IELTS Myths & Misconceptions | Don't Make THESE Mistakes in Your IELTS Test

hi everyone chris here from ielts advantage with a quite a special video today uh what we're going to do in this video is introduce you to our team so we have some of our great ielts experts who work for ielts advantage with us today we have damien we have david and we have michelle and what we thought we'd do is to let you guys understand the myths and the misconceptions surrounding ielts because what we find at ielts advantages improving your score is as much about unlearning some things and stop doing some things that a lot of students do as much as learning new things and learn improving your skills because there's so many myths and misconceptions about the ielts test and we're going to talk uh about a number of them today and if you are making these mistakes and it's not normally your fault it's because you've read it on the internet or someone has taught you this you this could be the main reason why you're failing the test and it's also about focus as well focusing on the things that will actually improve your score and ignoring the things that will not improve your score but before we get into the myths and the misconceptions surrounding ielts can we start off by just introducing ourselves a little bit and i think people probably know who i am i'm chris pell i'm the founder of ielts advantage and i've been teaching ielts for more years than i can actually remember at least 10 years i think michelle can you introduce yourself to everyone hi everybody my name is michelle i am originally from canada that's where i grew up but now i live in england and i've been an english teacher for almost 20 years and an ielts teacher for about six years i used to be an examiner i was an examiner when i lived in saudi arabia so i've lived in quite a few different countries and i've had the privilege of teaching students from lots of different countries and uh that's me excellent thanks michelle david hi everybody uh my name is david i've been teaching english again like michelle almost for 20 years i've been teaching ielts for the past eight years i have been an ielts examiner in asia both in indonesia and in vietnam however i now settle back in wales in the uk working for ielts advantage and i really love helping people reach their goals thanks david damien hi my name is damian um i'm originally from north wales but i currently live in the south of spain i've been a teacher for about 16 years so since yes since 2006 um i've been an ielts teacher since about 2012 so similar to david about eight years um i've taught um students from all around the world um it's actually i actually get surprised when i find a new country a nationality from a new country it's really interesting to me to help people and meet people around the world and to achieve their goals i have been helping people um get their ielts scores since about 2012 and i've also helped students um get onto academic courses and i've worked for the university of manchester and seeing the results of that journey and when people are undertaking their masters courses there thanks me excellent thanks guys so to the people watching students watching it's very rare for you to have what we probably have nearly 100 years or 80 years of experience uh teaching english just on this video and having examiners to tell you what is right about the test and what is wrong about the test those misconceptions so it's a great opportunity for you to dispel some of those myths and really focus on on what matters so let's start off with michelle michelle what would you like to start off by talking about so some students are a bit nervous when they go into the speaking test um for lots of reasons but one of the reasons is um they believe that they can't ask the examiner any questions during the test and that's actually not true so not only can you ask the examiner questions about what a word means or to repeat what they've said it doesn't affect your score so i've had lots of students in the past that i've been helping prepare and i can see when we're practicing that they haven't understood the question and they're reluctant even just in the classroom to ask me to say it again or to ask for the meaning of the words and i think it's really important for students to know that it doesn't affect your score at all so um in any part of the test if there's a word that you don't understand or you don't know you can ask you know what does what does that word mean or what what is this word and the examiner will give you a very short answer uh and you can also ask the examiner to repeat it and sometimes students like to get a very you know make a very long question say i'm very sorry i couldn't understand that could you say it and you don't have to make a very long question you can just say two words and it's really easy say again and you have rising intonation say again and it's really quick it doesn't take any time it doesn't interrupt the test and the examiner will just repeat the question for you and it does not affect your score at all and you made a really good point earlier that now that we're in a different situation in the world that some examiners might be wearing masks and do you think that would have an effect on students might put them off or might make them uncomfortable how could they deal with that well i think it is important to know that your examiner might be wearing a mask but certainly they're going to be aware that when when somebody can't see their mouth it's going to make it a little bit harder to understand because we watch people's lips and that actually helps us more than we think so i know that certainly if i was examining i would enunciate extra clearly to help the candidate and the examiner doesn't want to make it more difficult for you they don't want to trick you they don't want to make it more difficult so they will be doing that for yourself if you're going to wear a mask also just be aware that the examiner can't see your lips as well so just enunciate you know clearly and the examiner is going to be listening extra carefully to try to catch what you're saying so yes it can make you feel a little bit uncomfortable you might want to get used to wearing a mask if you're not used to wearing a mask or talking with the mask so you get used to how it feels because it is different isn't it when you kind of you know smell your own breath when you're talking somebody brush your teeth before before you're gonna take the test if you wear a mask but you know we're all in this together and we're gonna do what we can to help each other sort of you know and keep each other safe and that's really the most important thing right now yeah brush your teeth before going into bring your toothbrush to the center good good advice michelle because i yeah i think one of the complaints that we get a lot from students um would be that they felt a little bit intimidated by the examiner because the examiner might not have been not unfriendly but not overly friendly to them um do you mean david what would you advise students in in that context where a student feels that the examiner is not being friendly or not are not helping them get give their best score in fact this is a question that many students ask and again it's kind of related to the body language between the the candidate and the examiner a lot of candidates often get put off or distracted by the examiners because the examiners are quite strict they are i can't quite think of a word here formal um there might be yeah because the examiners are very formal um the candidates often think they have to be the same and eye contact and things like this are very important however again related to the masks eye contact body language is not important so when you walk into that room with the examiner try not to think about what the examiner is feeling try not to think about the pressure in the room the mask just think about the questions your english and clarity so body language eye contact again this will not affect your score just think about giving clear answers yeah i think i think it's actually called mirroring where when you meet someone you mirror you you replicate their body language and their tone and everything so that's a really really good point that the examiner might be focusing on their job and being very formal and very rigid and not being overly friendly and that might affect the student by intimidating them but it also might affect the student by encouraging them to speak in that kind of overly formal robotic way giving it is that what what the examiners are looking for like a robotic formal academic delivery um in the speaking test in fact chris they're looking for the exact opposite yeah they're looking for clear natural english yeah so if that's what you can produce that's fantastic don't feel as though you need to be as formal as the examiners don't feel you need to give high level vocab and structures like like the examiners clarity is king the the the tip that i always give to students when the speaking test is just pretend you're speaking to a friend like just just just because i i know that's weird to like go in and somebody might be from a different country from you and a different background and it's a really high pressure situation but the more you're able to speak to that person as a friend and this you know because your fluency will improve and your your pronunciation will be clearer but i've often find that vocabulary and grammar will also improve because you're if students are less nervous and they're a bit more relaxed then they tend to make fewer mistakes as well yeah i would agree with that chris um i've noticed a lot doing mock speaking tests part one students tend to make a lot of small errors errors they know they're wrong that they wouldn't normally make because at first they're a little bit nervous and so at the end in the feedback i always say you know you need to approach this that this is an informal chat with a friend yes of course you need to you know be clear and think about the language you're producing but at the same time relax this is a conversation and if you're in that mindset you're going to produce more it's dramatic language you're going to speak um you know use more connected speech you'll be connecting ideas together and everything full you know follows on from from that mindset really of being comfortable in that situation absolutely absolutely i totally agree so that's two myths dispelled already uh you can ask the examiners two questions you can say can you repeat the question um or you can say can you explain what that word means and so that should help many students out and the second one is body language body language eye contact your clothes that you're wearing hand gestures none of those things are really matter because the examiner is assessing fluency grammar vocabulary pronunciation body language eye contact hand gestures have nothing to do with those things so relax relax about those and also don't focus on those things during your preparation because it's a waste of time cool damian what's a big myth or misconception that you have found over the years working with ielts students one of the biggest is that you all the only thing you need to do is practice now this is going to sound strange the teacher's saying don't practice of course i'm not going to say that working hard practicing is essential but if you only practice you're not going to see any improvements in fact it might even make situations worse because if you're not seeing improvements you get more frustrated um you don't know what's happening and it's going to lead to bad results so what i mean by this is yes you you do let's say you write a a task 2 essay or you you do a speaking test and what you should do after that instead of just going on to the next one straight away is you need time to stop and reflect on what has happened before so that could be you know thinking about the good things you did but also the weaknesses that you've had um and then you need to be very specific about that you can't just say i've got a weakness in grammar i need to do more with grammar okay that's good but what does that mean grammar's huge there's so much grammar um you need to be very precise so instead of just jumping to a next practice you need to understand what the problem might be so let's say for example i have a general problem in grammar i need to identify what that main problem is so my biggest most frequent mistake could be let's say the use of articles in in writing or in speaking so then you need to go and do something about that you need to first understand the rules if you don't understand the rules then you can't implement them and then once you've understood that's not that's not the end you then have to do practice exercises to make sure your controlled you know exercises to make sure that you're being accurate and then you need to use them in your language when you're producing so writing or speaking whatever it might be and then that might not be the end anyway because you might be 70 sexual but you're still making some mistakes and you still need to identify what is it about those particular mistakes i'm making um you know what is what is it am i not understanding it is it a particular context that is an exception so all these thought processes are things you need to go through instead of jumping from one practice to another you need time in the middle to understand your weaknesses understand what's the problem and do something about it if you don't do that then students tend to make repeat mistakes yeah laura had a really good example um lara is another teacher who works with us and he said it's kind of like four legs on it on a chair and if you take one of the legs out you're going to fall on the ground so i think if you don't identify your weaknesses you're going to be in trouble if you don't learn the correct thing to do you're going to be in trouble if you don't practice that thing you're going to be in trouble and if you don't get feedback on that thing and i think a lot of students focus on one of those things so they'll focus a lot on practice or they will watch every youtube video and just learn learn learn to learn or they will just focus on feedback um and it's really understanding that it's part of a whole system and if you miss one part of the system out then you're going to be in trouble whatever would everyone agree with that yes absolutely cool excellent yeah and i think it's also really natural to want to avoid working on those things that we find quite difficult because nobody likes to do things that are that difficult it's like when you go to the gym right if any of you are into exercising and you go to the gym and you'll see certain people that have got maybe just like you know really well developed biceps and they're always in there doing bicep curls but it could be that their lower back is really weak which is going to you know hurt them in the long run but they don't want to work on that because they're not as strong because they go down to you know the smaller weights and it hurts and you get sore and so the thing's very natural to want to avoid you know really really focusing on your weaknesses and addressing and addressing those and it's human nature to just try to ignore those difficult things and everyone's got different areas that they struggle with and and it's often i wouldn't say that i mean it's easy but what i see a lot of people doing is they will there's two very common scenarios one they will read every single ielts book watch every single youtube video do every single course or the other type of person will do every practice test available every single cambridge practice test and then go i'm not improving and that will i could take someone a year to do all of that but what is more difficult to spending 15 minutes actually working with a teacher or by yourself and going what am i not good at like what what is the main reason why i'm being very targeted and very strategic because as damian said like and you get you guys can tell me if you agree or disagree the number of students that we work with that only have one or two problems and the rest is good like articles is a perfect example um and they might be working for years on everything except articles but once they identify that and fix that then then everything becomes better would would you would that be extreme that most people just need to fix one or two things or um no i don't think so i think that's that's absolutely right and so when a lot of students want to jump from six point five to seven that's that's the the most common goal that a lot of students have um and you think well they think if i just work a little bit harder in a general sense i it will naturally happen but it doesn't because as you say if you're not solving that problem if there aren't if there are three legs on your table it's always going to be falling over so you need to put that extra leg in and if you ignore that problem it will never go away and so i think going on from what michelle said before about the gym is really good analogy it's like it's almost like being honest with yourself and it's hard it's the hardest thing for any human to do to be honest and criticize ourselves and so but if you do that it has the biggest rewards because that is the thing that's stopping you there's nothing else absolutely absolutely it is the most difficult thing but it's the thing that gives you the most power once you once you figure it out because it a lot of people talk about shortcuts and hacks and tips and tricks that is the number one hack is be honest with yourself establish your greatest weaknesses and focus and improve those weaknesses um so excellent excellent advice i'd like to jump in there as well chris and agree with your point there that people only usually have one or two issues that they have to they have to fix and quite often i remember when i was doing ielts exams in the past i would do a speaking test with somebody now ielts examiners can't give or can't speak to candidates but quite often after finishing one of the speaking tests the candidate would leave the room and i would think to myself oh if only that person fixed this one thing i wish i could tell them just to focus on this one thing um so i i definitely agree just one or two issues um and if you can fix those you'll have a chair to sit on yeah if i was the ceo of idp or the british council i that's one thing that i would bring in to not give people a detailed report on because that it would end up costing a lot of money and i think it would affect the security and the reliability of the test but for the ability for the examiner to just tell the student work on these one two or three things you know these are your main areas of weakness and then i think it would become much a much fairer test but i'm not the ceo of british and that's why these mock tests are so valuable because now i i am able to say oh look you just need to identify and fix this one issue keep practicing that um and and students are successful because of it yeah and it ends up being much cheaper in the long run it's much cheaper to hire a good teacher or attend a good course than to fail the test multiple times and over and over and over again so excellent advice guys thank you so much one of the questions that i get asked very regularly is do i need to speak with a british or an american accent to get a high span score um on the speaking test and the answer is no you do not need to speak with a particular accent because that would be number one that would be incredibly unfair and number two it doesn't really rep it does it's not a good representation of what a british accent is or what an american accent is david is british damien is british michelle's husband i think is british um and they all have uh very different accents um where i am right now you could drive 20 miles down the road one way and the accent will change and then 20 miles down the other way and the accident will change it um so i think that this is maybe comes from a misconception about what good english looks like or what good english and sounds like you don't have to sound like the queen of england you don't have to have a standard american accent and i also think that this is one of the areas where ielts is very fair because they judge you on clarity they don't judge you on um on having an rp accent or having a canadian accent or having something like that what the advice that i always give to students is that use your own accent but focus on clarity think of someone i think everybody probably knows someone like a celebrity or an intellectual or or a news presenter or something like that from their own country that speaks very very good english but they use their own accent i i know i've spoken to a lot of students from india and from china and from vietnam it's like well model yourself on that person who has retained their accent rather than trying to sound like the queen of england because you don't need to sign like the queen of england and you're going to waste a huge amount of time trying to sound like that rather than just focus on on your your own accent and i also think that it's important to say that your accent is your identity and if someone is telling you you need to change you need to sound more british then there's issues with that because they're telling you to change who you are as a person which i don't think is a nice thing to to say to a student and that's that's a controversial advice in the elt community but would any of you um agree or disagree with me on that in terms just in in the context of ielts i would completely agree well first of all i'd like to say that um you know accents of rice factions and rich life they're beautiful i love hearing accents not just within my own country within from all over the world i mean the world to be a much poorer place if we all try to sound the same it's it's an unfair as you say a completely unnatural thing to expect and so as you say i think clarity that's all we're looking for can you be understood an accent doesn't stop people from being understood it's um pronunciation which is slightly different thing it's the the sounds you're producing rather than you know the more of the wider accent that they're within and from a practical point of view i would i would say to to a student to um become familiar with the phonemic chart and phonemes and individual signs of english and identify which signs they have a problem with so my wife is from vietnam and in vietnam they never put their tongue between their teeth when they're speaking so they have a problem with you're in spain i think the verse and the buzz or a problem with spanish speakers there's only one sound for both letters yeah yeah and uh pronouncing ed endings for example they would describe them ed everything rather than the three the three different types do we have yeah so so every language every every uh culture has a it comes from a background where the pronunciation is totally physical unlike uh like the vietnamese example that i used it's nothing to do with your intelligence or anything like that it's just what you're used to doing there are signs in vietnamese that i just cannot make because i've never made that shape with my with my tongue and with my and that's all it really is it's just the position of your lips and your mouth and your teeth and just pushing air out of your mouth and making making a sound um it's nothing to do with you know with your background or anything like that really and would you what would you guys have to say with about pronunciation in the context of the ielts test yeah i would totally agree with what you said damien and chris and i think that students do sometimes confuse pronunciation intonation with accent because of course different people from different parts of the world use different intonation patterns so i'm from canada and i've been living in england for a while now and i noticed that my intonation patterns have changed and actually when i talk to my family when i go back to canada everyone tells me i sound really british and i just don't hear it but it's because my intonation is slightly different what i'm doing is i'm using my intonation to help the listener pick out the important information and to convey meaning and that's what we're looking for when we're listening to you speak right it's not about british rules or american rules or you know an accent from you know your own personal accent i've got my own personal accent that's like a mishmash but you know in terms of english pronunciation there are ways that english pronunciation works and the way sounds change at word boundaries and that's what we're looking for we're listening to students because it's about clarity and it's about meaning yeah it would be horrible if there was like a standard way everybody had to speak english and that would not be a nice world to live in um and an intonation is a funny one i think a lot of people from northern ireland where i'm from when we go over to england they think that we're america they think we sound very threatening or something because we we tend to go down i remember saying to a friend once and when i was in vietnam he was american i was like i know where you live [Laughter] where i live and i was like yeah from england be like oh i know where you live [Laughter] so yeah i can get you into trouble as well would you would you agree or any advice david um for a student that is worried about their accent or about their pronunciation when it comes to the ielts test clarity um it's really useful to look at that phonemic chart and just make sure you're pronouncing the sounds correctly now one way of doing this a lot of the time when i meet candidates and students studying english when i meet people with really clear pronunciation i always ask them how did you do it how did you practice and the most common answer is copying copying youtube um and not trying to sound perfect a lot of the time these people are in the privacy of their own homes and they don't really care how silly they sound they'll sing to little jingles they'll copy little phrases on youtube and and doing that listening to native um speakers and trying to copy that that sound that's really important yeah the students who had the greatest improvement in pronunciation was a vietnamese student that i worked with who he was obsessed with game of thrones and he would just watch game of thrones that i'm like cause he thought because a lot of the accents are in game of thrones they're not british but they're not american either like they're they're middle of the road they're very normally very very clear um so he he learned that that way just by pausing the the the dvd or whatever it was and uh and repeating it and doing that over and over and over again but i think the reason why he got so good was he enjoyed it at the same time i think um because pronunciation is a physical thing it's like going to the gym if you you know do lots of bicep curls you'll get big biceps if you don't you won't you know sort of thing so it is about identifying your the the areas of pronunciation you need to work on and then working on that and find an enjoyable way of doing it as well as well i think podcasts movies songs are are a great way to do that so cool excellent advice all right so we'll go back to michelle and i michelle what's another big myth a lot of the time when i'm helping students prepare they want to know about using high-level vocabulary and so what high-level vocabulary can they use to get a band seven and i think this is a really common misconception whether it's for you know the writing test or the speaking test there's no checklist that the examiner has where you know they've got different categories and they're listening for how many low-level and high-level words it just doesn't work that way i mean first of all i think that um if chris damien and david and myself were able to try to come up with a list of the high level words we'd be here all day because it just doesn't exist right so like david said earlier clarity is king you've got to use the right words to communicate the specific idea that you've got in your head clearly so the reader or the listener knows exactly what you mean and if you can do that right then that's what we're looking for for a band 7 level you know you don't have to use idioms and in fact you'd probably recommend that you don't try to insert idioms because they're very very difficult to get correct and you know the more mistakes you make the lower your score goes so don't force it just be clear and if you can do that then that's exactly what the examiner is looking for so this even when i give students this advice they disagree with me so it's easy to disagree with one person um now we have four can you get a high score in ielts speaking test without using idioms or lots of idioms yes you can you absolutely can yeah i think this comes from a misconception in the in the uh marketing criteria it talks about idiomatic language and it gets a band-aid for for vocabulary what is the difference between idiomatic language and using lots of idioms well i would say the difference is that idiomatic just means how a native speaker would say it or how it is naturally said and of course that's going to be different in different parts of the world and again it doesn't matter exactly how you say it but in a natural way and how we don't speak is in an academic way the same way we would write and so often i i've you know had speaking tests with candidates who try to speak as though you know they're they're writing an essay and they would ideally like to give me a speech right they'd write it out an essay form and then read the speech and that's that's not it that's not how people that's not how people talk to one another right so even like just the kind of language that we've been using here today i don't think that anybody has used an idiom listen to a podcast of two native english speakers talking to each other and even an academic or high level podcast um and kind of many idioms they they use they don't or can't how many words they they use that you like a high level english learner would not understand very very few cambridge actually have a really amazing tool that you can put in any text and it analyzes the level of the words so it looks at a1a2 words b1 b2 c1 c2 so a1 and a2 are low level words but you know they're words like and because you know ah and and then b1 b2 kind of in the middle and c1 c2 at a very high level and what i've done is take taking like um academic journal articles from cambridge and oxford and harvard and mit and put them into that and and then they all follow the exact same pattern as good band 8 band 9 essays as well which is the vast majority like 60 70 percent a1 a2 words and then there's there's like 10 20 b1 b2 and c1 c2 for band 8.9 uh essays and harvard cambridge oxford academic journals you know the very very rel reliable high level writing 2 3 c1 c2 words and they only use those words when it is necessary to to to use them because there's no there's not an easier word to use um there's also a grid george orwell wrote a essay on i think it's called on good writing and the number one rule was don't use a complicated word when a simpler word will will do and george orwell knows a little bit about writing i think so i think that's a great point and i think that a lot of students do themselves a disservice by just focusing on expanding their vocabulary because if you just use the words that you already know but use them correctly then you probably have enough words you know to get the score that you need absolutely i think this comes a lot from how vocabulary is taught in many ielts books ielts youtube channels ielts schools where they will say to the student learn my list of band nine or golden or her diamond vocabulary and you'll get a high score uh dami and david what would you say if your students say can you give me a list of high level vocabulary i would say symptom michelle says use the words you know now but you need to know use them correctly you know if you don't understand the con every context that word can fit in if you don't know the formation of that word if you don't know how it fits in in a group sentence grammatically then you don't know how to use it correctly so um michelle also hit on the nail on the head will they go there you go there's an idiot she was correct absolutely correct when she said um it's communication at the end of the day when you're writing an essay for example you think it's like you're alone you're not you're communicating with someone someone at the end of this was going to read this uh saying with when someone writes your reading someone's written that for you to to read it's communication so have an idea communicate in the most simple clear way possible you don't speak to your friends and family or go to a shop and use the most informal and complicated language in your own language do you that would be it's very strange and you wouldn't and they wouldn't have a you know an appropriate ending the ending is has that person understood what what i want to say and that's communication yeah as someone on youtube commented the other day that uh sir you have um you have a plethora of mistakes in your sample answer and i will elucidate the um the reasons why when you tell me your band score honestly okay i know what's going on here um but yeah what would you say to someone watching this who is like it says in the marketing criteria you need to use a wide range of vocabulary what you're saying is is the opposite of that what you're saying is to use simple language and and to use the language that i already have i would say firstly you you know more words than you think you know i'm i i'm not sure this the statistics i have seen in previous i can't bring them to mind right now but you know students at b2 levels number have a huge range of vocabulary certainly enough to convey any idea that they want to to explain and so it's it's trusting that you do have the tools to to answer a particular question and if you don't by the process of studying and you're reading an ielts article by listening by doing anything you're actually expanding if you've understood those words written them down recorded them etc you're actually slowly expanding your vocabulary the key there is slowly and naturally doing it not like okay i'm going to learn 20 words today it doesn't work that way you have to use it understand and find them in context use them in context and then actually your vocabulary is going to expand naturally and you'll understand how to use all those words rather than i'm going to work you know expand it very rapidly and you'll never know how to use those words perfectly absolutely i thought of a really good good idea for for another video um imagine if you gave us for a list of 20 high-level words and told us that we had to include them in an ielts essay so we wrote that essay and then we wrote an essay where we just used the appropriate words to help us clearly communicate the answer and look at the difference in in in the clarity and the effectiveness of that essay as native english speakers and as ielts teachers we could not do that and it would lower our scores so giving that to a student who is really struggling is very very dangerous and and i think if of all the things that a student could could stop doing it would be trying to use words they just do not know how to use because they think that that's how to get a high score i think another common misconception is that it doesn't really matter how many how many attempts you make that are wrong as long as you've attempted some and got you know got those right but it doesn't really work that way if you try like you know basically i always have like my bucket of like high level words and students are like take a handful and chuck them in the essay some will land where they're supposed to but most won't and it's not like the ones that you got right are so good that it cancels out all the mistakes absolutely because you're you're being judged on the fundamentals you're being judged on on can you use a1a2b1b2 words not can you luckily use a c2 word the examiner's not going to look oh my god they used the word plethora they must be amazing but they have misused the word ah and because and sit and like basic words like that um i don't know whether any of you are into to sport or to basketball but the greatest basketball player of all time is michael jordan and the thing that everyone says about him is his fundamentals the basics were better than everybody else's he was also able to do amazing things that no one else could do but he had to build that from a foundation and if you look at any any good qriket player football player artist picasso mastered all of those fundamental aspects of painting before he was able to do whatever he did i'm not 100 sure but i remember picasso talking about that and saying that he had to study for you know 50 years the fundamentals before he was able to bring it to the next level so um there's a lot of examples of that you know throughout the world yeah i think that's a great example chris and it kind of um leads into another misconception that a lot of students have that there's like a trick that you can learn good and that's it you just got to learn the tricks yeah so i'll put that out there to everybody can you use tricks and tips and hacks and shortcuts to get get a high score because this is what we were asked every day we get emails can you just give me some top top 10 tricks to trick my way to getting a band 7 does that work i think i would be here for a very long time trying to think of tips because there aren't any um the biggest and only real tip that i can think of is work hard um identify your weaknesses nothing really beats hard work um tips and tricks people talk about them people try to share them but there really aren't any um the only thing you can do is work hard absolutely damien would you agree i agree completely yeah absolutely so it's it's working hard and as we've said before you know working hard in a smart way like you know identifying states working on them but there is another way it's that's the reality is facing the reality this is hard it's going to be difficult but you can do it by breaking it down achieving those small goals and working towards a bigger target and i also think that it's a bit of an insane thing to do because why do you look for shortcuts and tips and tricks it's to get something easily and quickly but the result is that you will fail the test again and again and again and again we we survey our vip students when they come in and we say well how many times have you failed the test and the average is three that's an incredibly high average that means a lot of our students are failing the test five six we've had students fail the test more than ten times by focusing on tips and tricks and i'm trying to oh well those tricks didn't work let's look for these other tricks and that could take them two years of their life and thousands and thousands of dollars but i think you'll see this in other industries as well the one that springs to mind is like the diet and fitness industry that you know use my you know drink my magic potion or take my magic pill and you will look like you know you look like a an instagram model in two days that's not how it works you know and i think i have a theory that a lot of marketers have taken over the ielts business or marketing departments have taken over schools and marketing 101 is ask ask your market what they want and then give them what they want so when you ask students the marketing team what do you want i want a shortcut i want a tip i want a trick so the marketing team tells the teachers i want you to give them that and that is very dangerous to leave marketing in charge i think because um i don't want to say that that's criminal i don't want to say that they're ripping people off but i think whenever you take teachers out of the equation um then that becomes very dangerous would would you agree with that or maybe that's just a conspiracy theory yeah and but i also think that you know even from well-meaning teachers you know there's a temptation to you know to give students a good service and a lot of teachers mistakenly think as well that they can help teachers or help students by giving them tricks and and tips um i think there's a massive difference between someone who's aiming for a banned vibe and someone who's aiming for a band 7 as well because i've often had students you know bring me you know grammar structures and go can i use this and i think well you know can you memorize it and use it yeah i suppose you can but you can't memorize your way to a band 7. i'm sorry but you know if you think if you've ever taken you know a class in english class or you know if you've gone abroad if study abroad a lot of that business model is you know trying to keep students there you know and so we'll fill a lesson with like teaching you new vocabulary then we'll learn like you know a different trick this day you know come back next month and renew your course for that but in the end it's not actually going to help you because they don't have the interest their their interest the teachers in the school's interest is not to get you the score you need as quickly as possible because if they just said to you these are your two key mistakes fix them right and then you know you'll have a good chance of getting the score that you need you wouldn't be the student for no it wouldn't make any money so that that is another big problem um and and i think i you hit on a another problem which is when you walk into a classroom you don't want to have a a bad relationship with the students so you want to be friendly with them and give them what they want but what they want and what they need are two normally two completely different things so that that means that teachers will often give tricks and cheats and things like that and to keep the students happy but it will also mean that they don't do the most important thing which is to criticize their work and tell them what their weaknesses are and i think one of the reasons why our students are so successful is because it kind of stems from my personality where i don't care if the students like me or not i really only care about the results um because i've dealt with so many students who you do see when they get the results the difference that it makes to their lives and i'd rather do that and for them to hate me a little bit um you know we don't criticize people's personalities and we're not overly harsh but we just said what saying how it is you know you are not going to pass until you fix a b and c and it doesn't matter what you do or how many times you do the test or how much you practice you will not pass until you fix these you know a b c d it could be five things it could be one thing um thank you very much guys i really really appreciate your time what we're going to do is we are going to make another video where we answer students frequently asked questions so what i would like you to do guys is in the comments below write a question that you would like the four of us to answer uh so it could be something that you are really struggling with or something that you've seen on the internet and like one teacher says this and another teacher says the opposite or something that you just need help with comment below and next week we will make the same style of video where we answer the most popular questions if you've enjoyed this video give it a like if you want some more information check out the rest of our youtube channel check out ieltsadvantage.com and and we will see you again next week michelle david damien thank you so much for sharing some light on those myths and i'm sure we'll see you again soon thanks very much [Music] you

Channel: IELTS Advantage

Views: 47,270

Keywords: IELTS, IELTS Test, IELTS Advantage, IELTS Expert, IELTS Examiner, IELTS Preparation, IELTS Myths, Myth debunker, www.ieltsadvantage.com, Chris Pell, Michelle, Damien, David, IELTS Teacher, IELTS Lesson, IELTS Class, IELTS Writing, IELTS Speaking, IELTS Listening, IELTS Reading, IELTS Course, Expert Help, Examiner, IELTS Exam, Prepare for the IELTS test, IELTS Myths & Misconceptions | Don't Make THESE Mistakes in Your IELTS Test, Don't Make THESE Mistakes in Your IELTS Test

Id: -6onjP0P-GI

Length: 46min 54sec (2814 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020