Band 9 IELTS Vocabulary with Alex!

hi my name's Alex I'm one of the expert IELTS teachers here at e2 language comm and today I want to talk to you about vocabulary IELTS and I'm gonna answer three key questions for you here they are one why do I need to build vocabulary - what vocabulary should I learn and three how can I learn it let's start with the first question why do I need to build vocabulary this is a fair question there are a lot of people out there promising shortcuts and hacks but can you really get a high IELTS score with low vocabulary level well in writing task 1 - and speaking your vocabulary makes up 25% of your score so a quarter of your score goes to vocabulary and these parts of the IELTS test are marked by human raters so it's very difficult to trick a human rater into thinking your vocabulary is better than it really is let's look at IELTS writing I'm gonna show you a typical task - topic and I want you to think about your own current language ability and I mean current because your language in your vocabulary today I'm not the same as they're going to be tomorrow or next month or next year here's a typical essay question with deforestation urban development and illegal hunting many animal species are becoming endangered and some are even facing extinction do you think it is important to protect animals what can be done to deal with this problem so when reading this our students a native language would already be thinking about their vocabulary library what do I know about this topic what relevant or appropriate language can i generate so for something like illegal hunting they might know a synonym is poaching becoming endangered what's another way to say that dying out facing extinction how about on the verge of extinction and what about the ideas do you think it's important to protect animals why what can be done to deal with this problem for instance could we use sanctuaries could we increase penalties for poaching implement captive breeding programs you can see that a rich vocabulary is a huge benefit here so that brings us to IELTS speaking let's stick with the animals theme here and look at this typical speaking part to the topic talk so you could be asked anything really but you might be asked to describe an animal that you're interested in that's a pretty easy topic right but how confident are you that you could talk for two minutes about an animal that you're interested in you might want to talk about an elephant for example so it's big and gray but what's this what's this do you know the word tusks do you know the word trunk it lives for a long time but some more interesting vocabulary it's a wide roaming herbivore it's known for its intelligence it lives in a close-knit matriarchal society this kind of language is very nice very topic specific but very useful when doing the IELTS speaking test how about another animal a tiger do you know what this is this these and this striped tail poor claws fangs those are just some of the words that you could use the point is you need to be ready for anything when it comes to IELTS writing and speaking on to IELTS reading and listening let's consider IELTS reading first now in academic reading you get three pretty big texts one two three and you probably won't know every word in fact there are often words that even native speakers don't know in the reading texts and it's not essential to know 100% of the words when you're reading but you do need a certain percentage to be able to understand the text this is called lexical coverage researchers vary but most estimate that learners can understand a text when 95 to 98% of the words are known and interestingly it's a little bit lower for listening comprehension so it looks like this you need to know this amount of words to be able to understand a text now it looks daunting but the principle to keep in mind here is that the more vocabulary you know the better your language will be and the more you'll be able to communicate and also comprehend so that answers the first question of why and leads us to the second question what vocabulary do I need to know there are quite a few lists of words and you can download some of these on our website at 82 language calm but I'm really interested in IELTS reading and I wanted to find out what vocabulary in particular do you need to know to understand a text in IELTS reading so I took a bunch of reading text and ran a bit of an analysis on them and this is what I found around 80% of the words in the reading text came from the first 2,000 words in English that is the 2,000 most frequent words used in English and the good news is that you probably already know heaps of these if not all of them they're words like the good bad idea spend in other words of that nature about 5.5 percent came from the academic words list which is a list of 570 words commonly found in academic texts so these are words like research theory initial acquire valid so what about the others well these are words that were either higher than the first 2,000 words in English but realistically are you gonna print out and learn 4,000 5,000 up to 10,000 or 15,000 words it's not really so let's consider these words just less common words or technical and topic-specific vocabulary in an analysis of a few IELTS reading texts about animals these are the kinds of words that we see habitat predators livestock foraging captive so this is the basic breakdown of a typical IELTS reading text so when it to the first two thousand words and the academic words list these are easily accessible and you can find them here on our website but for the other vocabulary you need a bit of a system and that's what we're going to talk about next so just a quick summary about what vocabulary you need to know you need the most frequent words in English you should know the academic word list and also you need to build topic-specific vocabulary so the big question is how can I do that how can I learn new vocabulary I've mentioned word lists a couple of times and they do have their place but how helpful is it to download a list of words and look at it actually you need to take those words and make them your own you need to see them again and again you need to integrate them into your own vocabulary so yes a list of words is nice to have but learning vocabulary needs a little bit more than that we need to think about deliberate and incidental learning so deliberate learning so deliberate learning is when your full attention is on learning the vocabulary he might be just looking it up in a dictionary writing out the meaning in your book or doing drills in class or using flashcards and your aim with deliberate learning is to learn the vocabulary this is actually really useful so even if you do have a vocabulary list you should write it out by hand into your own system in your own format so in a live class we spend a bit of time doing this working on the deliberate learning of vocabulary and you can do it alone but it's much easier when someone else has prepared all those activities for you right this brings us the incidental learning incidental learning happens when you are not trying to learn the vocabulary you actually focused on something else so you might be just reading the newspaper or listening to a podcast or perhaps reading an article in order to write a summary of it so in this case you're just accidentally or incidentally bumping into the vocabulary and this is another key part of remembering and incorporating vocab into your own language now a key point here input if you're gonna meet familiar words in new context you need to be reading and listening to a huge range of language in a traditional language course you have been limited by time when it comes to this kind of extensive exposure to language but these days we've got the internet so the whole world is at your fingertips and the job of a good language course or language teacher online is to curate some useful resources for you so once you've got the words that you need to know your teacher can direct you to an article a video a podcast where you can meet that word over and over so of course you need both types of learning both deliberate and incidental you need to learn it on purpose and then you need to accidentally bump into it over and over so at eetu we've built this into a kind of vocabulary system that we call grow G our W so let's consider this acronym as the basis for your vocab learning G stands for gather this is the deliberate part of the learning where you collect or gather information about the word so you might get the meaning the translation into your language the pronunciation related words and collocations as well as examples so you should gather this information into a system it might be a flashcard system it might be a vocabulary journal it might be a list of words on your phone so this is just the very first step to learn the words you need to review so you need to see the words hear the words write the words a lot so why do we need to review well this comes down to your memory and something called the forgetting curve so imagine on day zero when you first learn something you've got it you've got hundred percent of the meaning you can remember the translation you've used it in a sentence you know how to spell it but day after days you can see from day one to three you start to forget quite a lot quite quickly if you review a day one notice that your retention goes back up to a hundred percent and then the forgetting curve slows down a little bit you forget a bit less if you review then on day three view on day six you can see that you are retaining a lot more information so that's why it's important to keep coming back to the vocabulary don't just look at it once don't download a list of vocab and glanced at it because you're never gonna remember it like that you have to review review review so use flashcards spelling test gut feels dictation and seek out lots of input o stands for own this means you've got to make the vocabulary your own write it say it read it incorporate it into your active vocabulary and the last one stands for wonder so what this means is that now you go out into the wild and you try to find that word in its native habitat you might find it in the newspaper in a podcast on a TV show in conversation with a friend so explore it in the wild read and listen to a wide range of media and as you're doing that you might be able to bump into new words and you can start the whole process again gather review own wander and of course we can help you with this you know IELTS academic and general courses on any language comm we incorporate vocabulary into the self-study course and our live classes and you can also check out our course tests ready on e to school comm which focuses on vocabulary and collocations building sign up for free at both places let's recap learning vocabulary is important you can't trick an examiner you can't trick a reading and a listening test you should learn high frequency and topic-specific vocabulary and use the acronym G ro W to grow your vocab gather information about it review because repetition means retention on your new vocab personalize it and activate it and then find the vocab in new contexts as you wander around we can help get you started with the IELTS topic toolkit on our blog follow the link below for topic 1 which is all about animals in the toolkit you'll find 20 words with definitions and example sentences you'll find speaking questions essay topics plus a sample essay as well as extra resources things like podcasts articles and videos don't forget to subscribe like comment and share this with any of your friends that are preparing for IELTS and come and join us at eetu language comm today thanks for watching I hope that was helpful and tell me in the comments about your tips for learning vocabulary [Music]

Channel: E2 IELTS

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Id: i2ZbcfF0ixM

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 31 2019