3 Steps to a Band 7+ in IELTS Speaking: Day 2

hi everyone Chris here from IELTS advantage with lesson 2 of our speaking mini course so three steps to bond seven speaking so let's look at the three steps and the three lessons so step one we looked at this on Monday today's Wednesday we looked at part one so if you're watching the recording of this or you're watching live feel free to go back and look at part one after we finish up today because part one speaking a lot of people think that it's just not important at all or some other people think that it's like more important than it is it's good it's a really good idea to find out exactly what part one is because you want to start the test and as strongly as possible step two so will today we're looking at part two this is it the part you know sometimes called the long term where they give you the cue card and you have to you know plan for one minute and then speak for up to two minutes a lot of people really really worry about this and it's not something you do actually have to worry about that much step 3 Friday at 11:00 a.m. we're gonna go live on Facebook 11 a.m. UK time and we're going to look at part 3 of the speaking test part 3 in my opinion is the most difficult part which is where you'll be asked and the more difficult questions but just because you're asked difficult questions doesn't mean that's actually a bad thing it's actually a good thing so we'll be telling you why that is a really really good thing on Friday and giving you a strategy for part 3 so what are we going to do today for part 2 so we're going to look at what the goal of part 2 is what is your goal what what's the thing that you want to be doing we're going to look at some common problems that students come up against and some common strategies there's a lot of strategies online especially on if you look at YouTube Facebook you'll find a lot of people who say like this is a magic way or a special way to answer part 2 there isn't any special way to answer part 2 and there isn't any magic way that's going to guarantee that you improve your scores and but we'll look at a way that will help you as much as possible and help you prepare for the test and get the best score possible for you and we're going to look at that strategy and this strategy actually does work because we've helped thousands of students and improve their part two and improve their overall and score in the speaking test we're going to show you what that is so what is the goal of part two what should you be looking for and what you should you be looking to do you should be looking to speak fluently and coherently for up to two minutes about the topic all right so some key words here fluently to secure that big black mark there let's change this true pen you change the color to red so you need to be speaking fluently speaking without too many pauses and hesitations on natural pauses and hesitations and coherently actually talking about the topic that's on the cue card and developing that idea and speaking for up to two minutes and about the topic not about anything else apart from the topic and the examiner should be able to understand what I'm saying so understanding what you're saying that's related to pronunciation candy's I'm going to understand what you're saying or do they have to strain to understand you and are you using grammar and vocabulary effectively principally are you using grammar vocabulary accurately most oh you do also have to worry a little bit about your range of grammar your range of vocabulary but for most students what they should focus on is accuracy and we're not going to talk about this too much today what we'll focus on more is strategy so in the comments and Facebook what I want you to tell me is what are some problems or what are some things that you worry about when it comes to part two speaking what are you really really worried about or what things do you do in part two speaking that you think are leading to you getting a lower score in the comments tell me what you think and I'll look I have my phone let me see if my phones working don't be shy let me see if I can use my phone instead of Justin's phone yeah sure okay so Hardeep said lack of ideas good hardy yeah a lot of people are worried about that anybody else kate says no ideas okay anybody else any other ideas apart from Hardeep and kate she is thinking what topic not too sure what you mean by thinking what topic but if you want to explain what that means Dallas is lack of information so lack of idea is lack of info about the actual topic so maybe you do have ideas but you just don't know how to develop those ideas vocabulary you're saying oops [Music] good speak for two minutes good okay so here are some ideas what we're going to do now is I'm going to show you a a cue card like you would see in the test and what I'm going to do is I'm going to demo what I think is the main problem that students have with part two and I'm going to demo like as if I'm a student and I have this main problem okay so let's get a cue card up so we went to the British consoles website they're a free website I'm will take a cue card from dance you should always use real example questions because if you don't use real example questions you'll get fake ones and you'll mess it up we'll talk about that in a second okay so here's one from the British console describe something you own which is very important to you okay you should say where you got it from how long you've had it what you use it for and explain why it is important to you okay so what I'm going to do is look at this as if I'm a student and demo exactly what I think is the main problem and then in the comments tell me what you think the main problem is okay and remember that I have to speak for up to two minutes so on my watch let me see okay so imagine that I planted out already and so something that I own that is very important to me is my watch I got it from Argos which is a shop here in my home time and I've had it for about six months and I use it for telling the time and recording my workouts there's also a feature for the weather on it which I use sometimes and my calendar is also on it and it's important to me because as I said it helps me record my workouts so it tracks all of my activity and I know how healthy I am and how much exercise that I've done so I got it from Argos and yeah I've had lied about six months I use it to tell the time and it's really important because yeah because it's a really nice watch I like this watch it's really good okay so that was demoing a student that has these big big problems so what are some of those problems after listening to me do that some of these might be correct but are there any other things that I was doing that might be a problem remember the goal is to speak fluently and coherently about the topic for up to two minutes and the examiner should be able to understand what I'm saying and my grammar and vocabulary and pronunciation should be up to standard so let's have a look again to see if anybody has any further ideas see a lot of your tagging your friends done so based on what I said what do you think you get the idea is here okay so not developing not developing ideas good repeating ideas so no one has picked up on the biggest problem hesitations not really there weren't that many and fluency does not mean speaking perfectly alright I'm never pausing or hesitating it means you know speaking at a natural rate with without unnatural pauses and hesitations little pauses and hesitations are fine lack of connectors no no linking linking words you mean they do help a little bit but it's not bad pronunciation no could you understand what I said hopefully okay so the main problem was I didn't speak for two minutes all right what I did was see you get the cue card the main problem was I looked at this bullet point and I talked about that one then I looked at that bullet point I talked about that one then I looked at that bullet point I talked about that one and then I talked about this one and I didn't develop any of these points but I ran out of things to say within a minute less than a minute I've done all of these on there so this is what a student does they look this one then they talk about this one and they talk about this one then they talk about this one and then they're like oh I have nothing else to say and what happens then is they go off on a tangent or they repeat themselves which is what I did I just repeated the same things over and over again and then they just stopped alright so for me this is one of the biggest problems that that you face when it comes to part two so how can we solve these problems let's have a look another problem is a lot of you are using strategies that you find on the internet and just because somebody says these are bond 9 strategies or magic strategies or something like that doesn't mean they're actually going to work so let's look at some common strategies that you'll find online and think about how do they actually work so one common strategy is talk about each point in the order that you see them all right so the strategy is talk about that and not then that then that ok is this an effective strategy well as used as I've just demonstrated and as I like I do this with our students in our in our course we do maybe 40 to 50 students a week doing practice runs with with part two and we've done that for four years so we see this over and over and over again when they do that they just run out of things to say and they then they stutter and they panic and they don't know what to do and it's also a very very unnatural way to speak to somebody if somebody asked you this question would you ever look at a list of bullet points when I talk about one and then looking at done again and so I'll go with the other and then look like it's just a very unnatural way to speak to someone so is this going to get you to your goal which is to speak fluently and coherently for up to two minutes about the topic no it's not going to help you so be very very careful who you listen to and what strategies you use because you might be better off with no strategy whatsoever rather than following something that's going to lead to a lower score another common strategy that a lot of students who start working with us uses they'll talk about the past I'll talk about the present and then they'll talk about the future all right so does this help some to be honest some students really do like this and it really does help them the majority of the people that we work with it doesn't help them at all why it's very rigid all right again if I asked you that question or any other question in the world would you answer it in that way would you say okay let's talk over the past then let's talk about the present then let's talk about the future no it's a very very unnatural way to to answer anything so it's it's making it more difficult than it needs to be also a lot of people who use these strategy like talk about the past and the present in the future they tend to run out of ideas they're like okay past and they talk a lot about that and then present like okay I own this watch nice and then they start talking with the future and they can't think of anything to say and then they start again to panic and that can affect their fluency and their coherence and everything to be honest so does work for a minority of students but the majority it doesn't help them at all and so again be very very careful with what you listen to so when we were thinking of this strategy I'm hard to help people with this what we normally do is just think Hollywood do people normally speak to each other so it's a speaking test if you're chatting to someone like if Justin and I went for a coffee after this lesson um what would our conversation look like our conversation would look like I would ask him a question he would answer back and forth like that a normal conversation so think about this is your brain how do we normally talk to each other well we have some sort of input which is normally like a question or comment let's keep it simple it's just some sort of question our brains are gonna process the information and then there's going to be output so this will normally be someone speaking all right so so by using these very rigid strategies and using bullet points in that way or past present future and things like that you're just complicating everything you're making things as complicated as possible without actually using the the normal process that you have which is just question think about it an answer so how can we use this to help us answer the questions effectively okay so what is happening here is a lot of people are under the misconception that you must talk about this then you must talk about this then you must talk about this then you must talk about this okay that's wrong all right you do not have to talk about each one of them in order and only talk about the bullet points what do you have to do there's only one thing that you must do you must talk about the topic here okay so for this question I must talk about I must describe something which I own which is very important to me that's the only thing if I don't want to talk about any of these that's fine the only thing I need to do is this 9 am I saying never talk about the bullet points no most of them are going to be very very useful but use them as tools to help you rather than as a crutch to rely on because if you're using them as a crutch like a crutches like if you break your leg you use a crutch to it to help you walk a lot of you are using these as a crutch and that's does it crutch actually help you walk effectively no use these as tools rather than a crutch well what does that mean well if you look at these where you got it from ok so yeah I want to talk about this but it's going to be very very short it's gonna be one line alright I don't really need to develop that at all because there's nothing really to develop it's where did you get it from a shop called Argos how long have you had it yeah probably want to talk about that but again it's just a very small small piece of information what you use it for yeah definitely I want to talk about that and there's many things that I can talk about related to that explain why it is important to you I don't really feel comfortable talking about that one don't want to talk about that one so don't are there other things that I could talk about related to that sure I could talk about details I could talk about features I could talk about past I could talk about present I could talk about future but I don't have to and what else could I do story my opinion on it or my feelings about it and anything else like anything else I can think of it so instead of three bullet points which don't really help me at all now I have one two three four five six seven eight nine extra alright so am I going to use all of these am I going to talk about this then this then this then this then this then this then this and this of it nope that's not what I'm saying what you do is when you're planning during your one-minute planning you just note down a few extra things that you would like to talk about and then use these naturally to talk about them okay you might not talk about the present you might not talk about the future you might not talk about your feelings you might not talk about opinion but you might have a story about it on how you felt about it in the past and the details and the features I'm not really really going to help you so what you're doing is all of these different things are providing you with a wide array of things talk about it it's like a toolkit all right the more tools you have in your toolkit the better and then during the one-minute planning stage you're just noting these done thinking about them and then talking naturally I'm not looking spending the whole time looking at your boat like bullet point number one talk about that okay and then bullet point number two okay talk about you're not going to do that so this might be the first time you've seen this strategy so let me spell it out number one establish main topic what is the main topic okay this is the main topic I must speak about this remember that number two think about each bullet point as we just did okay yeah I can use that one yeah I can use that one yeah I can use that one I don't want to use that one at all that's I don't even understand that one and add any others that will help well I definitely have a story about that so that's going to be really easy to talk about this one's going to be really easy to talk about the features are definitely I can't really think of anything else there might be a few details so there's a lot of things that I can talk about is this going to get me to two minutes I'll be able to speak fluently and coherently absolutely no problem whatsoever five speak naturally until examiner stops you so let's demo that okay so that's a little bit messy I might not be very coherent if I do that all right so let's demo it as if I'm doing it the real test okay okay so first thing I need to do something you own which is very important okay so I know that one I'm gonna do that one I'm gonna do that one I'm gonna do that one this one no I'm gonna talk about it how much it is worth I'm gonna talk about my opinion I'm gonna talk about the future okay I'm not to be done and that I would just sit I think about it okay so let's go so the most important thing or let me set a timer so time myself so most important thing to me is this jam board alright and the reason why it's really really important to me two reasons and number one it is the most expensive thing that I've ever bought in my life it was about ten thousand dollars which is significantly more than anything else I've ever bought more than my car I believe so I got it about six months ago and with six months ago I called Google Google is they are the people that make it it's called a Google John board and you can only buy it from Google because I think they don't want anyone bumping or discounting the price and selling them for less than $10,000 and so it was originally designed as a collaboration tool so Google in there and their headquarters they've got offices all over the world and what you can do with the jam board is you can draw on it and make notes on it and someone in a different part of the world with another Jam board or with a a laptop or a tablet or even their phone they can interact with it draw things and give you feedback and there's a camera on it and everything and in my opinion it I wouldn't say it was a waste of money because we can use it every single day to plan stuff right and it looks great in lessons and it's very interactive and things I got however the ten thousand dollar price tag was a little bit pricey considering that there's a lot of bugs in it and it doesn't really work in the way that we wanted it to work for example it doesn't allow us to use PowerPoint we would have loved to had PowerPoint slides or Google slides even we can't even use Google slides even though twice it is connected to Google so we have to draw everything which is okay but in my opinion I will not be buying a new one in the future I will probably buy a Microsoft one I can't remember the name of the Microsoft one but they have one and it's much much better so that was dead on two minutes so the examiner would have would have stopped me so you see how much easier it was to talk about because I gave myself the freedom to talk about many many different things but I did only talk about this all right so what you're doing with that strategy is the strategy itself is not going to improve your pronunciation it's not going to magically help you you know think of amazing vocabulary or grammar or anything like that it's just giving you every chance to be able to get the best score possible on test day but the number one thing you need to remember with it is you need to practice it okay so you cannot just take this strategy walk into the test tomorrow and get a bound 7 doesn't work like that I wish it did but it didn't you need to practice it alright so but if you do practice it you're really going to improve every aspect because you're but just the act of practicing it over and over again it's going to help you so get real practice questions don't get fake ones from fake and fake sites because they're unreliable use the strategy by looking at the question planning it out for one minute and then record yourself use your phone to help you alright so record yourself on your phone listen and then critique yourself alright criticize your own performance think about fluency think about coherence think of a grammar think about pronunciation think about vocabulary and if you do that over and over and over and over again you're practicing speaking part two you're becoming more comfortable with speaking part two but you're improving your fluency you're improving your coherence you're going to improve your grammar because you're going to spot lots of grammar mistake and you're gonna try and fix those you're going to improve your pronunciation because you might pick up on some pronunciation errors or you might pick up on the fact that your intonation is a little bit off or your connected speech or sentence stress things like that on your vocabulary as well you will be picking up that you are maybe making some little errors or collocation errors or you could maybe use it a more complex word when you're using simple words or you're repeating words sometimes so using that strategy is good but the person who practices it and does all these things that are really going to improve so and summarize everything start with the end goal in mind what is the end goal what do you want to be doing if you apply this to everything you do it's just going to improve everything avoid common problems and avoid common strategies and some of the strategies might work so many strategies I don't know about might work I don't know but you know ask yourself does this help me with my end goal if it doesn't then maybe it's not the magic strategy whoever's talking about it that and maybe it's not as magic as the person who says it is try strategy the focus is on there and go and practice and critique yourself and that's it doesn't need to be any more complicated than that but the key is to do these things don't watch a video and be like oh that's amazing and they're not doing anything student the student who does it is going to improve just to let you know we have a new free writing course three steps to bond seven or above it is a live course that we're going to be doing next week starts on Wednesday but we're going to open it up this Friday and Friday the 18th but they'll only be limited places available because it's like we're going to give you it's going to be in a secret group and everything was going to limit the number of people that it's available to we're not going to be putting it on Facebook or YouTube or anything so if you're interested in that check on our beside our check your email if you're on our emailing email if you are on our email list I can't speak anymore I've been doing making too many videos today if you don't an email list you're getting an email about it and if not check our Facebook YouTube all that will be and talking a lot about it and over the weekend so you can get in it's totally free and it's helped thousands of people in the past so it can help you so that's pretty much it let me have a look see any interesting comments she see if there's any questions or comments or anything like that very good comment you're wrong but it's a good comment all right so from a Shia said you you said the word and too many times okay so this is a common misconception a common misconception is that if you repeat any words you're going to get a lower score all right so try and speak for 15 minutes and only use the word and once or only use the word that or a or an or of or like articles prepositions these words that just come up again and again and again and again good vocabulary does not mean only using unique words that's not what good vocabulary means so very good comment because it shows a common misconception and even if it's a key word like if you're talking about cars there's only a certain number of ways you can say cars and if you're talking about cars for 15 minutes you're going to say car a lot like it's it's just the way it is any strategy for being coherent it's that one coherent means that you talk about the topic for up to two minutes and you develop your main ideas properly okay so thank you very much guys I've got to go but hopefully a lot of you put that into practice if you need anything feel free to get in touch Chris at IELTS advantage comm is my email address and make sure that you check this out on Friday so many limited places available and we will won't be putting it out to the public and but if you're interested in improving your writing scores get involved thank you very much guys and see you again soon bye

Channel: IELTS Advantage

Views: 56,465

Keywords: IELTS, IELTS Advantage, Chris Pell, www.ieltsadvantage.com, subscribe, IELTS Speaking, 3 Steps to a Band 7+ in IELTS Speaking: Day 2, 3 Steps, Band 7+, IELTS lesson, Lesson, ielts listening, ielts listening test, ielts test, international english language testing system, ielts writing, in this lesson, live lesson, listening ielts practice, grammar, ielts tips, IELTS Speaking: Day 2

Id: gh6MhULTX2E

Length: 33min 3sec (1983 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 16 2019