Welcome to 2021. And welcome to E2 Language,
E2 IELTS. I'm Alex and my name is Jay. And in this video, we're going to talk about
passing IELTS in 2021. You can do it and we are going to help you. We sure are. Okay,
so let's say I'm taking IELTS 2021. Again? Again. And let's say I might be taking it next
week, or I'm taking in three months or six months, or I'm thinking like even a year away. What should
I do, Alex? Well, you've got to set some goals. So the first thing that you should do is
download our 2021 goal setter in the description below. I'm going to use that you're going to use
that to set your goals and achieve them. Good. So what things do I need to consider in order
to pass my IELTS test? So we've got to think about when? When is your test? Yep. What
scores do you need? Where are you going? What are your scores? Or what's your level now?
Right. Where are you? Yeah, right. And then you've got to set some more micro goals as well. What are
you going to do every day to improve your reading to improve your listening. What if I just leave
it until the day before the test before I prepare? I'll pretend you didn't say
that. Don't do that. Please. There s plenty of time. There are plenty
of resources. You can do it. Yeah. Alright, so in this video, we're going
to take you through all four parts of the test. And for each part of the test, we're
going to give you two critical tips. Okay, so stick around and watch this. Now, why do
I actually want to pass an IELTS test? Yeah, I think that's the biggest thing to keep in
mind in your preparation, because it can be tough. Yeah. mentally tough. Its challenging.
Physically tough. Yeah, you got to keep in mind what's at the end? Why are you taking the
test? What's your goal? And how is life going to change? When you open those results and you've
got your score? Hang on to that through your test preparation that is going to keep you alive.
That's what it's all about. Where are we going? Okay, let's get started. Writing. Tip number
one is get to know all the possible IELTS task types. This first tip is all about familiarity
with the test. Now if you're taking IELTS academic task one is 150 words or more. But there are lots
of different possibilities. You might get a line graph, you might get a bar chart, you might get
four pie charts, a process diagram. On test day, you don't want to get a surprise when you open up
or when you click on the screen. You want to have seen that before and have written that before as
well. I think that's a really good tip. In fact, no surprises is what you want to expect or have on
test day. The worst thing that can happen on test day is you open up that test booklet and go oh
my god, what's that? I've never seen that before. Yeah. And of course, you have to be flexible,
like task one. Yeah, there's a there's a number of tasks that you might get if you're doing general
formal, semi formal, or informal. But within that you never know the question or the topic. But
you know that you're going to write a letter. And if you've studied those three different types, you
don't need to ask yourself questions like how do I start? How do I end? Can I use contractions?
All of those questions should be answered in your test preparation. So how do you do it?
Well, we've got some videos below to show you. But of course, the best place is on our
learning platform on E2Language.com. Yeah, so one of the things that we do at E2language.com
is we have live classes that happen every day, twice a day with expert teachers. And there
will be no surprises if you prepare with us on your test day. Okay. And on the self-study
section, all the different task types are there, mixed charts, processes, maps, all of that. I
remember, because I've taken the IELTS five times. One of them, I took it and I did Academic
Writing Task one and there were three line graphs with two lines each and the line graphs and I
was like WHAT. Yeah. And I didn't prepare for that. And we weren't mentioned my score. good
lesson. That was them. That's right. Not 2021. Okay, so tip number one, get to know all the
task types. Writing tip number two in task two, answer the question. Alright, this might seem
obvious that when you get your essay question that you actually read it carefully and answer
the question, but you'd be surprised people don't. What people tend to do is they have some memorised
essay in their head that they're just going to sort of write on test day, and it's not going to
hit the first criterion, which is? Task response. Tasks response means that you actually answer
the question fully. So on test day, you really need to spend a little bit of time clearing your
mind reading the question, making sure you've understood all of it. And your essay needs to
address every single part of that question. Okay. Let's have a look at an example, shall we? So this
is a question from the Cambridge book, thirteen. We'll just read it quickly. It says living in a
country where you have to speak a foreign language can cause serious social problems, as well as
practical problems. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement? Okay, so some
important features of this question serious social problems. Can you think of an example? Okay, so
miscommunications while shopping? Yep. Yeah. Or miscommunicate communications in a healthcare
setting? Or these are more specific examples. But yeah, making friends at university or
something like that. Serious social problem. Practical problems. Maybe you're having
trouble booking a room in a hotel or buying a ticket on the train. These are the
kinds of things the examiner wants to see you write about. The most important thing is
this. To what extent do you agree or disagree? Cool. So a big problem that could
happen with this essay question is that someone just writes about the social
problems. And maybe they write about how, I don't know, maybe they just don't get into that
in detail. They neglect the practical problems. Instead of to what extent they agree or disagree.
They talk about the disadvantages. For example, this is no no, no, no, no. You read that,
you read it all, you understand it all. And your essay must include all of it. Yeah,
answer that question. Answer the question. Check out the links below. There's a great podcast
that you did about this. And check out some of our sample essays as well. Yeah, actually, in
that podcast, it's really good. I spoke to two people from IDP, which is a co-owner
of the IELTS test. And these two guys were experts or are experts in IELTS and specifically
in IELTS Writing. And we spoke to them, I spoke to them about all different aspects
of IELTS writing, how to maximise your score. And one of the guys actually said that the
major problem that all anyone who struggles, the major problem is that they don't answer the
question properly or fully. So there you go. We've made our point. Made the point. Okay. To achieve
your writing goals, what are you going to do each day, and each week, until your test. write
them down on your 2021 goal sheet, it might be something like rewrite a task one and task two,
each day covering all the different task types or attending a live class or watching a live class
on E2, writing a paragraph perhaps if you're just getting started. And maybe each week, you might
want to do a practice test. Make your own goals, something that you can achieve? Yeah, I
think these are, these are great goals. With that weekly one of writing a full practice
tests, one of the things that you want to do is build up endurance, because on test day, you are
sitting there for like three hours. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. And if you're doing the writing
section last, or first, it doesn't matter, you need to build up your endurance. So especially if
you're taking the paper-based test with a pencil, and you're writing these essays, you
actually need to build up muscular strength. Yeah, it's painful. It gets painful. Yeah.
Reading. Okay, so in order to improve your reading score, you should do practice tests.
That's a good idea. But there's much more to it than that. You can, of course, find practice tests
on the internet, there's heaps floating around, just make sure they're good quality
ones. The Cambridge ones, of course, are very good. And the E2Language ones are also
very good. Just be careful of poor-quality tests, because they won't be helpful. But that's not
a tip. Is it? Okay, so imagine you're doing these practice tests, and you're aiming for,
say, 6.5, and you get 5.5 on the first one, then you do another one to get 5.5. And
again, you get 5.5. How do you actually increase your reading score, because if you're
just doing practice, test after practice test, it's not actually going to help you you're still
stuck at that particular level. So let's take a look at a couple of tips to help your reading
score. Reading tip one, grow your vocabulary. There is a really strong correlation between
how many words you know and your reading score, basically, how much you can comprehend when
you're reading. So it's a very simple equation that the more vocab you know, the higher your
band score is going to be, and it may seem daunting or overwhelming to think, okay, I'm
5.5 I need to go up to 6.5 how many words do I need to know? Luckily, we covered all of this in
another video, which you can find linked below. And in that video, I talked about what vocab
you need to learn why you need to learn it, and also importantly, how to learn it. And it's
a kind of fun thing to learn vocabulary. There's simple ways to do it like little flashcards.
There are apps that you can use as well. And basically, being around English as much as
possible. That's going to improve your vocab. But building vocab should be a really strong part
of your IELTS preparation. Yeah. Okay. What about also time management? Because that's an issue in
the reading section. So knowing lots of words is one thing, but there's a special word
called. What is it? Automaticity. Right, like automatic, you need to know these words
immediately. Like, if you're looking at a word, but you kind of know it, but you're spending
a few second thing, or what's that word? If you're doing that 100 times in the reading
test that's going to chew up a lot of time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So learning a word is not just
printing a list of words. Unfortunately, it's meeting those words a lot. It's internalising
the words producing the word so that when you're reading, you recognise that word. You don't
need to stumble around thinking about it. Yeah. Reading tip two, try the E2 paragraph by paragraph
method. So what is this E2 paragraph by paragraph method? It's wonderful. And we've got videos on
it, which you can watch on our YouTube channel, we also cover it in our live classes on E2 Language
and in our methods, videos, which we just recently updated there in the course on E2Language.com.
But essentially, the paragraph-by-paragraph method is one particular approach, particularly
useful for those longer academic passages. I won't go into it here, because you'll see the
videos linked below if you're interested. But I guess the broader point here is to try a couple
of methods if you are struggling, and if you're stuck on 5.5 5.5. And you're building your vocab
but not making progress. Yeah, maybe you need to adjust your strategy because one way doesn't suit
everybody. There's a good expression for that, I can t think of what it is. One way, different
ways to skin a cat. Yeah, something like that. I don't like that one though. Yeah its awful. Okay,
but you know, a lot of books, a lot of teachers will say you must skim the passage first.
And personally, I actually don't find that all that helpful. So I use a different method
most of the time, because I've tried a few and you should do the same. Don't use paragraph
by paragraph because I said to. Try it if it works for you. Awesome. Use it. If not try another
method. Yeah, look, I think I think these methods are really helpful. They like step-by-step
approaches to a particular question type. First of all, you need to understand the question
types. I think there are 11 different reading questions in iOS 11 or 12. Anyway, again, we've
got these methods, lessons on E2Language.com which take you through every single different question
type, and we give you these methods. So the next time you're looking at that match headings or true
false not given or whatever it is you like, is, I know how to approach this, where to look
first, what to do next, etc. And that helps. Okay, so let's set some goals for your
reading so you can improve your scores. What you want to do on a daily basis is read some
sort of article that might be sciencedaily.com, or BBC or whatever newspaper, you particularly
like. While you're reading, you might want to summarise the paragraph. Okay, so read the
paragraph. A good little tool is to then summarise it into a single sentence. Okay, get the
main idea of the paragraph in a single sentence. The other thing you need to do in order to build
your vocabulary is to create flashcards. So find five new words a day. Now you might want
to do these by theme, so by technology, or health or education, etc. That's really helpful.
And it's also helpful if you know if it's a noun or a verb or an adjective. So categorised by
theme. And by part of speech or type of word. On a weekly basis, you might
want to do a full practice test. But what's better is if you come along to
our live classes that happen every day, twice a day by an expert, taught by our expert
teachers, and we actually take you through the methods we actually do vocab building with you and
it's just sort of it just it's good motivation, actually, because there's other students in
the class. There's a teacher, it's kind of fun. It's really good. Yeah, that's it. So we've
covered so far writing and reading we've given you some suggestions for goals, but share with us
your own ideas in the comment section below. Nice. Listening. Jay, you've done the test five times.
I have. What's your overall impression or you re feeling your experience with IELTS listening?
Okay, so I think it's fine as in the audios are quite slow, they're actually quite
artificial. They speak very clearly, the accents are quite neutral, you'll get
different accents, but they're very clear. Like, you know, it's not like real spoken English where
people are blah, blah, blah, right? However, few things you need to know is one, you want to really
be familiar with the different question types. Secondly, you want to employ the tips that we're
about to tell you now. Okay, listening tip, one, read ahead. This is a really basic test
skill, a really basic listening skill as well. But it's also something that when
I was teaching in the classroom, I always saw my students sitting staring
at question one. And we do that in the live class too. I say read to question 10. I
know everybody's just looking at question one. That has massive consequences for your score,
I can promise you. The difference between just looking at question one or reading before you hear
the audio is enormous. So I know you've heard it all the time. The teacher always says read ahead,
read ahead, the audio and the test says look at questions one to seven, look at questions one to
six. Make sure that you do it. And really not just look at the questions, read the questions. I'll
show you a quick example. So you might have something like this. There's only four questions
here, but huge amount of text. And you can see, if you were just looking at question 21
and reading through A through B through C, the time will probably be up and you haven't
read question 24. So an example of read ahead, that philosophy for multiple choices, just ignore
A,B,C. But you've got to read those questions. 21, 22, 23, 24 the stem of the question. And
this same tip also applies when it comes to the breaks in the listening test. Remember
there s lots of spare time? Yes. We ll call it. That's 30 seconds here a minute there.
Yeah. And the instructions sometimes tell you now check questions like questions that you did
previously. Yeah. You should not do that. I agree. You should go forward whenever you ve done, if
you've missed something. Yeah. Just say goodbye and move forward. Yeah. Always keep your eyes and
your mind ahead. Look, it's a I should say it's quite look, I think the listening test goes for
about 13 minutes or something like that about 30 or 30. Yeah, time flies. Time does fly. I say it's
quite stressful because what you're doing is yes, it's listening. But you're doing a lot of reading
as well. Okay. And so, especially with like a multiple-choice question, you've got to quickly
read through it, then you're listening. And while you're listening, you're also reading again,
in just like parallel processing between reading, listening, reading and listening, reading and
listening. Or if you're looking at the map, you're looking at the map and listening
looking at the map listening, etc. So it's, it's full on actually, yeah.
And you don't want when you hear it, you should have already read it before that
will make life much easier. Yeah. Read ahead. Listening tip two, listen to more English.
Okay, so what you want to do, of course, in addition to learning about the questions
and doing lots of practice in our live classes, for example, is you want to listen to more English
especially if you live in a country where English is not the main language and where you don't hear
it that often. So, Alex, how do you do that? Well, it's so easy now because English is everywhere,
thanks to the internet. And thanks to things called podcasts, which are basically free radio
shows we made a video all about this you can find it in the link below. And that video explains
how to use podcasts to increase your vocabulary on the one hand, also to increase your breadth
your ideas, the number of ideas that you know and also to get familiar with spoken English like
real spoken English. Which is very different to written English of course, and as Jay said, the
IELTS listening test as you'll see in that video, comparing IELTS listening to real English
you'll notice IELTS listening is much much slower. So the more that you can
listen to real English real people speaking really quickly. IELTS listening will
become a piece of cake. A breeze. Breeze. Yeah. Let's write some goals to increase our score
in IELTS Listening. Here are some ideas every day. You could watch a TV show. Any TV show
doesn't matter, you could listen to a podcast. Or you could do five practice activities on E2
Language every week. Challenge yourself to do something like listen to a podcast and read the
transcripts. If you're enjoying watching this video and you think we are wonderful teachers,
which is true, you should click the subscribe button because we release videos nearly every
week, every week. And they're very helpful. But if you really want to practice your IELTS properly,
check out E2 language.com because only some of the stuff we do is on YouTube. All of it is on E2
Language calm and it's a way more fun there. Okay, so let's talk about speaking now, Alex, you were
an IELTS speaking examiner for how long? 10 years. 10 years. How many candidates do you think you saw
in 10 years? A lot. 1000s? Maybe? Maybe? 1000s? Yeah, a lot. Wow. So you must have seen a lot of
good performances and a lot of bad performances, right? Yes. Have you got a few tips for us?
I've got two great tips for you. Excellent. Speaking tip one, speak English a lot. This is
another obvious one, right? I'm doing a speaking test, I should practice speaking. But again,
it's something that may seem more difficult than it is perhaps you live alone, perhaps
you don't live in an English-speaking country, you may not have friends who speak English.
You can find them online, there are a lot of people who want to practice on our like Facebook
group, people are often looking for study buddies, which is great. The key is though, set it up and
commit to it. So I say all right, twice a week, this time, you know, make a little zoom
session with the person. Alternatively, come and see one of the teachers that E2 Language,
join a small group class, something like that. Or you can just talk to yourself, you can talk
to your plant, you can talk to the mirror, you can record yourself, be nice to yourself. Say nice
things to yourself. And you can practice speaking about IELTS questions, we have a video which is
below with 20 speaking topics, lots of questions under 20 speaking topics, use them. Or at the
end of the day, you can just sit on the couch, talk to your plants and tell the plant what did
you do today? How did you feel? What did you see? What did you read? Reading aloud is also
good, I think Yeah, yeah, I think yeah, that's something. It doesn't make it spontaneous,
which is a big part of it. But it can help with just that flow. Especially if you're
reading aloud, like listening to say a TED talk with a transcript and say there's a nice native
English speaker s voice that you like. So you sort of mimicking them and making sure that your
pronunciation is matching their pronunciation, you really have to pay close attention with your
ears to make sure that you what you're saying or how you're saying it matches what they're saying.
Yeah, that can be helpful. And the reason why this is so important is because when you sit down in
the speaking exam, the examiner knows immediately if you haven't been speaking English much it when
they when you say your name, I can tell that you haven't spoken English today, for example. So you
want that language to just be available and to come out really easily rather than every word that
you hear and say, being a struggle because that is going to affect your score, you really want that
flow. So even though it might be uncomfortable, at least for you know, a week before your test, try
to shut off from your own language, and just speak English. Yeah, you won't lose your own language.
Speaking tip two, practice with the criteria. Okay, so if you're an IELTS examiner, or ex IELTS
examiner, like Alex, you aren't just giving a score willy nilly, what you're doing is actually
looking at it sort of checklist or what's called the criteria, and then you're listening to the
candidate, and you're assessing the candidate according to that checklist or that criteria. And
it's quite complicated. Let's take a look. Okay, so this is what it kind of looks like. And there's
these things called band descriptors like fluency and coherence, lexical resource of vocabulary,
grammatical range and accuracy, as well as pronunciation. And you can see that there are also
numbers 9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0. Let's simplify this a little bit. If we look at this one here, fluency
and coherence means you speak without effort. You use a range of connective words, discourse
markers, you develop your sentences or your topics fully. Lexical resource is vocabulary. That means
you use the vocab precisely and flexibly. You use some less common or idiomatic vocab. And you use
paraphrasing grammatical range and accuracy means you use a range of structures, lots of different
structures and you produce them error free, those sentences are error free. Lastly, you
have pronunciation which includes intonation, emphasis and stress connected speech and
clear pronunciation. Oh my God speaking is very complicated. These are all the different
parts or elements of a good performance. So, Alex, what do I do as a candidate? Should I just
be? Should I get a tattoo? Maybe tattoo of the criteria on my arm? Yes, yes, that is the best
idea. That's my tip for the day. There is a lot to think about, definitely. And the examiner is
thinking about all of those things as you speak on test day, you shouldn't really be thinking
about that stuff at all. If you've prepared well, on test day, you were just there with your
confidence and your flow of English. But our tip was to practice with the criteria before your
test. Like from now, give some attention and some time to each individual criterion. So let's
say today we're going to do a speaking test with you or with my plants. I've got my tests on
my phone or printed out. And I'm going to do it by only I'm only going to focus on one aspect of the
criteria. So today, I might be just thinking about grammar. Okay, so I'm just thinking, what are
some of the grammatical structures I can use, maybe make a list where you can find one online
like I'm going to use five different tenses, I'm going to use a conditional, I'm going to make some
complex sentences. I'm going to use modal verbs, modal so I have a list of things. And then as I
do my speaking test, I'm sort of checking off that I've used them all or recording myself. Of course,
on test day, you're not going to do that. Because if you've concentrating on grammar yet, fluency is
going to drop, maybe vocab is going to drop. Yeah, pronunciation, you're hesitating a lot. That's
all right. This is just preparation. Yeah. But the idea is that Oh, cool. I used a conditional
there, I'm more confident using a conditional or I listened back. And I made errors with my tenses.
So, I gotta fix that up. So that next time, it happens more automatically. So, practice with
the criteria before your test. Yeah. And focus on those things that you need to work on. This is
where feedback from an expert will really help you as well. Yeah, agreed. Agree, your feedback
is critical. One of the things we offer on E2 Language, are tutorials, one on one 45-minute
tutorials with experts, who will actually do speaking practice tests with them. We also
have the mock test, which includes a one-on-one speaking mock test done on the computer via zoom.
That one's great, because you get really detailed feedback on the checklist. And even more
detailed than that from the teacher. You have to show you what you're doing well, and where
you need to improve a bit more to Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, the criteria is, is
critical. That is really what you're scored on. It's not just plucked from thin air by
the examiner, this is what it's all about. And it's also the same for writing. By the
way, writing also has a set of criteria. And you should really be understanding
how that all works. Now, you can go about doing this by yourself. Of course, if you're a
linguist or a philosopher, that might be fine. But if you're an average Joe, who just wants to
pass the test, let us do the heavy lifting in our live classes. I think that's the best idea.
Let's set some goals for speaking. Okay, so here are some possible speaking goals for you. On a
daily basis, you might just want to spend like 10 minutes a day where you speak for four minutes
on a topic, then three minutes on the same topic, then two minutes on the same topic. This will
help you to become much more coherent and precise. Of course, one of the IELTS speaking tasks is
a two-minute monologue. That's good practice. You should do a speaking test with a grammar
checklist. So as Alex mentioned before, you might want to have a list of different a
range of grammar that you can include while you're speaking. Okay, so you want to also set yourself a
weekly goal that you speak English for 30 minutes every day. And there you have it. That is our top
tips to get you started on your IELTS preparation for 2021. You can find all the links that we
talked about below. Make sure that you subscribe so you are the first to know when we release a new
video or when we're teaching live. For more help, more personal help. Join us on E2language.com.
Finally, make sure you share your goals with us in the comments below. And let's conquer
IELTS. Yeah, let s do it. Happy new year.
