Well... You know... Well... The first thing that came to mind was... and so I just had this kind of like... Yeah, I mean... You do get a bit of discounts and stuff because you have your... what's it called? What's it called? Anyways... Do you suffer from hesitation during the IELTS speaking test? Well, today's video with me, Chris, is going to look at the difference between language-related hesitationÂ
and content-related hesitation. We have the wonderful Thalia with us today and she answered questions about the beach, dentists and decisions. And Thalia is going to show us just what it's like to hesitate or to pause when thinking about ideas and words. And I'm going to point those sections out for you. Just to remind you if you haven't already seen our other mock exam videos, make sure you check them out because we have lots of great examples of wonderful IELTS speaking tests. So if you're ready, we should begin by looking at Thalia's speaking test. Let's go! Hello and welcome to this practice exam conducted by IELTS daily. My name is Maddie and I'm your practice examiner. The questions in this test are designed to simulate the IELTS speaking test. Let's start. What's your first name, please? I'm Thalia. Thanks, Thalia. At the beginning of the IELTS test, you will be required to provide some ID. But as this is a practice test, we don't need to do that today. I want to begin by talking about you. Do you live in an urban or rural area? Well, I live in an urban area. I actually live in a college close by and I've always been an urban person; I've always lived in an urban area. And do you see yourself living in a city in the future? Definitely, definitely. I prefer going out to rural areas for holidays or vacations as opposed to going into the city for holidays or vacation. So definitely, I see myself living, you know in a city or 10 or 15 minutes away from a city. Yeah. Great. In this section, she used the word, "definitely". You can use the word, "definitely" if you strongly agree with something. You may also want to use the word, "sure". So, sure and definitely are great ways to immediately give an answer. Kind of means, "yes". In this example, she used, "definitely" when the examiner was asking about whether she sees herself living in the city in the future. Great. Why do people live in rural areas? Okay. I'm gonna stop just at that point. If you notice, Thalia is looking up; she's trying to find an idea. This is called content-related hesitation and this is acceptable at a band 9. We as people, sometimes find it difficult to think of an idea immediately and this is an example of Thalia looking for an idea. The opposite of that is going to be language-related hesitation and we'll see a little bit of that later in the video where Thalia is looking for a word. Do you find it easy to come up with ideas or do you find it easy to come up with words? I think both of those are really tricky. When I took the test, I thought both were really difficult. Well, it could be, because they like the quiet and they like the... well, the lack of noise, and the lack of people, and I think being in a rural area is where you get to choose who you're surrounded by. Okay. The lack of... Some people like the lack of noise, the lack of people. Great language there. The lack of... it means no. So no noise, no people. So obviously, more family, more close friends. So you just have this kind of intimate and cozy kind of environment as opposed to just being with a bunch of people that you don't know and being basically thrown at the deep end of social, you know... environments. Wow. She used some great language there. She talked about being thrown in the deep end. To be thrown in the deep end means to be in a situation which is unexpected and you have to find a solution very quickly. So, at work they threw me in the deep end with a really big project. But I think it always depends on the type of person you are. So, obviously you know, people can prefer rural or urban areas and both have pros and cons. But I think those are a few pros, yeah. Rural areas in a previous video, one of our students used the word, "you know". And some of our students were asking, is it okay to say, you know? You know. My answer is, absolutely. Language must be natural in the IELTS speaking test. So you have to use language which you would use every day. Thalia uses the phrase, "you know" as an insert; it's a filler so that she wants to show that she speaks naturally. It's great. What jobs are available in rural areas? Well, the first thing that came to mind was obviously, there's a hospital or a clinic. So you're going to get doctors, you're going to get nurses. You're going to get, you know, receptionists. Great. I don't know if you notice at the beginning of her answer, she said, "the first thing that came to mind". The first thing that came to mind. You could also say, "the first thing that comes to mind". So that's a filler phrase that you may want to practice and include during your speech. She also repeated a phrase. She says, "you're going to get". You're going to get. You're going to get doctors. You're going to get clinics. You're going to get is an example of excellent pronunciation. It's called chunking. It's putting words together which are, "you are going to get" and it's a contracted version. You're gonna get. And that's a great feature of her pronunciation. Very natural. There's a bunch of supermarkets. I think of you know, for people to get their... their... you know... what, groceries. Did you notice in this section, she almost couldn't find a word for something and I think she was looking for the word, "groceries". This was verging on it, was very close to beingÂ
language-related hesitation. I don't think it was fullÂ
language-related hesitation but it was very, very, very close. She also said a bunch of supermarkets. Would I use the word, "a bunch of supermarkets" to talk about a number of them? I'm not sure. So people that work there as well... maybe bakeries, cafes, maybe not as much as the city, but I think there are some nonetheless. Another great feature of Thalia's pronunciation is her natural use of the letter, "t". Now, Thalia shows with the word, "city". You can pronounce the word, "city". If you listen carefully to Thalia, she actually says, "city". City. And that's more American or Australian English in terms of pronunciation, and this would be a high-level pronunciation feature. It's very natural. In the city. And I've never lived in a rural area but I can guess all the basic, like you know, having a little 7-eleven store, you know or a store next to a petrol station. Just you know, these kind of basic jobs, yeah. Okay. Let's move on to the topic of the seaside. Do you often go to the seaside? I do, I do. I used to much more than, much more when I was back home just because it was much closer. It was about 10 or 15 minutes away by drive and I feel like here, it's more of because the city is very accessible by public transport, people tend to take public transport and so it would take a bitÂ
longer with public transport. Here is Thalia's first little minor mistake. She says, "Ten minutes by drive". You may know that in English, you can't really say, "by drive". You would have to say, "by car". You can say, "on foot". You could say, "by bus, by car, by train". But we wouldn't normally say, "by drive". so that would be a little slip in terms of her language, her lexical resource. Is it enough to go from a 9 to an 8? I'm not sure. The examiner might be very strict on the day. But I'm looking out for little mistakes like this, which when you add them up, when you have one, two, three, it might bring you down by one band. And I don't have a car here. But I do go to the beach a lot and I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Did you notice how Thalia is so natural when she speaks? She has a great relationship with the examiner. She's talking with the examiner as though she is her friend. And I think that's a really great piece of advice for you. Try to be as natural as you can. Don't be nervous; just pretend you're speaking to a friend that you've known for a long time. Why do people like spending time by the beach? I think it's just peaceful and it's like a serene environment, and you can just hear the waves, and you know, have the sun, you know, shine on you, and the entire beach, and you know, have a cold breeze or a warm breeze and... Okay. So we've got something called, "collocation" here. Collocation is a feature of your language where you can put two words together. You can fit them together naturally. She used the term, serene environment. Serene environment would be a high-level lexical feature. She also said, cool breeze. Two words which go together and she also said, warm breeze. She's demonstrating that she has a wide range of vocabulary that she can use. So well done to Thalia. She's doing really a great job here. You know, build a sand castle, play with the frisbee, play with the ball. I think it's just, you can relax if you want to. It's just purely just being one with nature and it's just really great. Being at one with nature, what a great phrase that Thalia used. It shows that she can use language extremely in a really sophisticated way, very impressive. What do people do at the beach? Well, I think you can do anything. You can eat, you can play, you can swim. You can chat, you can sleep. You can tan, you can read a book. My sister even watches a TV show on Netflix. You can... can just be by yourself. Be you know, listen to the birds in the ocean. You can go with a group of friends and listen to music, and have a chat, and play with the ball and you can do almost everything. You can. You can. Maybe you notice that Thalia repeated the phrase, you can. Would this be a problem in the IELTS test? I'm not sure because she was making a list and it also it all felt very, very, very natural. You can do this, and you can do this or you can do this and you can do this. You may want to vary the language a little bit. So for example, you could say: You can play, you can tan, you could even. So did you notice that I changed the word "can" to "could", which makes it a little bit more hypothetical. There's a few options for you. Just bear in mind that you do need to vary your language sometimes. Now I want to talk about dentists. Do you mind visiting the dentist? No, I'm okay with doctors. I'm okay with dentist. I'm not disgusted or worried about needles or anything. So... Hmm... This one's a tricky one for me because she said, "I'm not disgusted by needles". Would I say, "I'm not disgusted by needles"? Probably not. I would probably say, "I'm not frightened of needles". Disgusted by normally creates an emotion of, "eh". So some people say , I'm disgusted by the sight of blood. I''m disgusted by some food. So it makes you go, "eh". It doesn't make you go, (gasps), which is fear. So I would just question the use of the "disgusted by needles". I'm not sure what an examiner would think but just be careful. More of a, okay kind of situation. Yeah. Why are some people nervous about the dentist? I think some people are afraid of, you know, having like a big needle go into their teeth or just having people snoop around with machines, and you know, stuff that they just haven't been exposed to before. Wow. Snoop around. Snoop around is a great piece of vocabulary. It means to look around, but kind of secretly. A detective will snoop around the crime scene after a crime. To snoop around. A criminal might even snoop around a house very quietly. So the word, "snoop around" is great language. And I think it's the fact that they don't necessarily know what the doctor is doing. Like they don't exactly know what the protocol is. So obviously, they just have this... I don't want to say curious but, they're just kind of they don't know what to expect, and that kind of makes them anxious which is understandable. But, yeah. Is visiting the dentist expensive in your country? Yes. Well every kind of healthcare is expensive in my country because it's not subsidized by the government. So, basically you get a... to get health care, you need to have a job and that job basically provides like the health care. And so yeah, I mean you do get a bit of discounts and stuff because you have your, what's it called... what's it called? Anyways... okay. There are two important things that I want to talk about in this section. You will hear that Thalia said, a bit of discounts. Discounts are countable, which means that you probably can't say, a bit of discounts. You, she would have to say, You can get a few discounts. But the most important thing that I want to cover in this section is language-related hesitation. Do you remember earlier, Thalia had some content-related hesitation? In this section, you could see her saying, "Ah what's the word...". She is struggling to find a word and this is called, language-related hesitation. In the Fluency and Coherence section of your mark, if we look at the Fluency and Coherence section, you will see that it says that language-related hesitation is not possible. And therefore she will probably be stuck at a band 8 in the FC, in the Fluency and Coherence section. She's been doing so well, so far. But probably would be stuck at a band 8 for this particular part. But it's, it is expensive. Great. I'm going to give you a topic and i'd like you to talk about it for one to two minutes. Before you talk, you'll have one minute to think about what you're going to say. You can make notes if you wish. Here is a paper and a pencil for making notes and here is your topic. I would like you to describe a difficult choice you had to make. You have one minute to prepare. Okay, I'm ready. So remember, you have one to two minutes for this. So don't worry if I stop you. I'll tell you when the time is up. Okay. Can you start speaking now, please? Sure. So, for the past three years, I wanted since I was about 17 years old, My... I've wanted to get into veterinary medicine. And that's been something that obviously I've researched. I've had to chat to people like, I've chatted to people about. I did a couple internships and I found that I really loved it. The issue is that in terms of income, it's... so the income isn't very high for veterinarians, especially if you don't have your own clinic. And another issue is that it's highly competitive to get into vet school. And so I just had this kind of like, hard decision to make. Should I go with it or should I not go with it? And obviously, after chatting to some friends, family and people here at college, I decided that, you know what, I'm gonna go for it. Ii'm gonna put my all if it works out, great. If it doesn't work out, I have the plan... a couple extra, you know, plans. And so I decided that it doesn't really matter if it's, if I don't go for it right now. It's going to be something that is going to be on my mind forever. Like a what if, kind of. And for me, I hate the feeling of regret. So i'm just going to, you know, do my best and see if that works out, then, great. And if not, then that's completely fine and it's not the end of the world. But at least I know that I did my best and I actually went for it. And luckily, I've got the support of my family and friends and you know, peers at college and university. And yeah. What else would you do if you couldn't be a vet? So my plan B is that, so i'm applying for a fast track right now. My plan B would be to apply as a graduate, normal graduate entry across the country and to apply for law school. So I can get into animal law and maybe consulting in that area. And then if I don't get into any vet school around the country or law school after undergrad, I'll take a year off and then go to Europe or Latin America, teach some Spanish for a year and then come back and sort out some jobs. Great. Thank you. What a great part two. Thalia did, she gave lots of ideas and she talked a lot about her experience as wanting to be a vet. She said, "it's highly competitive". "I'm gonna go for it". "If it works out, then great". "If it works out", is an example of varied grammar complexity. Remember, for a band 8 or a band 9, you need to be using a wide range of grammatical sentences, grammatical constructions. So she did really, really well. Probably not too much to focus on in her part two. She was very fluent. She spoke for about a minute and forty. We always recommend if you can speak up to two minutes, that's great. However, when I took the test, I didn't speak for two minutes. I said to the examiner that i'm finished and then they asked me another question. And you will see that the examiner asked her a follow-up question at the end, when she'd finished naturally. Thanks. Now, let's talk about making decisions. Right. What type of difficult decisions do governments have to make? Where tax payer money goes, that's the freaking that popped into my head. So obviously, you've got the taxpayer money that is taken from, you know, the citizens of the country and so how would a government properly choose where to put this money or where to invest this money, because they need to take into consideration what's going to benefit the citizens the most, and what can also economically benefit them. And I think it's just so many things to take into consideration and to factor in that it's, makes it quite difficult. Especially that sometimes, you know, you have to prioritize a couple things and you don't know which one to prioritize. And it's just, yeah, makes it difficult. These questions in part three start to get a little bit harder and you'll notice that Thalia spends a little bit more time trying to think of ideas. So be prepared in your test to have ideas about investment or government spending. It's a common topic. So, where do you think government or what difficult decisions should governments make when they are thinking about investing money? So is money going to be invested into health care? Is it going to be invested into education? Some of the difficult decisions might be going to war if they have a conflict with another country. That's a very difficult decision. So think about ideas before your test. Should young people be given more decision powers? Like in the government? Like in that kind of situation? Yeah. I think, I think the legal age being 18 is good because... and I think individuals that are 18 and older, so adults already have you know... Okay. I'm going to interrupt Thalia here. You will see she's really struggling to find ideas and maybe she didn't quite get the question, so she asked the examiner for some clarification. It's okay for you to do that. You might want to say, could you explain a little bit more about what you mean or what your question is? It's totally normal for you to do that in part three. You can't do that in part one and, but you can do in part three. So if you're struggling to think of ideas, just say, "could you explain that in another way?". But Thalia is really finding it difficult. She does give an answer at the end. So I wonder whether the examiner would mark her down for some fluency here. It's a voice. So whether that is in voting or whatever it is, or sometimes the fact that the government actually listens when they protest, I think that's already a great step and a great thing that's happening and I think, I think, yeah. Because at the end of the day, the government takes what the citizens want into consideration. So as long as they're listening and taking it into consideration, that's I think what's important as long as they're not just turning a blind eye to what the people are saying. Okay. So she again hesitated a little bit but then she started talking more and she also said, "as long as they are not turning a blind eye". As long as they are not turning a blind eye. That means as long as they are not ignoring people. It's a great idiomatic phrase, it shows that she has a wide variety of language. Why are elections important? Because it helps bring out the democracy of a country. I think that having an election means that everyone's voice can be heard and at the end of the day, that's what you want. You don't want to, otherwise it's not a country that you'd want to live in. And it'll be more of a rule as opposed to just a democratic kind of government, democratic life. I think having your voice heard kind of makes you feel like you're important and have a place in this country. And in this whatever, kind of environment. And i think that's enough. It makes you, you know, respect it more. It makes you fight for it more. It makes you, you know, defend it more and I think that's, yeah, something very important. Great. Thank you very much. That is the end of the speaking test. Wow. What did you think of Thalia? I was super impressed with her speech today. I think she gave a great test. What do you think? If you have any ideas, leave them in the comments section. We'll talk about her score now. What would you score Thalia if you were to be the examiner? Would you score her a 9? Would you score her an 8 or maybe even a 7? Tell us what you think in the comments section below. Tell us what your favorite part of her speech was. Well, in my view, I'm going to talk about the areas that she did the best. So she scored for me a 9 in pronunciation. Her pronunciation was almost flawless throughout. She didn't really make any mistake. She had lots and lots of natural features of pronunciation. So we talked about chunking. The speech flowed really, really well and she had just really clear enunciation of her words. So she's got a 9 for me. Grammatical range and accuracy was also a 9 for me because in her test, she has to use lots of grammatical complexity. She had great features of grammar. Almost, I don't think she had any mistakes actually. I didn't notice any mistakes. So for me, she scores a 9. However, Thalia, she scored an 8 in Fluency and coherence for me. We spoke today about the importance of hesitation. Do you remember at the beginning, she had content-related hesitation? Well, later in the test, she also had some language-related hesitation. And as a result, she would probably score an 8 in her Fluency and coherence. And in her Lexical resource, I'm also going to score her 8. Just a few too many slips and occasional problems with collocations of words. Do you remember some of the things we spoke about? Go back and watch this video if you want to listen to those features again. And have a look and see what you think. So, overall, 8-8-9-9 would be a band 8.5, which is incredibly good. What score do you need? If you have any ideas and if you want to leave your feedback, leave them in the comments. What do you think of Thalia's mock exam? Well, as I said, we have lots more of these mock exams, so make sure you come and watch them. I hope you find them useful. Many of them are really great mock exam answers. They have very high band levels. So just make sure that you watch them, learn from them, and try to copy some of them. Don't memorize language word for word, but try to look at the features of their speech, how are they pronouncing words, what type of language are they using, how natural does it feel? Because in the test, I want you to be as natural as possible. My name is Chris from IELTS daily and I really hope that you enjoyed this video. I hope to see you in another one. So for now, take care and I'll see you soon
