How to Prepare for a Band 9 in IELTS Speaking

hi do you ever wonder how band 9 students prepare for ielts speaking well i've been chatting to some amazing people who have got a band 8 and even a band 9 on ielts speaking and i want to share with you how they did it so come inside let's find out [Music] so my name is keith i run the website www.keithspeakingacademy.com i'm helping you well speak better english give better answers and get a higher score on ielts speaking so today i'm going to tell you how band 8 and 9 students prepare for ielts speaking what is it they do what is it they think i think it's really interesting to find out i'm going to couple that together with the band descriptors and what they tell us what ielts tells us about being a band nine now a word of warning this really is for advanced level students i think if you're a band seven it's a great goal to go for eight if you're a band five your goal should be the next level up band six so this really is for high level students so if you're a band five or six turn off now go away well you can stay if you like it might be interesting to find out right how these um higher level students who achieve band nine how they think and what they do now in addition today i have a bit of a special surprise because i am going to do today together with our or my no hour it's our video with our sponsors cambly we're gonna do a lucky draw now if you don't know cambly they are a fantastic online platform where you can find native english-speaking teachers to give you one-to-one classes you can practice speaking practice your fluency practice your ielts questions and answers if you like it's a great quality platform i love what they do they very kindly sponsored this video they also have online courses which you can access on your computer on your phone even for ielts as well so definitely worth looking into but today cambly and myself we are going to do a lucky draw and choose one person and that could be you to get 60 minutes for free on cambly which could be fantastic right you could do a mock test you could do some practice you could ask lots of questions to the teacher that you choose now this is for not only new users but existing users on cambly all you have to do right is comment on this video tell me something that you agree with or disagree with if you like or something that you like in the video just leave a comment all of the names will be taken put into a big box span around spun around and i'll choose a name and that person will win the lucky draw 60 minutes free on cambly with a native english speaker that's it great so i'll remind you at the end right now let's jump in to how ben 9 students prepare for ielts speaking so first of all oh by the way just one thing right as i've chatted to these students um what i'm about to tell you is not true for a hundred percent everybody at band 8 and band 9. um you know students can be a little bit different they don't all do the same things but what i've got here are themes or things that i notice are repeated and come up again and again and that the majority of your band 8 and band 9 students do these are the traits the characteristics and behaviors of most of them but of course not all of them right so not everybody is exactly the same fortunately okay number one is band nine students realize that ielts is not about tips and tricks right now this is important because a lot of students at lower levels are looking for the quick fix the tip or the trick that can get them that extra level up your band 9 student realizes it's about learning a language they're in it for the long haul or the long game right it takes a long time to learn a language years and years and years so whilst you may pick up a few tips and tricks on the way really it's about learning english over a long period of time now what often happens is students go onto facebook and they see somebody say oh i just got a band eight and i prepared for three weeks but what they don't know is that that person has spent years and years and years working and developing their english level up to the band-aid level and has probably just spent three weeks looking at exam technique so you have to be really careful when you look at what other people are doing don't compare yourself to others right compare you to you several months ago and see the progress that you've made but that's the first tip so that's the first thing right that band 9 students realize it's about learning english and most of them grow to love language learning it doesn't become a chore or a headache but it becomes a thing of love a passion that they can see has benefits for the rest of their life the second point which is slightly related is that bandline students are patient right as i mentioned it takes years to learn a language right i mean take british people if you took a 12 year old british person they probably wouldn't get a nine on ielts speaking for fluency grammar hopefully pronunciation maybe but vocabulary probably not because they've not had their full education in english yet and they won't have all the ideas to talk about global warming and things like that um so you know that's 12 years for a native speaker so it's a lifelong investment so you do have to be patient and what's more the language learning curve right for a beginner is in a short space of time you improve very quickly as you get better and better you need a huge investment of time to increase or improve just a little bit and that's the challenge the advance and the intermediate and the advanced students face they have to put in a lot of time for a little reward so you must be patient number three is that band 9 students understand fluency is developed over time so i have noticed that band 9 students practice regularly persistently over a long long period of time and they don't just practice with the same person they will practice with lots of different people maybe it's friends family members teachers other students but they look for ways to get into communities and practice with different people the thing with practicing and developing fluency is it is very much like a tree or a plant growing up right it's nature it takes time to do it you need to water it to look after it to let it grow slowly you can't push a plant to grow more quickly it just doesn't work and it's the same with your fluency it takes time to come out naturally but if you keep doing the practice then you get there and this is a key thing i think that band-aid and by nine students do they understand the need to practice continually over a long period of time number four is the band nine students chunk chunk that means they don't just focus on words but they speak in chunks a chunk of language is a group of words that you speak or pronounce together and band-aid and band nine students do this they do it all the time and they have done it so much that it becomes a natural part of their speaking so they will combine shorter chunks and longer chunks together as and when it feels natural to do so so what do i mean exactly if you've not heard about chunks well because you don't get chunks very much in the course books or the reference books but it is the fundamental part of language learning and language speaking so let me give you an example right let's take here this phrase most days i get up in the morning at around seven i have breakfast and then i catch the bus to work now i'm speaking that a bit robotic and word by word but what your band 9 student does and understands is the need to chunk now they may say something like this most days i get up in the morning at around seven i have breakfast and then i catch the bus to work right you can see there are different chunks most days i get up in the morning at around seven i have breakfast and then i catch the bus to work and these chunks are developed by often by just substitution practice right at around seven at around eight at around nine it's just one sound i get up in the morning i get up at seven i get up late very very simple chunks and this is the key to fluency and language learning in my humble opinion so band-aid and band 9 students understand the need to practice this as much as they can and they do a lot of imitation i've noticed of native speakers now whether that's listening to a video or a podcast and just repeating these chunks as you hear them i get up in the morning repeating i get up in the morning i get up in the morning repeating these chunks a lot and quite a few students spoke to me of trying to imitate the native speaker not only the sounds but they the way they speak some students imitate the gesture or the mannerisms others try and get the intonation but to try and get what one student called an english speaking mode english speaking mode is this feeling of how english speakers speak and talk partly to do with behavior or culture intonation but all of that feeling is something that they try to imitate and they do that a lot okay next one up most band 9 students usually have a plan for a certain period of time they have an organized way of study something they're going to do at a certain time each day and it's planned out at least for the the time that they have decided to prepare for the ielts speaking so i noticed plans were a common theme for those high level students and many students said that they make a conscious decision to invest time in study rather than play hmm that's a good point let's move on the next point is most band 9 students understand what is expected of them and what i mean by that is that they look at these the ielts band descriptors although often they actually get a teacher to go through it with them and to explain exactly what it means that there there is a public version but it's not crystal clear every time but they take time to understand what they are evaluated on and where they need to focus most band 8 and 9 students have taken at least one mock test with a teacher um in order to identify their weaknesses or their strengths and to know where to focus in order to move up to the level that they require next one up um band 9 students invest a lot of time building up vocabulary and this is really interesting because as i mentioned before with the 12 year old british kid whilst your fluency pronunciation and um grammar take a long time to develop vocabulary is the one area you can probably make the biggest impact in the shortest time if you remember my interview with steve steve kaufman um the polyglot right he said it's all about vocabulary in fact there are whole teaching methods the lexical method based on vocabulary saying that you know the grammar is all well and good but the key to language learning is vocabulary and how does your band 9 student develop that vocabulary well the first thing is without a doubt is reading and listening to a wide range of resources not just the course book that they have not just the same films on netflix but a wide range of things so videos on how to cook on how to train a dog on on places to have a picnic magazine articles on furniture interior design scientific the scientific journal on space exploration reading and listening really widely widely is so important not just for the topic but for the vocabulary that's connected to that topic so this huge desire to read and listen widely is very very common and your band 9 student understands that you need to learn vocabulary in context so just having word lists is okay but you need to have got them from a context so you know how to use them and it seems they have this kind of curiosity this sense of being curious about language vocabulary and the different ways it can be used and one of the things i have talked a lot about with band-aid students is um the different uh connotation or nuance that a word can have and it's so important to understand the nuance because that again is where your the examiner will differentiate a seven and eight or nine is that do they really understand the nuance or the connotation of different words so for example when a student came up to me like several weeks ago and said keith it's great um your videos are really notorious i said what what's happened why he said well no that's great i mean you're becoming famous i said whoa wait a minute what do you mean famous or notorious and he said well it's the same ah i said no it's not notorious has a very negative connotation that's when you're famous for something bad that you've done famous is just neutral oh so different words have different connotations right and i have okay a pet hate i'm going to tell you about when i started using instagram i honestly didn't like it because i kept seeing lots and lots of these memes showing synonyms a bit like this one right so synonyms curious nosy old ancient right well okay they may be synonyms but the big problem is it doesn't take into account the context and the connotation right you can't say i bumped into an ancient man in the street right it's an old man ancient has a different connotation we use that normally for buildings for example or if i'm out with my wife and we're shopping and she's being very careful with her money i may i may say oh you're being thrifty today but whoa whoa beside if i say you're being stingy today because that is not a synonym well yes it means you're saving and being careful but stingy has such a negative connotation um i'd get into real trouble if i said that thrifty has a positive connotation so although synonyms are useful if they're out of context and if you don't know the connotation you're going to get into more trouble so your band 8 and 9 students are curious about connotation and learning connotations and the best way is through context oh yes and making mistakes make lots of mistakes and you start to learn how to use them correctly let's move on next up i think it's number eight um band nine students know that seeing a word is not the same as knowing a word so it's one thing to see a word and to know the meaning right you recognize it but that is not the same as being able to use it successfully and your band 8 and 9 students understand the different levels or stages you go through in learning vocabulary you have to see it you have to start using it you have to make mistakes with it you have to make mistakes so you can learn how to use it properly so mistakes are great you know and advanced level students will embrace mistakes and will be happy to make lots of mistakes as a part of the learning process i've also noticed you know successful students usually keep vocabulary records and at a band 9 it's most of the time monolingual so it's in english without translation so they're keeping records in english definitions in english examples of course in english and also they learn by theme they often group lang vocabulary words and lexical items by theme to help them connect them and learn them in a better way and so in order to reach the highest stage of knowing vocabulary they need to activate it and they will spend time practicing practicing practicing substitution drills um different contexts just practicing to activate the language and building up that flexibility which is really another key thing about band 8 and 9 is being able to use the language the chunks of language flexibly right so memorizing is not good but memorizing chunks that then you can move and change and put in different orders yes absolutely that's what it's all about next most band 9 students invest in their study and not just invest time but invest money right it's amazing i look at the the books and materials and things that they have that most band 8 9 students have bought a course they've bought reference books course books dictionaries reference books on collocations and idioms quite a lot or a significant investment and i think again i mean this is certainly my case is that it's to see this language learning as a lifetime investment something that you're going to benefit for you know the whole of your future life it's worth investing in the next one is that band 9 students build flexibility i did mention this before the key to language learning is flexibility at an advanced level so one thing they told me they do is that they repeat the answers to questions but giving a different answer so they'll take the same question for example do you have any hobbies and they will give different answers so they'll answer four or five times but a different answer each time do you have any hobbies yes i love cooking i really enjoy cooking at the weekends when i get some free time yes i'm a big fan of cooking i love to go into the kitchen at the weekends and rustle up a new dish try my hand at some new recipes you know just to really relax and enjoy good food and so on and so on building that flexibility it's a great it's a great activity right just take a question and give different answers every time now an interesting thing that several students did is that they said they practiced making up stories and they said that they became aware that quite a few questions in ielts were a bit strange and they've got no real experience about it so they made up stories to talk about that but they didn't just make up the stories they practiced making up stories so that if come the test they were hit with a completely unknown topic they were used to making up stories and to talking about things that were just imagined interesting right probably a good exam strategy next one up van line students are good at noticing and this is well researched actually that the value of noticing in language learning you know most successful language learners are able to notice patterns they notice grammatical patterns they notice vocabulary patterns and they notice how language is used in different contexts it's a really important skill to build up but a very valuable one so for example you may know that when we say i'm interested in something the preposition is in right i'm interested in this but you may be listening to the radio does anybody listen to the radio anymore i do you may be listening to a podcast and all of a sudden you hear somebody said oh i'm fascinated by this area of science and you think oh that's interesting i'm interested in but i'm fascinated by right and you notice and you make a note that curiosity and noticing patterns or grammar or vocabulary um it's really important like noticing collocations right which are key with language learning right i noticed this when i was learning chinese i was listening to somebody one day and they said to me keith and i thought oh that's interesting and what it meant literally was today big rain is falling and i thought that's interesting in chinese they say big rain in english we would say um well it's raining heavily or there is some heavy rain today heavy rain but in chinese it's down big rain and just noticing right that is the first step to learning really deeply the language now the next one this is interesting this is something i recommend a lot and i was surprised and pleased i wasn't surprised i was extremely pleased that actually bandline students do this and that is to record themselves a lot of students record themselves quite a lot to listen back and to improve fluency grammar vocabulary use pronunciation all different aspects and some students even listen you know they go through this cycle two or three times to get better and better of course i think that the reason this works really well is you're getting feedback so when you have a teacher say oh that's not right it should be like this when you're listening to your recording of you it's the same you're getting feedback going oh that's not right i shouldn't have said that i should say this so that feedback you can get from recording yourself now the next one i'm including although only some band 9 students say they do this um and it's about grammar i think actually a lot of advanced level students in in the test they don't think too much about grammar they just go with the flow they get into a flow and they start speaking and they just let it come out however i thought it was interesting that a few people said that they actually so practice using complex grammar so they take certain complex grammatical structures and they look for opportunities to use it in their practice now as a teacher i also think this is an interesting practice technique but i i would emphasize that if you find it easier just to speak naturally and get into the flow then do that but if you want to practice this you can so here's a few examples right let's take the third conditional right is a more complex tense if i had known that you were going to go i wouldn't have gone no no um but if i had known i wouldn't have right so i think especially in part two when you're thinking of stories events and describing activities um you may be looking for a way to use that kind of structure another one is the present perfect and present perfect with modals as well right so for example i've been to paris um oh it must have been about four years ago right so i have been to paris it must have been about four years ago so you can take that structure i have done something it must have been a go right interesting another one just for you is the past perfect i had never been there before right i've been to paris i had never been there before um so that structure i had never um before i had never done that before i had never taken one before so using that past perfect to describe something that happened before the point of the story in the past is is interesting so you can take these kind of templates complex grammatical structures and look for ways to integrate them into your part two talks or stories yes you can you don't have to but you can next up right we're at the last one phew um band 9 students are prepared to identify and work on ironing out pronunciation issues so ironing is not ironing the clothes ironing out is to make something smooth or better so we all have pronunciation problems um and especially certain languages will have a particular problem because of their own mother tongue band 9 students will identify that problem and spend a lot of time sorting it out because the big problem is you you have something called fossilized mistakes which is a mistake or a pronunciation feature that you've done for so many years it's become like a fossil stuck in the rock you can't change it but you have to because if you want a band 8 let's have a look at the band descriptors right this is band 8 uses a wide range of pronunciation features sustains flexible use of with only occasional lapses so you have to be able to use it sustain its use with just one or two mistakes but if you're repeating these pronunciation mistakes again and again through a 15-minute test well 11 to 14 minutes then you're gonna be in trouble right you're not gonna get a band eight so spending time the best way i think is either through a mock test or with a teacher who says listen you know that you're saying it's not right and you need to fix that and then really working on it through repetition recording yourself practicing maybe do a pronunciation course if there's a lot of different areas to look at don't worry about accent right notice that the product the band descriptors say l1 accent has a minimal effect on intelligibility so your mother tongue accent will be there that's fine so long as it doesn't affect your intelligibility how you are understood right my friends that's it i think we've had like 110 different things that band 9 students do quite a lot i'm very very interesting again this is not everybody but this is what a lot of your band-aid band 9 advanced students do so there's something to learn right some of these you may want to pick up and start doing yourself now then let me take a moment to remind you of two things two things bad connotation good connotation go and ask a british man if you don't know that um two things is the first one is just to remind you my fluency course fluency for ielts speaking is up and live it's on udemy the link is down below if you're looking to improve your fluency go and check it out it may be what you need and the second thing much more exciting is the lucky draw together with cambly who are sponsoring this video and thank you very much cambly it's this online platform where you can find native english speaking teachers to help you improve well practice and improve your speaking you can record your one-to-one sessions there's even even translation in the chat when you're chatting to each other and there are courses that they have as well but more important is that we are doing a lucky draw so all you need to do is to comment on this video tell me something that you learned or liked or even disliked or agreed or disagreed with just give me a comment make it interesting um and everybody who comments will go into the big pot or the big hat for the lucky draw you have got two days to do this so today is sunday first of november happy halloween by the way um you've got two days so bye tuesday the 3rd of november at 10 o'clock in the morning spanish time it'll close i'll stop the competition i'll take all the names and i will let you know through the community tab and who the winner is also through my facebook group and obviously i will uh contact that person or get them to contact me one way or another we will find ourselves in the ethernet and you will win 60 minutes of free camberly time with the teacher of your choice that's it guys thank you very very much for watching today's video i hope it has been an interesting useful and alerting experience as well as a bit of fun for you if you're taking the test in the coming days best of luck to you and if you've enjoyed the video please do remember to subscribe turn on notifications remember to comment for the lucky draw and i will see you very very soon take care now cheerio [Music]

Channel: English Speaking Success

Views: 178,127

Keywords: ielts speaking, ielts speaking success, ielts keith, ielts speaking 2020, ielts speaking band, ielts speaking band 9, band 9 ielts speaking, tips ielts speaking, ielts speaking tips, ielts speaking tips and tricks, ielts speaking tips band 9, ielts speaking tips and tricks for band 9, ielts speaking test tips for band 9, keith speaking academy

Id: vOuzWhv5yPc

Length: 32min 12sec (1932 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020