'll be able to remember them that is far more effective than what most students do what most students do is they get long lists of vocabulary with the word and then maybe the meaning and then maybe the translation into their native language I don't know any other language other than English so I'm not going to try that one but they just read these lists of words and this is useless you're not going to remember words by just reading them and the meaning and never use the translation because that causes all sorts of problems on test day you're going to be translating rather than actually thinking in English band eight band nine students think in English that is a huge difference between someone struggling at a band five band six level and someone getting a band eight or band nine band eight band nine students do stuff like this they don't do stuff like this because doing stuff like this forces your brain to think in English and use English this is easy anything easy doesn't help you improve this is a little bit more difficult but as you can see it's pretty fun you could play a game you could play this with other people you could play it in the classroom if you're at a school on the key it's going to help you remember all these new words and if you did this once a day you know how many words are here there's not that many if you did this every single day learned you know 10 new words every day after 10 days you have hundreds and hundreds of new words and then you're able to play even more games review them even more match even more categorize even more tell more stories you could write a whole essay just using these words so hope you find that useful if you did that's great if you didn't find it useful feel free to give it a thumbs down and feel free to unsubscribe if you don't like it if you did really like this and you want to improve your vocabulary even more i'll put a link below there's a free vocabulary course that we offer completely free and all you have to do is go down it's on youtube just click in the description or there'll be a little button somewhere i don't know where it's probably popping up somewhere click on that it's a full vocabulary course for you thanks very much and if you need anything more go to ialtadvantage.com and you'll find a huge number of free resources there to help you with your IELTS preparation