How to get a Band 8 in IELTS listening

everyone Chris here from Isles advantage come with another live lesson today's life lesson is all about so we've had a huge while emailing us over the past few months saying that they need a ban eight and listening it seems that many many people want to move to Canada they need that eight triple7 and sometimes what's stopping them getting there is they're getting seven 7.5 and listening which is a great score but if they had that eight or even above eight in the listening test they would they would get to Canada also countries like Australia for example as a point system for immigration so the higher your score and the more points you're going to get so getting a higher score and listening is really going to help you and in general just thinking a little bit strategically you want to not be worrying so much about the listening test because you're probably going to be worrying a lot about the writing test maybe even the speaking test and so if you have learnt these things which I'm about to teach you and you've done all of these things then you're going to make the whole test day and a lot easier on you because the less stress you have and the better so the whole aim of this lesson is to give you things that actually work the first of all I'm not going to give you any tips or tricks because tips or tricks do not work and tips or tricks these are the the best way to prolong your IELTS journey to make it long to make it hard so that you will waste money like how much money is it these days to do the test how much money are you wasting every time you fail the test by looking for tips and tricks you think that you're saving time you think it's going to be easy but in the long run tips and tricks do not work you're not going to trick your way to go from about 7 to about 8 on the listening test you're just not going to be able to do that and so none of the things I'm going to teach you today I'll have to do with any tips or tricks why they don't work if they worked I would tell you but they don't so number one stop looking for tips and tricks they do not work number two listen to English every day now this sounds really really obvious this sounds like something that you know of course I'm going to do that but very few students who I actually work with on a one-to-one basis and when they have problem with listening normally the first thing I say is well how many hours a day do you listen to English normally the answer comes back hours per day like I don't listen to even one hour per week if you count up the number of minutes you spend each week listening I I have lots of podcast apps on my phone and they some of them are really cool they can tell you how much you're listening and I think the new iPhones or the new update for iPhone tells you how much time you spend on on each app and there's a lot of apps that do tell you that if you add up all that the time you spend listening to podcasts or YouTube or you know look watching TED Talks it's a lot less than you think and but it's so easy these days to listen to English every day because we carry it with us on our phone absolute you could watch TV you could listen to the radio you could listen to podcasts you could watch YouTube you could listen the TED Talks and I'm sure that there are hundreds of other ways that you could listen to English if you listen live in an english-speaking country go ahead and speak to people and listen to how people and talk the key here is is not which TV show will help you improve your IELTS score or which podcast will help you improve your IELTS score which TED talks it's about consistently doing it every single day 10 minutes a day or 30 minutes a day or one hour a day is way more powerful and more impactful than panicking a week before your test and listening to 12 hours of podcasts or 12 hours of TED Talks the week before your test it's not gonna going to help you and also the great thing about everything being on our mobiles everything being on our phones is you can listen to this anywhere on the way to work on the way back from work at lunchtime while you're looking after your kids while they're doing something else you could just have your your your podcast running in the background I was with my little boy on Saturday and sitting in a park with him and he was running around with lots of little other boys I could have been doing anything in that time I just took the time just to sit and watch him play but I could have been doing anything there are multiple times per day where you have time bring your phone with you bring your whatever you use to listen to it and that's going to help you with that if you want to get a band aid and you should be listening to a range of different accents a range of different topics you can find all of these out on YouTube you can find these on podcasts you can run a range of different accents like keep it simple if you want to improve like say you're unfamiliar with the Scottish accent listen to a podcast with Scottish people talking or if you are unfamiliar with the Canadian accent go and listen to Canadian news or Canadian YouTube channel or a Canadian talking and a TED talk just keep it simple just do it and it will help you listen to a range of different topics and obviously podcasts have every single topic in the world TED talks of a great range of topics especially topics that come up on the IELTS test and so have a look at those and they are going to help you also look at multiple people speaking on one person speaking and so for example TED Talks normally it's just one person speaking that's going to be tested on the listening test and podcasts or radio or TV could be one person most likely it's going to be multiple people speaking it's testing different skills we're listening to one person I'm listening to multiple people you know cutting in and stopping and asking questions and different accents that's completely different from just listening to one person speaking so you should be listening to a range of topics accents and one person versus multiple people also when you're listening we just did this lesson on Facebook before we did it here and there's a great question came up from from one of the girls who was listening and she said that I listened to podcast for two hours every single day and my spelling is still still terrible I said okay what you need to do is actively listen so what does actively listen to me oh I should go there so for example if you were terrible at spelling and you really needed to improve your spelling active listening would mean that when you're listening to something and you hear a word that you're unsure of the spelling you would write it down and then you would check the spelling in a dictionary and you would keep doing that until it improved your listening active listening is when you focus on one thing at a time and do something while you're listening so let's say you wanted to improve your vocabulary what you would do is listen to a podcast or something like that or YouTube or TED talk and when you hear a word you don't know write that we're done right all the information you need to remember that word and then review that word so actively listening means you're doing something to help improve a specific area that could be vocabulary grammar accent pronunciation all of these different things that you can focus on one of those is spelling so as I just said you could focus on your spelling and actively listen to improve your spelling spelling is really really important for IELTS listening for a few different reasons and number one normally people mess up spelling not because they are bad at spelling it's because they're careless they think about when you're writing an email or text message to someone and even as a native English speaker I make spelling mistakes when I'm writing a text message or writing an email and it's not because I don't know the spelling of that word it's because I'm not very careful when I'm doing letter I'm in a rush or I'm distracted or I'm not focused what you need to do is make sure that you are when you're transferring your answers over in the last part of the test when you have that time at the end to transfer your answers over make sure your spelling is 100% spot-on because if you get even one letter or two place it is wrong it doesn't matter if it's very close or it's just to two letters the wrong way it's going to be wrong and also be very harsh when you're practicing so when you are practicing you're going to have to give yourself a score by checking your answers often when people check those answers if the spelling is a little off they'll give themself a mark they they will ticket and they will give himself that correct answer you need to be realistic you need to know your real score before you do the test I was working with one student a couple of weeks ago and they said to me every time I do the test I get like a seven or sorry an eight or eight point five when I'm practicing at home but when I do the test it's like seven seven point five so they were getting really high scores and practice lower scores on test day I wasn't sure what this was and then I looked at their their actual answers and multiple answers were spelled incorrectly but they were giving themself the correct answer there like god it's just a little bit off that doesn't matter on the test they're going to give you a incorrect answer for that so be harsh and record your mistakes get yourself a notebook just a plain notebook it could be any sort of notebook you want and it doesn't matter how expensive the notebook is the important thing is that you have just a blank notebook to record your mistakes and then once you finish doing all your practice review it and you'll start to see patterns and and then you can correct all your mistakes and that's really good going to help you also what you can do is when you make spelling mistakes take a photo and take a photo of the mistakes file it away in a folder on your your iPhone or whatever and you can then check it and then review your spelling mistakes and that's going to help you number four it's not just a listening test it is also a reading test a thinking test a spelling test a grammar test and a vocabulary test the testing all of these different things I'd say these two are really really important reading and thinking and this comes down to focus often you'll get students who are not used to listening to English and there you have to listen for a very long time you don't think it's that long but when you are there on test day it does feel like a very long time and it is a big challenge for a lot of people and what happens is you lose focus and then you don't read the questions you don't think about what the answer might be and then the the listening tract starts and you get lost and you get panicked and everything just snowballs and you're in a you're in a bad place you should be reading the questions before the recording starts you should be thinking about the questions you should be thinking about what the answers might be before the recording starts and that is really really going to help you spelling we've also covered grammar there are certain types of questions where you're going to have to be aware of grammar and if the grammar is not correct you're going to get a wrong answer also being aware of grammar and thinking about grammar is going to help you predict the answer and get the correct answer ultimately and also as with the reading test and the most important thing is that you improve your vocabulary for many of you it doesn't matter how many strategies or tips you listen to if your vocabulary is not good enough you're never going to get a band-aid and for listening or reading think about what a band-aid means bond eight means that you're just below a native English speaker so think about how the audacity that you have thinking that you're going to go from someone just learning a language to nearly native English speaker level by just learning some tips and tricks that that's outrageous to think that in order to improve your level you're going to have to improve your vocabulary there's no other way around it so number five improve your vocabulary combine this with daily listening daily reading practice so if you're listening to a podcast get your notebook get a notebook that you just use for vocabulary so you're listening to a podcast or a TED talk or something you hear a new word or phrase write that down add in what you're going to do add in collocations antonyms synonyms pronunciation example sentences and then at the end of six weeks six months you will have a huge number of new words which you should just go and review and you'll be improving your vocabulary and listening at the same time you can do that with your reading as well when you're reading try and improve your vocabulary by trying to you know note down new words and reviewing them so record them in your book and review them regularly I'm not sure slowly but surely you're going to improve your vocabulary you're not going to improve your vocabulary by looking at lists you're not going to improve your vocabulary by noting down the translation to your own language you've just it's a waste of time and you will improve your vocabulary by listening out for new words writing them down and then reviewing them number six have a strategy there are many different types of questions so you're probably more familiar with the reading questions like true false not given multiple choice matching headings summary completion but for each of the different types of four on the listening test there are different types of questions each one test if a range of different skills and they all follow the same format so if we go on how to look on my website let's go to IELTS listening listening so you'll see here summary completion form filling multiple choice labeling a map or plan these are all very different types of questions and each of them requires a different strategy so if we go to multiple choice here looks like three different types common problems strategy so at the bottom here we have a nine-point strategy so you don't have to follow this exact strategy you can come up with your own strategy but the key is that you want to not be real like become a robot on test day but just do things automatically on test day so you're going to have to do so many different things on test day that you want to be using a strategy like this so that when you see these different types of questions you know exactly what to do and that's going to mean that you can focus on getting the correct answer or more and and they all follow the same format so you can just learn that strategy and apply it doesn't mean that the strategy will guarantee did you get the correct answer but it's really going to help your chances of getting the correct answer number seven practiced strategically so practice alone will not help M will actually waste time so many of you think that in order to improve to a bond date and listening you just need to do lots and lots of practice wrong you're wrong you're not going to help could I learn how to drive by just driving around a racetrack again and again and again and again no you can't just practice practice tests you have to practice strategically and because number one it's not improving your score but number two it's wasting your time if you did lots of students that I speak to is say I've done all 13 of the IELTS you know the Cambridge IELTS practice series like that's that's a long time for listening alone that would be what 4050 hours of your time if you didn't think strategically about this and do some crucial things then you've just wasted your time and you wouldn't believe the numbers that I speak to that are really really angry with the fact that they have spent all that time practicing and their scores aren't improving it really comes down to this practicing strategically what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a whole lesson on how to practice strategically for listening on Wednesday the same time Wednesday join me here on YouTube and we'll go through that I wanted to do a separate lesson because it's so important and I really think a lot of you are gonna benefit from that one on Wednesday so let me see if there are any questions first stop talking and listen to Chris he is giving us simple you give good advice yeah because it's really difficult for me to find questions when all of you are just having little conversations yeah I can't find most of the answers because um good question which book is useful for listening you don't need a book for listening you need to listen for listening and a book is not really going to help you with listening and any advice on multiple choice questions yep if you go to my website go to if you go to I else listening so if you go to the main the main home page you'll find writing speaking reading listening vocabulary so you want help with listening it's going here and scroll down it's just a listening guide and then multiple choice questions go in there pretty simple okay will I be starting a $1 listening challenge no we're probably never going to do we know I can say a hundred percent we're never going to do $1 listening challenge and we probably will never do another $1 challenge ever again hopefully not good question should we learn explanation of words rather than translation yes of course translation is not going to help you doesn't help you understand the meaning of the word how the word is used in a sentence the grammar the collocations the synonyms antonyms it's really a waste of time any good teacher if you are in their classroom they should burn like just come do not allow any translation should be a hundred percent in English someone has asked five times how to answer multiple choice questions and I took you through war to find it on the website so maybe listen and watch okay thank you for all your questions last question was and from somebody who said why is section three really really difficult well the way that you should think about it is the first questions not easy but not very difficult and the questions get more and more difficult as you go through the listening test and so a good way to think about it is the first section the first easier questions don't ignore those questions those are low-hanging fruit they're easy questions get those in the bank and then that will enable you to go through the test and be very very confident that you've got the answer to those questions and then as you go through the end don't worry if you get one or two wrong at the end because even if you need a band-aid you can still get a few wrong and you're not looking for perfection what what happens with many students on the listening and the reading test is if they get any questions wrong they get really angry with themselves and they think they're going to fail and say it will add up all your marks won't walk did you get obon date it's like it's band-aid enough yes but I want to get every question correct you're not going to get every question correct and the key is to practice strategically and we will look at that on Wednesday and I'll show you how you can learn from your mistakes and improve and through practice thank you very much guys hope did you enjoyed that video I'm sorry that I can't answer all your questions if you go to my website IELTS advantage you'll find help with writing task 1 that's 2 speaking reading listening just go in there have a look and you'll get the answers to your questions if you need my personal help you can email me chris at il-2 advantage com I don't work with very many students I only work with students who I want to work with and who I think I can help and so if you want to send me an email we can talk about whether you fit that bill if you need any other help go to the website you very much guys if you enjoyed this video please subscribe we'll be making another one on Wednesday and another one on Friday all about listening and Wednesday we'll be looking at how to practice strategically and on Friday we'll focus on how to focus I'm on the test and keep your focused during the test thank you very much guys hope that you enjoyed that video let me know what you think about it in the comments if you have any questions let me know thank you bye bye

Channel: IELTS Advantage

Views: 595,247

Keywords: IELTS, IELTS Advantage, IELTS Test, English, live lesson, Band 7, subscribe, www.ieltsadvantage.com, IELTS Writing, Chris Pell, lesson, IELTS listening, Practice tests, tips, ielts listening, international english language testing system, grammar, listening, ielts tips, How to get a Band 8 in IELTS listening, live lessons on Listening, IELTS Listening most important, IELTS Listening practice tests, IELTS Listening tips, How to crack IELTS Listening, New Listening Practice Tests

Id: kHTnAx6f-j0

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 08 2018