How to Improve Your Grammar in the IELTS Test - Mini-Course: Day 3

hey there Chris here and welcome to day three of our IELTS grammar mini course so make sure that you check out day 1 and day 2 you'll find them either on Facebook or YouTube there's something really really important information in there but I think this one is going to have the biggest impact on scores because we're going to show you exactly what to do to improve your grammar and specifically how to improve the accuracy of your grammar we talked a lot in lessons 1 & 2 but the difference between range and accuracy and I told you that the most challenging thing for students is more accuracy than range so this is all to do with how to improve the accuracy of your grammar so what are we going to do in this lesson we're gonna look at the single biggest mistake that students make that we see every single day because people email us every day saying you know how can I improve my grammar and they go away and they do this big mistake and then they come back they haven't improved we're going to give you a little bit of a talk on strategy and how to think strategically about improving your grammar and then we're going to go into step by step how to improve your grammar so the single biggest mistake that we see is trying to improve your grammar by reading a whole grammar book so we get I'd say 10 to 20 emails a day from students and that just goes something like this hi Chris tell me how to improve my grammar and we actually give them this grammar improvement plan and then they reply and they say I don't want that will you just tell me a grammar book and they go away and they read the whole grammar book and then they email us after they fail the test again and they say why didn't I improve my grammar by reading this whole grammar book I'm not saying that grammar books are not useful and we will actually include using in grammar books in the plan but just sitting down with a whole grammar book and trying to read it it's kind of like trying to improve your vocabulary by reading a whole dictionary for one that's very very boring you're not going to get through a whole grammar book in one go you're going to lose focus because it is incredibly boring and and also I'm going to show you in a second you need to be more strategic than just getting a whole grammar book I'm reading the whole thing on because it's a big waste of time if you actually do that so let's look at an analogy alright so imagine you go to the doctors and you say I feel unwell alright so the doctor wouldn't say to you oh well you feel unwell just you know go at the back and we'll shoot you in the head and that would be the end of it no what they would do is they were trying to figure out the part of your body or the system or exactly what is wrong with you so imagine you have a problem with your liver alright imagine you drink too much alcohol they're not going to try and work on your teeth they're not going to try and work on your eyes they're not going to try and work on your skin or your heart the principle you're going to focus on the liver because that is the actual problem so what a lot of people do is they think that improving their grammar the best way to do that is to read the whole grammar book you need to be a lot more strategic about that in the same way that a doctor would be strategic and find out exactly what is wrong with you so let's say I go into the doctors when I say I'm feeling really unwell the first thing they would do is identify what the actual problem is to the actual problem is my liver and then they would tell me what to do so they would say quit drinking they would say lose some fat maybe maybe have my liver is too fatty and then they maybe say exercise to lose some loose some fat for my liver but then once they've identified that and they've told me what to do it's up to me to then go and do these things so I have to quit drinking I have to lose fat by exercising and eating more healthy and if I don't do these things this is not going to fix anything it's going to I'm going to remain sick so if you just read grammar book but you don't actually do anything with that grammar book you don't actually do any practice or actually try and fix anything or learn the actual rules or just sitting reading a grammar book and not really thinking about it it's exactly the same as going to the doctor and them telling you what to do and you're not doing it and we'll come back to this metaphor at the end so step one just as going to the doctor then and finding out what is actually wrong with you the first stage the first step in the improvement plan is identify your main weaknesses there's no point in trying to improve every area of grammar and this is not students fault for because a lot of this comes from textbooks and courses if you go to a textbook what they do is they don't tell you your specific areas of weakness they'll just teach you everything about grammar if you go to a course in your local area then it's a grammar course or a general English course they won't often tell you exactly what you need to work on and just focus on that they'll teach you everything to do with grammar and a lot of the time that's a waste of your time especially in the context of IELTS because you there are certain areas of grammar and I don't know what those are for you but it's probably one of these could be a verb subject agreement tenses articles conditionals prepositions countable uncountable lines punctuation you need to figure out which of these areas it can could be other areas but most of the time it's one of these or two of these or three of these which of these areas is the main problem and then you're going to attack that problem just in the same way as if you went to the doctor you're not going to try and improve everything unless you're incredibly sick you're going to improve one or two areas that are actually causing the problem so the first stage to improve your IELTS grammar scores is to identify the exact areas of weakness what do you have a problem with you could be aware of this yourself or you can get like a friend who's very good at English or a native English speaker or a teacher just to look at your writing or to you know look at your or listen to you speaking and they should be able to identify pretty quickly what the problems are with the students that I work with just listening to them for you know one or two minutes or looking at one essay you can identify what their main issues are so let's have a look at this set these two sentences to debt to show you to demonstrate why this is a problem so I just literally took a book off my shelf a random book and this was the first the first two sentences and from this book so some revolutions begin with a gunshot others with a party this one kicked off on a Friday night in downtown Athens in 415 BCE so imagine that I'm writing this sentence but I have a big problem with articles so here's an article here's an article here's an article okay so most sentences have articles in them imagine I have a problem with articles and I don't know how to use them most of my sentences are going to have mistakes in them all right so that's a major problem imagine that I have a problem with prepositions again multiple prepositions in just two random sentences if you had a problem with prepositions most of your sentences would have problems and there's so many other areas of grammar that's just two out of these imagine you have a problem with punctuation so here we are so those are just three areas imagine you really struggle with those three areas articles prepositions and punctuation you would have multiple multiple mistakes in multiple sentences you are not going to be getting a seven or above in your writing or your speaking if that was the case so what would we do we would attack those areas so let's say for example you need to work on this you need to work on this and you need to work on this but you're pretty good at this you're pretty good at this you're pretty good at this that's no problem and that's no problem so what we've done is instead of focusing on everything we're just targeting our weak areas in exactly the same way that a doctor would treat a patient they would attack the weak areas or treat the weak areas and that is what you're gonna do that is the first step step two learn the rules of that grammar grammar is simply the rules or the law of a language all right that's all it is so it's not very interesting it's not very sexy he's not very you know fun but it that's what it is it is the law of the language it is the rules of the language but luckily rules can be learned all right lock the law of something can be learned it is pretty easy to do it you just have to put the work in and do it I'm a former lawyer I can tell you that it is not that complicated you just have to sit down and learn the rules of something and there is a huge amount of online resources waiting for you British consul has some great and free resources and just breaking down the rules and in particular areas of grammar and all you have to do is look at them or you can go and get a good grammar book most grammar books will be pretty much exactly the same because they're talking about the exactly the same thing the rules of that grammar another way to think about it is to use logic IFTTT some of you will know what this means if this then that it's a really good way to think about a programming language if you're a programmer and this is a good way to think about it for example you could apply this to articles do I need an article before a9 if you don't zero article if you do then it's going to be either definite article the or indefinite article there could be aa or could be an within these there's so many if this then that for example if it was United Kingdom alright that is a group of nations so you go to put that the United Kingdom because that's the rules the United States the Philippines or if you are going to let's say I'm going to see a movie there is a rule on why I say app movie instead of the movie or zero articles and you can break it down into this kind of logical way of thinking thing thinking about things or just look at the rules and it's not terribly exciting but it has to be done so again looking at this why let's say we're looking at articles again why are we going to use this one here why why here there any other articles so why are these the indefinite article uh instead of and why is it instead of the why is it zero article there are rules definite rules that you can look up and reference that will tell you why that is you could do it not in two seconds by googling it googling the rules of that I'm thinking about it and that's what you have to do I'm afraid and again not terribly exciting but it's there for you if you want to learn it and what happens is a lot of people who are frustrated with learning grammar the main issue is they just don't want to learn the rules they want to learn a quick fix or get a quick like a hack or a shortcut there's no way of doing that you can't immediately learn all the rules of a specific area of grammar but by you know learning some quick trick you just have to sit down and work the Mike step 3 practice those rules that's just the first step sitting down and unfitting out what the rules are then all you have to practice them because if you don't practice them you won't be able to use them because when it's not testing your knowledge of all the rules its testing your ability to use those rules I need luckily you'll find a huge number of free practice activities online ask Google don't ask me I'm not Google Google knows a lot more than me ask Google and go and find article practice activities preposition practice activities present tense past tense whatever you want to learn just put it into Google and you'll be able to find it it's pretty easy step 4 produce try and produce error free sentences so you're going to learn the rules then you're gonna practice those using practice activities but then you need to produce full sentences using that area of grammar if it's something like articles or prepositions or punctuation pretty much every sentence is going to contain them so it's all you have to do is produce sentences so you can do this when you're doing your writing practice or your speaking practice and if you don't do that you're never going to be able to do the thing on test day because it's remember it's not a knowledge test it's a doing test can you produce the actual grammar in sentences so you need to work on that in step 5 feedback alright so when you produce the sentence are you using that area of grammar correctly and you can use self correction so you could one thing that you could do is use your phone and just literally every phone these days has a recording option download an app that allows you to record your voice and get some practice questions and then listen back and self-correct those areas of grammar or you can do a essay under exam conditions and then look back and try and figure out what the mistakes are or you can hire a teacher or you could use you know a friend or a family member who is a very high level English learner or a native English speaker if you know one of them to give you feedback on that but the key is to view each mistake as an opportunity every mistake that you make is an opportunity for you to improve grammar you should see mistakes as a really good thing so we often work with with students and we send them like a full report on their grammar on our grammar course when somebody joins that we get them to write us an essay and then we go through and we tell them every single mistake that they made I don't know how the students when they get that report like every sentence has multiple mistakes and they're like oh my god I'm never going to get better and I'm terrible it's like no this is great now you know exactly what is wrong and now you can learn from those mistakes and improve them so here is a grammar improvement plan identify your weaknesses once you have identified those areas of grammar that you need to work on it could be one could be two could be three could be four but try and may be limited to the maximum three or four because you don't want to you know look try and learn everything normally people have one or two areas of grammar that they they really struggle with and they need to work on learn the roof free for you online you can find that by googling it or you can get a grammar book number three practice again loads of free practice material online and in books as well produce produce sentences with that grammar and get feedback and learn from errors alright one thing I just add do not use artificial intelligence like grammarly or something like that to try and correct your own grammar Lee is for native English speakers who know when they've made a mistake grammarly cannot tell you why you made that mistake and help you figure out why you did that and that's not really useful and again you can self correct the best way is to actually get a teacher to help you with that you know you wouldn't try and fix your own car you wouldn't try and like if you went to the doctor you go to a doctor if you had a medical problem why would you try and fix your own grammar if you can hire someone to help you with that so exactly the same we'll go back to this imagine I go to the doctor and there's something there is nothing wrong with my liver hopefully but imagine I do and I say that I'm really sick first of all they would identify that the problem is here then I would learn what to do the doctor would tell me what I need to do then I would need to do those things and then a few weeks or a few months later I would go back to the doctor and they would say he didn't you didn't stop drinking or he didn't do this or well done you did then you would get feedback and you can apply that system exactly the same way to your grammar or pretty much any any other part of language so hopefully you enjoyed that mini grammar course and if you didn't watch lesson 1 and/or lesson 2 feel free to go back and and please do email me in a few weeks or a few months after you have implemented that grammar improvement plan it's always great to hear people who hear from people who do actually put these things into place and actually do them but the key guys is actually doing it you would not believe the number of people who we give this system to and then they do nothing with it alright there's no point in watching any of these videos the key if you don't do anything it is very very simple anybody can do that anybody it's free alright there's no barriers but it's not easy there are no easy ways to learn grammar and that's what you have to do so thank you very much guys and it was a pleasure teaching you this week and if you need anything feel free to get in touch with us there's my email either myself or one of my team we'll get back to you if we have time and and if you have any questions about grammar or anything like that feel free to post in comments thank you very much guys and see you soon boy

Channel: IELTS Advantage

Views: 36,702

Keywords: IELTS, IELTS Advantage, Chris Pell, www.ieltsadvantage.com, grammar, IELTS grammar course, IELTS grammar, how to, Improve Your Grammar, IELTS Test, ielts listening, ielts listening test, international english language testing system, ielts writing, subscribe, lesson, english grammar, ielts preparation, How to Improve Your Grammar in the IELTS Test - Mini-Course: Day 3, band 7, in this lesson, listening ielts practice, ielts 2019, tips, live lesson, ielts 2018

Id: ODGzi-TaKVY

Length: 19min 21sec (1161 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 08 2019