How to prepare for the IELTS / TOEFL Essay (Idea Bank Mini Course), Part 1

hi everybody welcome back to right to the top i'm adam in this video series i'm going to help you guys create an idea bank for your ielts or toefl writing section preparation an idea bank is just a collection of words and topics and questions and examples and sample essays that you're going to use to help you prepare for the essay component of the exam now it's very important that you create an idea bank because this is what's going to help you prepare the most to succeed on this section of the exam now we're going to do a few things in today's video i'm going to talk about the introduction talk about why you need to create an idea bank what should be in the idea bank and we're actually going to get started and we're going to get started with the vocabulary collection i'm going to show you how to collect it what to do with it once you have it and again why it's important to do it so let's dive right into it and start with the why why do you need an idea bank keep in mind that the task one of the exam whether for the ielts toefl or the toefl ielts general is that the information is given to you in the task one the information is given to you so there's not much in terms of creative or critical thinking necessary you're observing or you're listening and reading and you're just taking what's given to you and putting it into your own words in a summary so not too stressful i would think anyway i know it's stressful for some people but the problem is the essay and what's wrong with the essays that it requires you to create produce your own ideas in order to justify a thesis you're going to be asked for an opinion you're going to have to say why you have that opinion and that includes ideas support examples arguments etc for a lot of people this is a little bit difficult to do because you might not have that much practice doing it now the reason it's important to prepare is that the essay is worth 67 of your writing score two-thirds of your writing score comes from the essay so you need to be able to create a very strong essay even if you have a very strong summary but a weak essay your score will not be very good again because of the way they break up the scoring now another problem with the writing is that a lot of people think that this is an english language exam so they're checking your grammar and vocabulary which they are of course grammar and vocabulary is part of writing it's part of speaking part of the language but what they're really checking is your ability to communicate and to communicate an idea and to make sure that your reader is convinced that you actually believe what you're saying or that you have a reason to to say what you're saying in your essay so that's where the task response and the cohesion and coherence score come into play each worth 25 collectively 50 so half your score is not grammar or vocabulary half your score is your ideas and the way you support these ideas and the way you organize these ideas which is why you have to have all of this stuff prepared a little bit in advance whenever possible now the main reasons again that you want to create an idea bank beyond the technical is what it will help you do in terms of managing yourself during the exam so one thing you will do one thing the idea bank will do is would it actually help you save time how does it help you save time well a lot of people they get to the writing section first of all they're already tired they've done the listening they've done the reading a couple of an hour and a half hour 40 minutes have already passed they're pretty tired so they're a little bit stressful now they have to start thinking about ideas to answer the essay task question or prompt and a lot of people spend too much time thinking and they don't have enough time to write properly and strongly a strong essay so this is one thing that will help is if you already have these ideas beforehand also if you don't have enough ideas you don't have enough to write about so having these ideas and extended ideas will help you write more than you make sure you get the word count remember for ielts you need at least 250 words for toefl recommended 300 or more and more is obviously going to be a little bit better for the toefl so make sure you have enough to write about now the more idea banks you create the less chance there is that you will come across an unfamiliar topic now they can ask you about pretty much anything but there are certain topics that keep coming up a lot for example education comes up a lot government comes up a lot technology comes up a lot make sure you have idea banks at least for these but even if you get something that's a little bit more rare by having prepared to think about different things in different ways you will be ready for pretty much anything so that's another advantage of the idea bank also part of the idea bank is collecting questions so once you've gone through a whole bunch of questions you won't see any more tricky questions on the exam you'll be able to look at a question understand what's being asked of you and address the the needs of the question right away also you will be able to provide good arguments you will be able to elaborate on them elaborate means build the argument or give reasons give support etc and the most important thing is you will reduce your stress remember before you start writing your essay plan your essay don't start writing until you know exactly what you're going to say and this is where people get stressed because they can't think of anything they don't know how to organize things again if you had an idea been created this will help you do that as well and i'm going to talk to you about that eventually about what to do with all the all the materials you've collected and how to prepare for for the actual writing day right the day you go write your exam so that's one thing another thing what should be in your idea bank well you should have keywords basically vocabulary and you should think about common terms these are words that will come up a lot i'm going to explain all of these different categories as we get to them you should also include subtopics which are more focused topics so again education very big topic they can't really ask you anything about education they're going to ask you something within the field of education and it's going to be a bit more specific so you're going to think about these specific topics sample questions you're going to try to get as many questions as you can examples things that you can use to support your arguments and your ideas and of course you're gonna collect sample essays and you're gonna write sample essays so let's start with the vocabulary what are you gonna do with vocabulary step one you're going to collect as many words as you possibly can then you're going to organize them into categories and i'll explain this in a moment again you're going to identify your common terms and expressions that come up a lot you're going to look for alternatives which is basically synonyms and you're going to think about words that are often confused or misused and i'll give you some examples of those as well so where do you get the vocabulary first thing you're going to do you're just going to brainstorm them you're going to take a pen paper or computer whatever you like to use and just think about the words that you can think of about this particular topic and just write down all the words that come into your brain that's what brainstorming is right now once you've thought of as many as you can start thinking about these this topic in your own language and collect all these words translate them into english and add them to your list when you've done all your thinking you can't think of any more words now you have to get into the actual search for these words you have to go looking for them and spend some time and energy looking for these words and you're going to conduct an online search now you're going to use a variety of search topics and go to google or whatever search engine you like i personally prefer google but use any search engine that works for you and think of as many key terms as you can come up with and plug them into your search engine so for example if you're looking for if you're creating an idea bank for education education vocabulary education esl words about education and so on and here there are a few to get you started now where the boring part comes in is that you're going to actually have to go through all the different websites that come up and see what words they offer you some of you them will offer you like 10 words some will give you 20. some will give you 50. you have to go through all the lists all the words that you don't already have in your list add them to your list and the more websites you get through the more rare will be the new word findings because you'll go to the next website and they'll have most of the same words the last website have had but there'll be one or two new ones take them next website one or two new ones take them and so on and so forth now there is an advantage to this because in the process of doing this you will find a lot of new and useful websites that will help you study english so you're getting basically you're killing two birds with one stone here you're building your idea bank and you're finding new resources to help you study english okay so that's the next step now if you've done all this you've done the brainstorming you've done the online search and you think you're done one more step i want you to take take some of the words that you think are important or the ones that you think might be used often and look them up in a thesaurus a thesaurus is like a dictionary except it doesn't give you definitions it gives you synonyms start collecting more words from these synonyms now if you don't have a therasaurus go to merriamwebster.com or dictionary.com these are two online dictionaries and thesaurus with thesaurus applications that you can use get more words more words more words build up as many as you possibly can now i have done an example for you okay i've created an idea bank for the topic about housing now of course you're thinking housing that's not a very common topic no it's not a very common topic but it may be something you will be asked about it has happened before so you have to be ready for anything i have also created idea banks for the more common topics but this one i've created especially for this little course so i'll tell you more about that after so in my search for words about housing i've found over 400 keywords now keep in mind a lot of you are thinking housing like house apartment you know a renter tenant landlord there's a lot more to housing than that where do you live do you live in urban area do you live in suburban area in the rural in the countryside do you live with family do you live alone do you buy a house do you rent a house a lot to think of when it comes to housing so now that you have all these words you're gonna have to put all these words into as similar headings as you possibly can you don't want to have a huge list of 400 words and try to remember the a list of random words by putting them into groups they're much easier to remember and to relate to other words right and that's why we're doing it so here are some examples of uh headings that i've come up with for example economics of housing so there are a lot of words that deal with you know the money issues that come with housing mortgage interest rates security deposit all the things that have to do with the money of having a house or an apartment or renting or buying etc accommodations different ways to talk about accommodations dwellings residents etc types of homes structure function describing how describing your house describing a building location address and also you have here compounds compounds are taking the word home or house or whatever comes up and putting them in combinations with other words homemade homework etc make sure you have a list of these but if you can't think of too many headings that's okay do the best you can but make sure that at least you have these headings people verbs and collocations these are going to be used in every essay you're going to write when it comes to people you're thinking about again tenant landlord superintendent lender at the bank all kinds of different people involved when it comes to housing verbs every sentence you write in the essay is going to have a verb in it try to have as much variety and as much precision as you can with your language and that's especially important with verbs and call locations collocations are words that work together to have a specific usage or specific meaning this includes phrasal verbs idioms etc and the compounds i just showed you before so make sure you have at least these headings and as many other ones as you possibly can now before you move on to the next part you're going to have to think about words that are going to come up often so again let's talk about education as an example the word student is almost impossible not to use when it when you're writing about education but you don't want your essay to use the word student 5 8 10 times you want to have a little bit of variety in your language if you're using the same word too many times the examiners think you just don't have enough vocabulary to use other words and your score is going down so you have pupil undergraduate high schooler and what you notice here is that your precision is getting better because you have very specific words for specific contexts so for example a student could be in kindergarten in high school in college in community college at a training seminar etc an undergraduate is only in university studying for a bachelor's degree so if that's the person you're talking about use that word rather than student to add precision to your writing and i also mentioned often confused words so think about business economics versus finances people often mix these two words up economics is more about the theory the the bigger picture so if i want to start a business i think i i have to think about the economics of doing so i have to think about the political climate i have to think about if there's a recession going on i have to think about the labor market i have to think about all these big things that have to do with the economics of running a business finances is basically the money am i going to make enough revenue to cover my costs can i pay the rent can i pay my staff all of the money issues are finances so again two very different words economical and economic people mix these up all the time these are not the same thing make sure you know the difference between these words okay let's look at housing again as an example a word that's going to come up often is tenant the person who lives in an apartment or a house and pays rent okay occupant renter leaseholder all of them can be used inhabitant doesn't necessarily means paying rent but it could be a person paying rent as well an apartment could be a flat a condominium a unit etc make sure you know the difference between house and home a house can be a home but it doesn't have to be other places other structures can also be a home and home can sometimes mean house but it doesn't have to mean house it could mean apartment as well it could mean tent as well if you're living in a tent make sure you know the difference between homemade and home grown these are two different words but the most important aspect of finding all these alternatives findings all these synonyms is to make sure that you actually use them in sentences only having lists doesn't help you because some words cannot be switched for other words in certain contexts so you have to make sure that the word works and sometimes you have to make adjustments in terms of grammar to the sentence to make that new word fit in so make sure that you're actually practicing using these words okay and the last step you're going to do in terms of vocabulary how you're going to study and practice you're going to have a whole list of words label them words that you know well words that you know somewhat you can guess them in context and words that you don't know start studying the words number two that you somehow somewhat know and move them into the number one category and lastly work on the words you don't know get to know them build your vocabulary okay and that's it for video one now what we're going to do next we're going to talk about subtopics and we're going to use all these words to get ready to think about different types of ideas okay i'll see you next video and uh if you have any questions about this video don't forget to ask me below in the comments section see you soon

Channel: Write to the Top

Views: 6,822

Keywords: IELTS, TOEFL, English writing, writing skills, language test, English vocabulary, how to write an essay, essay writing, test tips, English test, English skills, IELTS high score, TOEFL high score, language skills, how to write in English, IELTS high band, IELTS writing, TOEFL writing, academic writing, academic vocabulary, IELTS prep, IELTS test, TOEFL test, IELTS success, TOEFL success

Id: XW1tP-Bq1cQ

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021