How to Improve Your Grammar in the IELTS Test - Mini-Course: Day 1

either Chris here from IELTS advantage with another week and another mini course so one of the most effective ways to improve your overall IELTS scores is to improve your grammar grammar accounts for 25% of your total writing mark 25% of your total speaking mark and it's also important for reading and listening as well so in order to help you guys as much as possible what we're going to do this week is we're going to do a three-day mini grammar course so let's have a look at what we're going to be doing this week so day 1 we're going to look at high grammar actually affects your score because as I already mentioned it's 25% of your total writing and your total speaking score but it also can't affect other areas as well and other unexpected areas so we'll talk about that and we'll talk a lot about how the examiners think about grammar and what they're looking for and especially for the writing test and we'll also talk about a lot of myths surrounding grammar and so we'll talk about mistakes and how that affects your score structures tenses complex sentences simple sentences all of those different things because there's a huge number of myths surrounding grammar are there are as there are in other parts of the test as well so in order to understand what to do you need to understand what not to do first so be looking at that today day 2 we've got a lot of requests for help with simple versus complex sentences what is the difference between those how do you make complex sentences how do they affect your score and so we'll be looking a lot about that and not tomorrow Wednesday so Wednesday at midday on Facebook here we'll be having a look at that life and then on day 3 which is Friday at about 11 a.m. do it a little bit earlier on Friday we're going to look at a grammar Improvement Plan so this is a plan that you can use at home for free by yourself and you can work on improving your grammar so we'll give you that it's a very simple strategic plan that you can use so we'll give you that on Friday okay so like further ado let's have a look at how grammar actually affects your score so it's 20 five percent of speaking 25% of writing let's have a look at writing so here we have task achievement 25 percent coherence and cohesion 25 percent lexical resource which is vocabulary 25 percent and grammatical range and accuracy which is 25 percent so these are the things that the examiners are going to be thinking about when they're looking at your task 1 and task 2 writing so a very very common thing that we see is a student might have band 7 task achievement they've answered the question pretty well their coherence and cohesion is it around upon 7 and their vocabulary is it a run about 7 what we see a lot is with grammar it might be a tab on 6 so what a lot of students think is if I get these 3 a tab on 7 it doesn't matter if my grammar isn't that good because I'm going to get about 7 overall wrong that's probably not going to happen let me explain why that might have what that probably will not happen so if you are getting a band 6 for grammar that means you're making a lot of grammar mistakes they pretty much every sentence has some sort of grammatical error in it and what happens is if you're reading someone who is at a bad set about six level the writing is quite difficult to understand because there are there are many many many grammatical mistakes in it there could be some major mistakes but there's going to be a lot of small mistakes there so what happens is someone who is at about six the coherence and cohesion it can actually cause your coherence and cohesion to drop down into a bound six as well why is that because coherence means can you read the essay or can you read the task one response and understand what it's saying is it clear is it easy to understand if your grammar is at about six it can cause the essay to drop down also if your your grammar is poor you can also start making a lot of vocabulary mistakes all right see if you don't understand how the word operates in a sentence then it can lead to even more grammar mistakes sometimes it can also lead to the the the examiner looking at the that you're tossed to or you're toss one response and just not knowing whether you answered the question or not because of grammatical errors that's that's rare more common is these two so it's very very very common for grammatical range and accuracy to cause people to get a 6.5 overall because they're getting a 6 for grammar but then it might bring one of these two or both down to that level so that's one of the reasons why 6.5 is a very very very common score not and there could be many many reasons for that but for a lot of people it is related to grammar and so that's what we're going to work on this week and to help you because if your your grammar is going to go up to this level then you're more likely to be getting a 7 or above if you want to get a 7 you should be aiming for all of these across the board to be out of seven because you don't know what's going to happen on exam day if you want a band-aid aim for all of them to be at a bad date you shouldn't go in and think I might get away or I might be lucky you know try and move everything up to the level that you're aiming for and then you know you'll get the score that you need on exam day so what are the examiners looking for when it comes to when it comes to grammar it's really important that you understand this hopefully this is quite clear I've made this like a a seesaw all right so I I'm sure and playgrounds where you will you live you have one kid here I'm one kid here it's like a little seesaw and it goes like this this is here for a reason so the examiner is looking for two principal things on there related all right then that's why we have the seesaw one is range so range of structures range of tenses range of complex sentences reign simple sentences complex sentences compound sentences so that's one of the things that they're going to be looking for however the other thing that they're going to be looking for is accuracy all right how many mistakes are you making one of the ways that they will look at that is error free and error free sentences exactly how it sounds is a sentence with no grammatical errors in it completely free of any errors whatsoever related to grammar on this the more error free sentences you have in general higher the score that you're going to get but why are we why do we have this seesaw why is there relationship between this because what happens to a lot of students and the reason why they get about five or about six for grammar is they put too much emphasis on range so they try and really increase the complexity of their sentences in include lots and lots of complex sentences and complex tenses and a huge wide range of tenses and structures and everything and when they try and do that their accuracy goes down all right so it doesn't matter if you have this massive wide range of tenses and complex sentences and structures if you're making lots and lots and lots and lots of mistakes so in general as students try and increase complexity their accuracy will go down and that's why we have the seesaw here and the interesting thing about this is for most students there's nothing wrong with their range because as you write an essay you're going to be using a variety of structures and variety of tenses and a mix of simple and compound and complex sentences that normally takes care of itself what that's the thing that students really struggle with and the reason why make 95% of students fail to get the score they need in grammar is because of accuracy just making too many mistakes and this is the thing that's very obvious whenever you get you know a student's work you look at it you'll just see mistake mistake mistake mistake mistake mistake and it's very it's impossible to give them a high score for grammar and as high schooler overall if there are mistakes and multiple multiple mistakes in nearly every sentence that they have if you're looking for a seven or above you should be aiming for the majority of your sentences so more than 50% of your sentences should have no or grammatical errors in them whatsoever and by trying to focus on range you're making that really really really difficult you know so that's something to bear in mind it's something that is the key to understanding how to improve your grammar is this diagram so let's talk about myths all right and there's a car here for a reason all right so if you do your driving test in the UK I don't know what it's like in in different countries but in the UK I think you're allowed to pass the test you have to it's less than is it 16 minor faults is that correct 16 16 yeah so you can make less than 16 minor faults on the driving test a minor fault is something like not checking your mirror or crossing your hands or something like that and no major faults so a major fault would be speeding or not looking at a junction something like that and this is exactly not exactly the same but very very very very close to high the IELTS test is marked in terms of grammar myth number one your grammar must be perfect that's wrong all right in order to get a bound 7 you can actually make quite a few small grammar mistakes in the same way that if you were doing the driving test in the UK you could make like 15 how many did I make 9 I think I think I had 9 minor faults and I still passed no major faults which we'll get onto in a second but it's very very similar to to the IELTS writing test and especially the speaking test in the speaking test you can make quite a few grammatical errors of grammatical mistakes and still get quite a high bar score all right does that mean that you can make you know lots and lots and lots of mistakes and still get a high score no but the I mean IELTS realise that you are an english learner you will make mistakes even a someone at a bar nine does make little mistakes from time to time they're just slips but they are there so often you will show a student a really good essay like about 9:00 bound 8's a I'm gonna look at it and they'll see a couple of small mistakes and they'll say oh that's terrible they made a small mistake that's about five that's not the way to think about it especially for this the speaking test if you try and be perfect your fluency is going to really suffer and you won't be able to actually speak because you will be thinking of the perfect sentence and it will just destroy your fluency with the writing test you are if you are trying to aim for perfection you're never going to get there even a benign student is not going is never really going to get perfect grammar you're not aiming for perfection you're aiming to use grammar as a tool to help you clearly communicate through writing so don't aim for perfection try and improve your grammar as much as you can and minimize mistakes as much as you can but only isn't as much as you can remember this little analogy for the driving test and you should also try and avoid major grammatical errors so what are major grammatical errors major grammatical errors are errors that stop the reader or the person listening understanding what you mean smaller grammatical errors like countable uncountable nouns mistakes preposition mistakes article mistakes they can all kind up and but if you're only making a couple of them in your whole essay or you know a few of them during your whole speaking test not such a big deal because they don't affect communication myth number two you must use as many different structures as possible in order to get a high score this is not true alright so again using the analogy of the driving test when you're doing the driving test in the UK they take you out on the public roads and you're going to be turning left you're going to be turning right you're going to be going down to a roads one-way roads you're going to be at e junctions you're going to at level crossings you're going to come across a whole range of different scenarios so you don't immediately begin the driving test and start going left and right and doing all these crazy things because you naturally will be doing them throughout the course of a I think it's like a 40 minute test or a 30 minute test the same is true when you're doing the speaking test you will naturally use a range of different structures because you're going to be speaking for about 15 minutes in the writing test you're going to be using naturally a range of different structures so you shouldn't focus on that you should focus on answering the questions and you will naturally use a range of structures in exactly the same way as in the driving test you just follow what the examiner says go where they want you to go and you will naturally do that but you focus in on the in the driving test on minimizing mistakes not making any major mistakes not making any minor mistakes or as few minor mistakes as possible so what happens is if you try and use as many different structures as possible two things happen a you don't answer the question try do that doing that even in your native language try like just writing an essay or writing a letter or an email to someone and try and use as many different grammatical structures as possible like it it's like a it's like something a challenge you would set for yourself or something like that a silly challenge but it's just really difficult to do you will naturally do that you will naturally use a range of structures focus more on accuracy myth number three you must use as many different tenses as possible this happened actually on Friday I was to working with one of my VIP students and I asked her a really simple question what's your job and she started talking about her job just saying I work here and explaining what she did and that was all fine her fluency was great her pronunciation was great her vocabulary was great her grammar was great and then she stopped and started going on about but in the past when I was a little girl I wanted to be this and then she started talking about and in the future I want to be this and she's her fluency started going downhill her pronunciation actually suffered as well she was making lots of grammatical errors and I stopped her and said what are you doing why did you not just answer the question normally and she said oh my old teacher said that I must use every single tenth in every single answer in the speaking test like no you don't do not have to do that you use the tense that it's that's appropriate to use in the circumstance that you're using it in exactly the same as in real life you will use the appropriate tense when you're using it if you're talking about the past you'll use past tenses if you're talking about the present you'll use present tenses if you're talking about the future you'll use future structures so don't go into the test thinking I need to use as many different tenses as possible to go into the test thinking I need to clearly communicate with the examiner and answer the questions effectively and very much like number two you will use a range of different tenses especially in the speaking test they will ask you questions about the past questions about the future questions that ask you to connect the past to the present so you're going to be naturally using all of those different tenses so don't go in thinking that it's a tenses competition and it's a speaking test myth number four all of your sentences need to be complex and if you don't have every single sentence if if it's not complex you're not going to get a high score again not true there it's not a test of how many complex sentences or how long you can write a sentence it's in the writing test can you clearly answer the question clearly communicate in writing speaking can you clearly communicate with the examiner through opening your mouth and words coming right some sentences will be simple some of them will be compound some of them will be complex as long as you're displaying a range of different sentences and you'll be fine again focus on accuracy it doesn't matter if you write a you know fifty word sentence if it has 50 mistakes in it like that doesn't really make any sense whatsoever myth number five memorization is useful skill so memorizing bits of sentences or you know half a sentence or a full sentence and then adding those in to your essay it's not a memorization test it's an English test all right memorization is a useless skill why they're not testing memorization if it was a memorization test you could just learn you know memorize lots of different grammar structures and kick them into your essays and into your speaking test and you get a high score that doesn't work because grammar is just a - alright just like having a hammer and a saw and a drill memorization is like giving tools to someone who doesn't know how to use them like me I don't know how to use a hammer or a saw drill I'm completely useless when it comes to DIY or and you know using my hands in any way and so if you gave these tools to me I wouldn't know what to do with them I'd make a complete mess of it this is exactly what happens when you try and memorize structures and tenses and complex sentences you don't know how to use them so what's going to happen going back to our little seesaw here you're going to try to use all of these things put that this up and then your accuracy is going to go down always remember that it is a balance between those two things and your range is probably fine you will naturally use a wide enough range your problem I can really guarantee it because I work with students every single day if you have this problem is accuracy so hopefully you find those not useful it's really important that you understand the relationship between range and accuracy and you understand the myths and that they are myths because if you are going into the test believing things that are not true and giving the examiners things that they're not even looking for then obviously you're going to be in trouble so the first stage is knowing the truth knowing what actually they are looking for so tomorrow or not tomorrow Wednesday we're going to look at simple versus complex sentences this really does help you improve your writing and by understanding the difference between these and it also helps you it really helps you understand the relationship between range and accuracy as well and then day three we're gonna help you improve your accuracy as we've mentioned over and over and over again that is the key to improving your grammar score so we're gonna help you improve your accuracy by giving you this grammar improvement plan and that will be on Friday at about 11 a.m. and this will be widens day at about midday and as always with these live lessons if you join us on Facebook if you have questions I can interact with you and everything and what we're gonna do is a lot of you every time we do these many courses you say oh that's great but what about writing what about speaking what about reading what about listening and we have a fundamentals course which covers all of those and teaches you the absolute fundamentals it's totally free so we'll put a link in the comments and and we'll put it if you're watching on YouTube you'll get it in the description if you're watching on Facebook we'll put it up and in the description there and if you need help comment help in the in the comment and we will get in touch with you and try and help you out as much as possible and if you need any help you can email us we can't guarantee that we will be able to give you like individual help because we've listened to people emailing us and every day but we'll try our best if you do need and help saying that you're feel free to send us an email I'm gonna try and help you out with that alright so gonna take my my broken phone I dropped my phone the glass is broken and and see if you guys have any questions about grammar and every time we put up like myths or things that a lot of people think are true but there aren't actually true we'll get a lot of people disagreeing with us that's totally fine feel free to disagree as much as you want and I'm happy to answer any of your questions or anything like that Banjo says Chris we need example sentences reflecting component of each teaching there will be on Wednesday and will be doing today - we're doing simple complex sentences I'm gonna put up a lot of example sentences not so that you can copy them and but so you can learn from them and see exactly what I mean so we'll do that a lot of you need help so you're saying help that's fine we'll get in touch with you we'll send you a message if you have any questions feel free to put in the comments I will get back to you if we have time what are you saying you'd help with punctuation we will be showing you how to improve every aspect of your grammar on day three we're gonna give you that grammar and proven plan so can you help me start preparation yeah and send me an email or comment help and we'll get in touch with you we've got a lot of free resources and that we can just send to you and you can use those for free or we have paid em services as well and so send us a message and we'll figure out what's the best thing for you Miriam how many complex sentences we need to write to get about seven that's the wrong way to think about it Uschi you shouldn't go into the test thinking I need to write X number of complex sentences because you're just making it way more difficult than it needs to you shouldn't go in thinking I need to write this number of anything this because you're making it way more difficult and it's a very unnatural way to write anything so you should go into the the test thinking principally I need to answer the question and I need to use grammar in a way that is clear and is accurate and you will naturally use a range of simple compound and complex sentences and by doing that and we'll talk more about that on Wednesday Chris give me your whatsapp number no the reason why I don't give my phone number what's up number and stuff hey I don't have what's up on my phone but B I'm not gonna give my personal phone number I to a million people and that would be a bit crazy but there's my email address and that's a lot more manageable do the quality of ideas increase the marks it depends what you mean by quality and the two things that you should be thinking about when you're thinking of ideas or a few things you should be thinking about number one is it relevant to the question number two does it answer the specific question and number three can you develop it by explaining how it answers the question and support it with examples those are the things you should be thinking about there is no hierarchy of ideas it's not like if you use this idea you'll get about nine if you use this idea you'll get about seven and if you use this that's not the way it works like there are a hundred ideas that could get you about nine like it depends what you do with those ideas Mohammed could you suggest a book for IELTS grammar and there's a book by I think Raymond Murphy um so mu are PHY Murphy if you go to Amazon or whatever you use in your country I think it has intermediate grammar upper intermediate grammar advanced grammar those those books are good however grammar books most people they're good to refer to the grammar but they're not actually going to help you improve your grammar and we'll talk about that on Friday and because you need to be doing you need to be practicing you need to be getting feedback in order to really improve your grammar obviously a book doesn't really do that do you have a review centers here in the Philippines no I don't we're a hundred percent online because we believe that online education is is much much better than being in a face-to-face classroom with thirty or forty other students please can you create a whatsapp group no I don't have what's up all right so thank you very much guys I'm gonna leave it there and know a lot of you have questions that I couldn't get to just time as always and we've got a lot of people wanting to get in touch with us and not enough time but thank you very much and hopefully you enjoyed that and on Wednesday we will have lesson two and then Friday lesson three thank you very much guys and if you need anything feel free to get in touch bye bye

Channel: IELTS Advantage

Views: 139,110

Rating: 4.9222097 out of 5

Keywords: IELTS, IELTS Advantage, Chris Pell, www.ieltsadvantage.com, IELTS Grammar Mini-Course: Day 1, grammar, ielts grammar, international english language testing system, ielts test, english, ielts speaking, ielts writing, subscribe, lesson, learn english, ielts tips, ielts listening, band 7, in this lesson, english grammar, ielts preparation, vocabulary, live lesson, how to, pronunciation, listening, speaking, How to Improve Your Grammar in the IELTS Test Mini-Course: Day 1, the ielts test

Id: o1-tfOjZjnw

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 04 2019