IELTS Writing: What the examiner is looking for!

hello there and welcome today well ielts writing what is the examiner really looking for it's a great question and today we're going to find out i have a special guest we have eli howes who's joining me together and today we're going to find out exactly what the examiner is looking for in ielts writing let's do it [Music] hello hello everybody great to see you here um my name is keith if you don't know me from the keith speaking academy um we're helping well helping students speak better english give better answers and getting a higher score on ielts speaking now although i focus on ielts speaking so many students are asking for help on ielts writing which is why today we have a special live session um i'm gonna introduce you to somebody some of you know some of you may not know he's a teacher a trainer an expert in ielts training who's gonna help us well help you with your ielts writing skills now today's session i think is interesting for people who are new to ielts and also people who have done ielts before and maybe you're kind of stuck with your ielts writing you just can't move up to a band seven or a band eight today we're going to solve that we're going to talk about how ielts is assessed what the examiner's looking for and help you reach your goals before we do that i'd like to say well hello to all of you i'll say hello to some of you in a moment let's say hello first of all to eli who is our special guest today hello eli hello kitty thank you very much for having me i'm really looking forward to today's live lesson me too it's great to be back here with you we have done um lessons together before um and i know of course you have an ielts writing course on my website but for people who are new today tell us a little bit about you and what you do yes so i'm an ielts teacher i've been teaching in spain in the uk and also in china and whereas you've focused particularly on ielts speaking i've been focusing on ielts writing so for many of you that are doing the ielts test you'll know that the writing test is probably the most difficult in fact the average score for ielts writing is 5.5 so my intention is to stop that and to help people to get a higher score especially in their ielts writing and i've been doing that through my youtube lessons which you can find by typing in english pro tips into youtube i also have a website which is englishprotips.com and i'm very excited to have a writing course on this keith speaking academy and that's a writing course for both academic and general ielts students and that course really has everything you need to be able to boost your score from say band 5 or band 5.5 6 or 6.5 in order to be getting band 7 7.5 8 and even above so if you're struggling with your ielts writing then definitely check out this course because it's a very comprehensive approach to ielts writing wow that's fantastic sounds great excuse me um i've got a frog in the throat as we say um great so um that's exciting we're going to look at a lot of things today and i'm just going to say hello to some of the people who are here in the chat by the way you guys if you're on youtube do turn on the um subscribe button and that other thing the notification button so you can find out more about the uh up and coming videos as we do them here on on youtube okay so who is in the house today we've got let's have a look we've got from we've got from china let me take our names off because now you know who we are now eli i know that you're good at chinese as well the characters here what are they i don't know what the characters are unfortunately oh i know the last one but i don't know the others never mind i'm sure this person will tell us very quickly from india alka very nice to meet you here monira from eritrea fantastic good to see you here um and also we've got odonton galag from mongolia excellent great we've got mike from the from the ukraine nice to see you here shahed from bangladesh also been from vietnam and wow people from all over the world fantastic it is so nice to see you here we've even got a few from iran fafa for example is here from iran um brilliant thank you very much all of you for joining us it's so nice to see you here so if you've just arrived to let you know let me tell you what we're going to do today right we're going to look at ielts writing it's a bit of an unusual thing for me but it's great and to have this opportunity here with um eli many students do ask this question they say why can't i get a band 7 in ielts writing why am i stuck there and it's a bit of a headache a bit like this person here so we're going to help you understand how ielts writing is assessed and this is the key right because once you understand this once you understand what the examiner is looking for then it's much easier for you to write the kind of essay you need to write so we're going to help you with that of course you need to develop your writing skills all the time and improve your english all the time but exam technique with writing can be particularly you know useful and today we'll be looking at the four areas you need to understand and we'll be giving you some very clear examples so you understand not just the concept but you can see it in action as well with different examples okay i hope that sounds fairly clear ielts writing so eli we're about to get stuck in i wonder if our friend from china has answered she says china number one come on we know china's number one but i mean what's your name very interesting great um this is interesting because i've had a few students um eli who said to me i would like to come to the session but i'm not a big fan of writing um like this person here remo says writing isn't my cup of tea and for some students writing is really um they just don't like writing right um it's a challenge i mean what what do you say to students who say i don't like writing yeah i guess there's two approaches there's the kind of grin and bear it approach which is i don't like writing but i know that i struggle with it so i'm going to practice writing and then the other approach is i don't like writing so much but i don't mind doing these types of writing because at the end of the day you really need to practice your writing so you've got two options you can either make sure you practice your writing even though you don't enjoy it or you can find aspects of writing that you do enjoy so writing for example essays on topics that you find a bit more interesting or even practicing your writing in different ways like finding a language partner and instead of speaking face-to-face maybe you can send each other messages back and forth nice very nice and very nice tips there that's lovely that's good as i said i i think today's session will be interesting for those of you who've been doing ielts for a while but also people like spice faith here who says i don't under stand ielts to start with so i'm guessing she's very new to ielts there are so many bands um there are i mean there are nine different bands the the band at the bottom zero or one is like you can't say anything basically maybe hello and band 9 is the very top is like native speaker level so it's very important to understand what the bands mean in order to reach that level and that's a part of what we're going to be doing today and in a future session more about that later so eli shall we um shall we jump straight in shall we get going yes let's jump straight in let's go straight in so we're going to have a look at um first of all a let's have a look at this if i can bring this into the screen um the four areas that are important in ielts writing now we've got the abbreviation right um i'm going to ask everybody who's here with us can you write in the chat box what you think the letters stand for um maybe eli you could give one as a clue to help people okay so these are all the four marking criteria the examiners use to assess your essays now the first one ta is task achievement and what we'd like you to do is write into the comments section what does cc refer to and gr and lr so please in the comment section what do these letters stand for let's see we'll wait for a minute just just while we're waiting keith as well i think um yeah what you were saying about um the band scores going from kind of one to nine is very interesting i think that was just an attempt to make a an exam that everybody could sit because um i think in the past a lot of exams were the proficiency exam the advanced exam the intermediate exam and then i ielts is slightly different in that everyone can attempt the ielts exam and it's up to the examiner and your score to determine what level you have so i think it's a new but fairly effective way of assessing somebody's level what do you think totally agree yeah absolutely i mean it's interesting right there's no pass or fail in ielts you just get a score you're either a three or a five or a seven or an eight and that's neither good nor bad it just shows you where you are of course if you're applying for university and they say you must have a seven then you need seven and above and you may think six is a fail but for somebody else six could be fantastic and just enough to go and migrate and immigrate and live live in maybe america or england so yeah it's an interesting concept it's a slightly different concept that's exactly right i often see emails where they say i failed the exam i only got a band six and i say hold on band six is an absolutely brilliant score to get you know congratulations there there is no failure in this exam and you know that might be the score that you need that allows you to go and live in australia or america for example exactly listen the results are in let's share some ideas people have got um grammar grammar range uh what else have we got task responsibility it's an interesting one task respond is interesting um we've got task achievement minas says l r lexical resources bin carbon copy possibly possibly task achievement gr grammar interesting so we've got coherence in there ah i think we've got somebody who's on the ball coherence and cohesion and do you think it says task analysis okay complex curriculum very very interesting answers um so eli maybe you could talk us through just tell us and i'll type up tell us what these stand for okay so ta is task achievement and this is sometimes called task response as well right see yeah i'm going to type it in because i'm so badly prepared i haven't got the answers task achievement yep cc is coherence and cohesion and don't worry guys if you're thinking what on earth does all of this mean we're going to be looking at all of these in a lot more detail in just a second so bear with us so cc is coherence and cohesion so briefly um that refers to how you organize your writing so for example do you have paragraphs and a logical structure g a lot of people say the grammar so yes grammar except it's slightly more complex than that it's specifically grammatical range and accuracy so there's two components there's the range of your grammar so the structures that you use but then there's also the accuracy of your grammar so can you use all of those structures accurately and that's something that the examiner is going to be looking at when they assess your essays finally we have lr which as somebody mentioned is lexical resource so lexical resource basically means vocabulary so it's the words that you can use can you use synonyms can you put the words in the correct form and have you spelt those words correctly so we're going to be looking at all of these in a lot more detail in today's lesson brilliant fantastic well done good um i'm here on secretarial duty writing everything down brilliant nice so those are the four errors so i guess let's dig in um somebody says check the mic i think my mic is okay i think your mic sounds okay but do let us know if you're not hearing us let us know all right and let us know which microphone is difficult to hear yes brilliant we're going to kick off with task achievement eli tell us a bit about this and what the students can do okay so the task achievement is basically the what of your ielts essay so what are your ideas what's in your introduction and have you developed those ideas so we're going to start off with the first thing the examiner is going to look at is which is the length of your essay so we're going to focus particularly on task two so for those of you watching um see if you can fill in the missing word so for the length of task two you need to write more than something words so is it more than 100 words is it more than 200 words is it more than 300 words how many words should you write in your ielts essays or rather how many words should you write more than in your ielts essay so again comment below with the answer these guys are so quick they are so so quick kazim says 250 camila says 250 [Music] by tong says 250 is it 250 it is 250 yeah i know that both of our channels are very popular with a lot of english teachers so i'm not surprised that so many people are getting this right right away as well as all of the acronyms for the different criteria what happens eli if somebody writes less than 250 so they're going to get a lower score as part of task achievement so you definitely need to be writing more than 250 words and you also need to make sure as part of task achievement that those 250 words or more than 250 words include an introduction body paragraph and conclusions so if you miss one of these components of an essay and you're writing less than 250 words you're going to get a much lower score so as a result for many of you watching this learning how to write full essays longer than 250 words within 40 minutes is very important and something you should practice before your exam i was going to say so doing practice tests a lot before the test is really important right you need to be able to practice your time in 40 minutes writing 250 words which is not easy um for anybody yeah so practice is essential right that's right what i often suggest is when you first start your preparation don't worry about the time limit give yourself a lot of time to research the topic give yourself a little write the essay give yourself a lot of time to check over your writing and then as you approach the time when you're going to do your exam that's when you focus on being able to produce high level essays within the time limit fantastic great good very interesting so we've mentioned the length so more than 250 words we've got relevance development and position let's look at relevance first shall we what exactly do we mean by this okay so imagine you get a question like this teenagers should have regular exams at secondary school as this will prepare them better for life after leaving school to what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement okay so you need to make sure that you are talking about teenagers you can see that in the question it says teenagers should have regular exams now if you were to write an essay even if it's a brilliant essay that focuses on say primary school students or university students then you're not talking about teenagers and this is going to dramatically lower your score so even if you have wonderful ideas for primary school students or university students it doesn't matter you need to focus on the key words of the question likewise below it says prepare them um better for life after leaving school so your ideas should refer to how exams can help students when they finish school not while they're at school so as a result it's really important to read the question carefully and underlying keywords to make sure that you fully understand the question now one thing that slips a lot of students up is they'll do a lot of practice essays and then when it comes to doing their real exam they'll get a similar question and when they see the similar question they say oh i've written an essay like this before and they start recalling their previous essay but what happens if the previous essay and the essay that you have in your exam is not exactly the same is you end up going off topic and yes you've written a brilliant essay but it doesn't answer the exact question that you have in front of you so that's very important to pay attention to in your real test absolutely fantastic going off topic it's a bit like going off-piste when you're skiing it's very very dangerous don't go off topic um because you will you lose marks right you get graded down for that um and i guess one of the key message there that i think is so true for not just for writing but for speaking is do not memorize all of your answer don't memorize essays because if it doesn't fit if the ideas are not relevant even if it's a small difference between teenagers and adults you're off topic you lose marks yeah great point very good point um there's a quick question just about word count because i was thinking about this as well and asked the same question is there actually a maximum limit of words because he he wrote 400 words what happens if you write like 400 or 500 yeah so there's no maximum word limit uh you can write as many words as you want the thing is often when you write more words you tend to make more mistakes as well and tend to rush your writing um so for most people um around 250 or between 250 and 350 words will be totally fine but saying that there is no limit and i've actually challenged a lot of ielts examiners to write model essays in the past and i've given them 40 minutes and all of them without fail have written essays longer than 350 words so it's a bit of a tricky thing in order to write a very high level essay often you do have to write considerably more than 250 words but um you shouldn't necessarily aim to be writing a large essay and what you should be focusing on is um do you use your words well in order to communicate your message so as long as you're writing above 250 words it doesn't matter whether it's a longer essay or a shorter essay yeah and let me bust a myth here because he and this comes up from two people camila says right but nobody's going to count the words right um and billy says if you do the handwriting you can write slightly less because the examiner cannot count the words for everyone um okay eli do the examiners count the words of each essay yes they do yeah they do um first thing especially yeah if they've got reason to believe that it's under 250 words then they've got a very strict procedure for how to count those words and um and they will do that because if they've got a reason to believe that that it's under 250 words it's going to seriously affect your score so they need to be sure about that yeah so don't fall into that trap good relevance we've talked about sorry one thing i'd just like to add is um what i find very useful is to download um the sample paper for task one and task two and if you're going to be doing the handwritten exam then just write your practice essays on the sample paper and learn um with your handwriting at what stage you've written 250 words and in that way you don't need to count at the end of writing your essay you know for example when you reach line 15 of page 2 that you've definitely written 250 words nice yeah lovely tip like it very nice we're moving on from relevance then task achievement you've mentioned development ideas are developed here um let's have a look well with the same question right we're talking about teenagers should have regular exams at secondary school as this will prepare them better for life after leaving school to what extent you agree or disagree so if somebody writes this um i agree because regular exams push teenagers to develop a range of skills that are useful in the world of work what about this good not so good fantastic well i would say great that they've um they've thought about the question that their idea is relevant but not great because they because they haven't developed their idea they've just got one sentence and this student's probably going to move on and mention another idea instead but as a result they're not going to get band 7 because they're not developing their ideas right exactly exactly so we need to develop as you said i think um at the point earlier when we were discussing about the number of ideas in in an essay rather than having lots of ideas just have a few but develop them much further so what you might do here is something like this you have the same beginning regular exams push teenagers to develop a range of skills that are useful in the world of work for example and then we give an example taking an exam requires a student to plan prepare and perform in the test ppp plan prepare and perform thus developing time management capability resilience and the ability to deliver under pressure very very nice language these skills referencing are invaluable in a pre-professional setting where it is essential to be able to organize the workload and meet deadlines this to me looks like a much better developed answer right exactly you're right yeah and i think examples are one of the best ways to um to develop your ideas and the two most common ways are to to emphasize something so for example you could talk about how regular exams are very useful if you go to university especially and so you're emphasizing that university is a very good use of exams um a very good use for having done regular exams and then the other way is to have an example um so here we're talking about how universe uh irregular exams prepare help you to plan prepare and perform in the test yeah fantastic great nice so that's a nicely developed answer um there's interesting questions coming up i mean we'll answer one or two questions as we go um but we'll try and stay on topic but because we talked about handwriting before of course there's a handwritten test and a computer test and jan is asking can you use the spell checker when done doing the computer test no you can't and unfortunately unlike for example microsoft word that might draw your attention to um small typos the computer-based ielts test will not so for example if you um are typing quickly and you do what i do which is sometimes you'll put the letters in the wrong order as you're trying to type quickly that won't be auto corrected as it would be for example in microsoft word so you need to give yourself time to read through your essays before you finish very good very good and a question here about the the question we've talked about here about exams and it's an agree or disagree question so is it always necessary asks kiran to take a clear stand or position can i partially agree for example so yes you can partially agree because partially agreeing is a clear stance the important thing is that you have a position so you can partially agree or you can completely completely agree and we're going to be looking at that in a bit more detail throughout this lesson yeah fantastic great question kiran thank you for that so we talked about developing ideas what about well position that takes us nicely as little segway into position tell us more about this eli okay so for band 7 or above we need to have our position in the introduction and conclusion so for example at university you might be taught that you only need your your opinion which is your position in the conclusion however for ielts essays you need to have a position in the introduction and your conclusion as well right exactly fantastic so here's an example right um in the introduction if you like at the beginning somebody may say this maybe i can read it out exams are an important feature of secondary education however there is contention over whether frequent exams prepare students for post-school life so that's kind of paraphrasing the question i believe that teenagers should be given regular exams as this will provide useful practice before they go on to be assessed in university and also help develop a range of skills which are essential in the world of work so why is this good eli this is good because the examiner is going to read it and they immediately know what your position is in relation to this question so there's no doubt in their mind about what you believe in relation to this question and so they'd expect to see that in the introduction and the conclusion as well right right fantastic good nice um quick question coming from fafsa asks how much time do we have for the writing so you have one hour in total so that's for task one and task two and um the ielts test partners so british council and idp recommend that you spend 20 minutes on task 1 and 40 minutes on task 2 although you can choose and actually many students find they do better if they spend 25 minutes on task 1 and 35 minutes on task 2. the important thing is that you practice different time allocations to find out what's best for you fantastic good great good question fafa so we're talking here about what the examiner is looking for then you've got to focus on task achievement you've got to focus on relevance relevant answers developing your answer and having a clear position or opinion um we've given an example here i believe that i'm interested to know from people watching um how would you express your opinion in the writing task too clearly i believe blah blah blah is one way of doing it guys write in the chat let us know what you would probably write to express your opinion in the task two let's see what you've got while you're doing that i can see some more interesting questions these guys are full of interesting questions sylvia says if i have bad handwriting will it affect my score possibly if it's illegible yeah exactly if it's if it's incredibly bad handwriting then yes um but you've got to remember that examiners are trained to to see all sorts of different handwriting so even if you think your handwriting is rather messy they're evaluating you based on the language that you use not on whether they can um whether they think your handwriting is neat or whether they think it's messy so they'll do their best to try and understand it saying that unconsciously i think when you see bad handwriting you do have a bit of a kind of unconscious bias potentially against that student and so i would take time to try and improve my writing and my handwriting before doing the ielts test if possible yeah i think what happens is people are writing so quickly because they're looking at the clock 40 minutes they write quickly and if you've got so so handwriting it gets even worse as you write more quickly um and that's the challenge and i think as you said yeah it can be a bit like a bad first impression if you're turning up with very scruffy clothes people are thinking oh maybe it's not good quality um and if it is completely illegible you won't be marked but that's very unusual let's have a look at some of the ideas that have come up here some and maybe with the different ones here um eli you could say or we can take it in turn say whether we think it's good or or not suitable maybe so perry parisa i believe of course what about this one eli yeah that that's fine i completely agree that they're definitely um they're definitely being very explicit on on how what their opinion is so that's that's great i completely agree or i completely disagree great this one from sanvin i think that would be more common in speaking than in writing what do you think about that keith i wouldn't put this in writing i would not use that in a writing essay um i think it's too colloquial it's it's great for speaking in the speaking test but not in ielts writing i think it's too informal um biang says i think what do you think yeah i i think is fine i think there are a few better ones again for writing in particular yeah but um i think would be okay in my opinion yep um what about this one from alanike i genuinely think i i don't think it's really necessary again when we see i think we we'd usually put that in speaking more than in the writing test right um and so likewise with i genuinely think let's keep that in the speaking and not so much in the writing right maybe a better way of giving the idea of genuinely is something like what farheen says i strongly believe that yes um what about this one from muhammad from my point of view yeah from my point of view um i would again i would put that in the category for speaking instead of writing it's not one that we commonly see in in writing although it's a great one for speaking yeah i agree i agree i would argue okay i love this one um yeah why what you often find is because you need to put in your um your opinion in the introduction and then also in the conclusion what you don't want to do is repeat the same way of talking about your opinion so what you could often do is in the introduction you say i believe that and then you have your position and then in the conclusion you say i would argue that so you're showing the examiner that you have two different ways to give your opinion and you avoid repetition great so yeah avoid repetition have to at least two different ways of saying it nice listen let's move on we've talked we've talked about task achievement having a clear position both in the beginning in the introduction and in the conclusion um we're going to move on to cc if if you remember all of you at the very very beginning we had task achievement then cc which was if you remember coherence and cohesion let's come now and look at coherence and cohesion in more detail eli maybe just talk us through what we can look at here what the examiner is looking for so the examiner is going to assess you on four criteria for coherence and cohesion the first one is the progression of your ideas so does your essay have a logical structure is there an introduction body paragraphs and a conclusion and then also how have you organized those paths so for example have you used linking words to organize your ideas in your body paragraphs and then what about within sentences do you also have linking words to organize your ideas then finally they're going to assess you on referencing and that specifically that's using pronouns correctly so instead of repeating the same noun over and over again you can use pronouns for example they or to refer back to the noun yeah fantastic good i don't know what you think but i sometimes think of um coherence or cohesion as being a bit like building a house with bricks you know when you put the bricks on top of each other you put the brick in the right place to build up your structure you've then got the cement that kind of sticks the different bricks in the right place your cement being the kind of the linking words if you like to get this structure at the end which is your house hopefully a nice structure so often i think of coherence um and cohesion being a bit like building a house with bricks yeah that's exactly right and it's something that's also evaluated as part of your speaking it's just that you tend to use different linking words i guess in speaking it's called discourse markers yeah so while in writing you might use a phrase like or a word like however or furthermore in speaking you might use a word like but or after that exactly i think that's a big challenge for students to realize which kind of words are written words and which are spoken words especially with linkers and connectors um because you want to make sure you're using written ones when you're writing and spoken ones when you're speaking i think a piece of advice i often give students is if you're learning vocabulary and connectors by reading you can be very sure you can use them in your writing if you're learning connectors through listening you can be very sure you can use those in your speaking because you've heard them in a speaking context um so that is a quick tip is a very simple way of thinking okay i can use this for writing because i've seen it in somebody's right somebody else's writing right let's switch back we're back into coherence let's have a look in a bit of detail then i mean structure the the overall coherence of structure um this is nice maybe talk us through this what does this mean yeah so basically there's different levels to the structure of your essay so on on the left we can look at the basic structure which is you'll have your introduction then you'll have body paragraphs usually two or three body paragraphs and then in a conclusion and even before the examiner reads your essay they're going to be able to look at the structure of your essay and get an idea of whether or not you followed a logical structure and you have an introduction body paragraphs and then a conclusion but then there's also the progression of your ideas within those components so for example in your introduction a logical way to organize it would be to first introduce the topic and then afterwards to respond to the question so if you start to respond to the question before you introduce the topic that's no longer logical and you will get marked down for um coherence and cohesion and then also again in your body paragraphs ideally you want to have a topic sentence at the beginning of your paragraph where you introduce that your idea and then below that you'll have a development where you talk about examples and you go further into your idea and then finally in the conclusion ideally you'll want to have two components which is restating your position and then summarizing your ideas and making sure those are ideas that you've already mentioned in your body paragraphs so this is what they're going to be looking for when they think about a logical structure for an essay great and this is a great starting point right to have here something very very clear that you can follow step by step very very simple of course the key is what the content is and how you connect it all together that's where you need to work on your writing skills overall um in a quick answer to a question from kirat kawar who asks about how can students improve their writing skills especially if they're non-native i think one aspect is yes having structures like this and templates to follow but the other part is really it's in the practice it's doing lots of practice to build up your flexibility and your writing skills whether it's essays or letters or diaries or whatever you do so i think both of those you need exam technique but you need to improve your writing skills as well exactly i would say all of the members of um my writing course on your website keith all of the ones that have been able to get um band 7.5 band day and there's even a student that's got band 8.5 without fail all of those students have written many many uh essays themselves so um typically students that don't do so well are the ones that um intend to write a lot of essays but then get kind of carried away and distracted and they think and they leave that to the last minute and then the students that do very well in the ielts writing tests are the ones that are disciplined and they say something like this every day or every second day i'm going to research a topic i'm going to write an essay and then i'm going to compare it to a model essay and then as they develop that habit over time their writing really improves and um they're often rewarded with a great result for example um just last week i was talking to a student that was able to score band eight in her writing test which she's totally thrilled about and a large part of getting that score was the fact that she diligently wrote many many practice essays in fact she sent me eight essays to evaluate but um i'm sure she did more than 30 essays that she didn't send me that she just did for her own um practice right right fantastic fantastic so listen don't be obsessed with tips be obsessed with practice that's our message so we've looked at logical structure um let's move forward and look at linking words especially between sentences now here eli you've put up some um some sentences and we've got gaps for the linking words right so i wonder if the guys watching the guys and the girls watching um what do you think the gaps are have a look at these read them through and tell us which word there's one word a linking word in each gap tell us what you think quick answer to mandeep's question whether the examiner counts the word like the is am the answer is yes the counters words yes they do yes uh jan asks this question where can i find an example of this essay structure i'm tempted to say in eli's course because there's loads of them in there but also yes i mean you can find them on the internet the challenge on the internet is you never know which ones are good and which ones are bad um but if you can find reputable websites then that that helps yeah i think it's very important you write reading essays that genuinely a high level because if they're supposedly a high level but they're not then they could be leading you astray and teaching you aspects of writing that aren't actually going to help you um keith i hope you don't mind me saying so but there's going to be a couple of giveaways at the end of this um or rather the the extension of this lesson which is when students are going to be able to get a a model essay a high level model essay and that'll be a good resource for them for their ielts writing absolutely so stick around to the end because we're gonna give you um well give you and show you something yes we're making it mysterious but it is a bit mysterious there's some extra training and some model answers we're going to share with you but no but and let's have a look at your answers before we do that as a quick question which i think eli you may want to be to answer this one although uh spelt your name wrong but it's do you provide evaluation service for writing yes i do um if you go to englishprotips.com and you go to writing evaluation um which is just at the very top of the website then you'll find my writing evaluation service okay great good okay let's have a look at these words um regular exams are an important feature secondary school education moreover there is contention there is contention eli it's not moreover no what about because moreover means in addition right but here we're not adding the contention is not an addition it's more of a contradiction however right however exactly is good however now maybe okay so however would be a good one for the first one for the second one maybe this is what you meant with moreover for the second one we've got i'm assuming furthermore having frequent exams at schools um it's hard to know which ones people have put therefore so the first one is however so that's great we've got the first one and and that would be in in the introduction um and as keith mentioned however is a very useful um contrasting linking word so definitely you can be putting some howevers in your essay now in the second one we this is this sentence would appear at the very beginning of a paragraph and so we're wanting one word that's going to indicate our first idea hmm i'm looking for other answers furthermore again while lots of different ones here so i mean this is a great collection of very useful linking words in in this particular case we wouldn't use for example in addition or while um we're going to use firstly and that's a very useful linking word when we want to show our first idea so remember we talked about having um each paragraph having a central topic having a central idea so we can use a linking word like firstly at the beginning of our first paragraph to show to the examiner this is the first idea of my essay and then in the second paragraph we would use something like secondly or in addition fantastic sometimes students do ask me about this and they say should i be looking for really more complex linkers like in the first place or something like that is is firstly too simple or is it okay firstly it's fine i think it's all about using the right linking word and then using a variety of linking words um so certainly there are some that sound more sophisticated so i think nevertheless there's a very you know being three words in one it always sounds very sophisticated um but i don't think that you should go out of your way to use sophisticated linking words i think it's about using the most appropriate linking word to communicate your idea um great so things like maybe first of all could be okay um right to initiate with i i think is is not really suitable right it's over very nicely no it just doesn't work to begin with why can't we use to be yes so to begin with would would work um yeah and then and then in the second paragraph we'd have we'd expect something like in addition to this right in in order to in introduce our second idea yeah exactly good great okay so listen we've looked at different linking words here which are very important between sentences and as eli says between paragraphs what about connecting ideas within a sentence have a look here and actually what i'm going to do just to make this easier for me if i put a number if you give your answer guys in the list just put the number say number one and or so number two whatever you think great well maybe even just for the sake of time keith maybe we could just do number one yes because i just noticed we are a bit behind time okay let's do number one yes let's do just number one and just having everyone's got any answers and keith if you want i could quickly tell you the answer for number two just for those people watching just so they go for peace of mind yes because it could certainly be used anna says [Music] anna where have you gone you were there a minute ago um not due to grammatically doesn't fit the idea works but exactly as keith mentioned grammatically it doesn't work there felipe yeah as good yeah that works great great so as works um [Music] nice because and in the second one as we said uh thus could be an answer here maybe hence could be there as well exactly hence as well brilliant let's move on i'm just aware of time referencing using pronouns correctly um so what we've got here is an answer if you just have a look at this answer i'll read it through and just think about the use of pronouns here regular exams are an important feature of secondary school education however there is contention over whether exams prepare students for post-school life okay so we've got exams here and we've got exams here and then i would argue that teenagers should be given regular exams at secondary school as exams prepare teenage students for students academic and professional life after students have left school now it doesn't sound too bad but you'll notice again we've got exams and exams we've got teenagers we've got teenage students and students and students so what's happening is there's a lot of repetition right um and although it's not necessarily incorrect it's not flexible and it's not giving you that high level that you you should be able to show off so with pronouns is where you can change that entirely and get something like this they referencing of course the exams they prepare students well here this whoops this so doing the exams prepares them them referencing the teenagers they're referencing the teenagers um and they also but of course grammatically each one will be slightly different anything i yeah well pronouns are just a great way to make sure that your um your writing is easy to read for the exam and that you don't repeat certain nouns too often yeah exactly okay fantastic so great um we have hello guys i hope you are still there i do apologize something very very strange just happened technical problems um something cut out we lost eli for a moment but i think i can get him back in um yes i did leave you alone i apologize it was to give you time to think and consolidate all the things we're teaching you honestly hello again thank you for being patient i'm so pleased we're back with you it was probably a good time actually because we were gonna take a little break um let me just see if i can bring in um not this but i want to bring in eli back again can i bring eli back in hmm i don't know if i can so okay bear with me guys oh no i'm on a nightmare here i should be able to bring you in but bear with me i missed you too i missed all of you but we've had a bit of a technical problem and i'm just trying to get eli back in would you believe it right at the most inopportune and unexpected moment the gremlins decide to come along um and wipe me out well they haven't wiped me out they've wiped eli out he's been pushed out of the ethernet and i'm trying to get back in get him back in right bear with me i think we we're gonna get there in a moment you're all brilliant thank you so much for all being so so so patient yes yeah that's right you're absolutely right um maybe we could give guys a moment to have a have a look at um some of these whilst i'm here and see if you can guess what the idiom is here's one for you okay right i've got to go here i've got to try here no not here but here wow i'm not sure about this bear with me guys eli this is looking very complex to do and i don't think it's gonna get in so i can't see how to get you through as a guest which is on skype alternatives what are the alternatives uh we can try zoom i'll have to um yep i'm gonna have to research how to do it i don't know how to do it on zoom so i'm just gonna try one more time no oh no see if i can get you in an ecam again hello i hope you are still there okay i think you're still there i think we're reconnected okay hunky dory great so listen i do apologize i realize everybody's gone away of course everybody's gone and done something else but we are back here um at least for those of you who are here thank you very very much um we're back says eli and eli's back look yes where is he come back eli where are you there he is excellent we're back very happy to be back yeah i do apologize for that sometimes kind of technology just takes over and ruins everything so listen not to worry but we were showing you some pictures here um and it was this one wasn't it was the uh not that one it was this one guess the idiom and sure enough a lot of you got it absolutely right um such as ishmael who said the elephant in the room is maya let me um bring you in here with us elephants in the room a few people had that well done materang as well the elephant in the room eli what does that mean exactly the elephant in the room so that's typically the controversial topic that everybody's thinking about but nobody's talking about right for example the fact that our technology just completely failed i'm ignoring it and carrying on with the class so nothing ever happened nothing ever happened we're here happily talking about ielts writing showing you what the examiner is looking for [Laughter] i'm going to show a quick other one here one more just to give me a moment to get my second wind guys can you guess the idiom interesting one what can you see in the picture eli i see a large green object with many leaves so i guess that could be a bush and then the word beat and the word beat is strategically positioned in relation to the bush so hopefully that's going to give a bit of a clue to some people so i would say beat on the bush but beat on the bush is not an idiom what can that mean fortunately we've got some much more intelligent people watching um including anuet julia tony uh jan and this is often used as somebody put it this is often used in the negative right um we often say don't beat around the bush ismail again come on don't beat around the bush and return to the subject so beat around the bush what's another another way of expressing that eli i guess to to be ignoring a topic isn't it and not coming to a decisive um a decisive statement or a decisive answer to something yeah i yes i often think of it as bit like rambling or going around in circles that you're not going direct to the answer you're just going around and around the answer as you say kind of ignoring the answer and ismail's um example sentence is spot on people often say hey stop beating around the bush as in stop ignoring um the answer or stop rambling give me the give me the truth even if it's a hard truth give me the truth yeah exactly give me the truth tell me the reality very very nice good lots of people have got that prince says we just want to see you instead of this elephant oh fantastic and sally hello again to not both of you to you sally from both of us yes okay excellent so we're back um eli one more idiom or shall we go straight back in go on let's see let's see one more quite a lot of fun they are fun and we need to relax after all of that disaster this one is quite interesting right see if you guys can get this one hmm i can see this looks like an exit sign in a hospital or something right somebody leaving welcome back thank you very much welcome back to you as well i'm glad you've returned after our little technical mishap mishap being accident right somebody has already got the answer look at that well let's have a look at some of the more difficult ones um so if i just take it away for a moment um tengy said exit well exit in got out of topic um exit and then we've got what else hurry out now then here we go christiane out of the blue villa [Music] out of the blue uh little jewel out of the blue dirt well done hassan as well you've got it out of the blue something to the blue something happens out the blue what does that really like it means it happens unexpectedly so when we got disconnected it happened out of the blue and then when we got reconnected it happened out of the blue as well i'd lost all hope me too me too so in fact it's interesting all of these idioms connect very nicely to our technical mishap we lost connection out of the blue then we decided to um not talk about the elephant in the room and we were just beating about the bush until we came back to the topic and today's topic of course is writing ielts writing um so if you've just come back just to let you know my name is keith i run the keith speaking academy um which is at this website address you can go and check it out later um and i'm here today with eli eli howes is an expert in ielts writing also has a writing course on my website and we're looking at how um how ielts writing is assessed right um so we have done quite a bit so far so far we've been looking at task achievement these are the four areas that you the examiner is looking for the examiner is looking to see if you've done task achievement and we've talked about that about giving relevant answers developing your answer and also coherence and cohesion we've talked there about the logical structure of the linking words that you need all of the things that the examiner is looking out for we then got cut off but now we're back and we're going to look at the other two which is grammar grammatical range and accuracy and vocabulary which in the trade we have a fancy name just to make ourselves look more professional we like to say lexical resource but really it's just vocabulary um so let's have a look at grammar first um let me move on no let's not do that let's look at lexical resource first um eli over to you what are we gonna look at here okay so four criteria for lexical resource the first one is the range of vocabulary so the variety of words that you use and topic specific vocabulary for example afterwards it's the accuracy of your vocabulary so the accuracy in meaning are you using the best word to convey your idea but then also accuracy in the word formation so do you put the word in the correct form as a verb or as a noun or as an adjective and then after that spelling so yes spelling is important in ielts writing and finally paraphrasing which refers to the idea that we can rewrite um sentences or use synonyms so using different words to mean the same thing right so we're going to look at all of these individually starting i think with the range of vocabulary so um a little hint here on the left is the model essay and um this essay was answering the question that we looked at before about whether exams are good for teenagers for when they finish high school and they move into the world of work or go to university so um this essay uses a lot of useful collocations so a lot of specific education related collocations so things like post-school life so a synonym for life after leaving school or a range of skills to talk about a collection of different skills or world of work or ample practice so ample practice means a lot of practice and then further education is the synonym for going to university so examiners will pick up on these collocations that you use and give you a higher score if you use them accurately very very nice for those of you who haven't heard of collocations before collocations are key for learning vocabulary right i mean they're normally two or three words that typically go together to make a phrase or a chunk and i think eli i don't know if you agree but i think when we're learning vocabulary rather than learning just one word like skill a skill it's really useful to learn a chunk or a collocation like a range of skills or a work life skill because that collocation gives us more fluency because we're not working word by word we're working phrase by phrase and we know the phrase is accurate what do you think yeah i completely agree and i would say sometimes i find it quite difficult to teach collocations just because there's so many collocations out there but for students that do want to learn collocations i often recommend reading and just um pay attention to the words that often appear next to each other that's a good way to build up your collocations list yeah great good tony is just asking is there a difference between collocation and phrase that there is there is a difference for in the world of teaching and teaching languages yes linguistic there's a difference but from the point of view of your practice a collocation can be a phrase or a chunk um i wouldn't worry too much about the kind of the linguistic difference though there is a small one but more or less they're similar okay great so variety of words and then topic specific vocabulary what's that eli so yeah so you're going to be um assessed on different topics throughout the ielts test um so for example in the speaking um exam you might have um part one which will typically deal with three different topics and then part two and part three of the speaking test will will look at a specific topic and ask you and you'll be asked many questions about that and then again in the writing test you might be given another topic again now these topics don't tend to be um difficult it's not that they're topics that you've never encountered the idea is they're topics that language teachers think that everybody should be able to engage with so things like the environment or roles and responsibility another very popular one is education and upbringing so you're going to be assessed on different common topics and the examiner is going to be looking to see if you have vocabulary that adequately talks about these topics so this one is about education and in this essay we can see things like assessed in university developed skills tested practical and vocational coursework so we're showing the examiner that we have vocabulary related to this topic great um that's nice now i'm i'm as we're talking about words and vocabulary here and just because we've had a bit of fun with the idioms there are some very interesting questions that have come up and i thought we'd get these questions so let's let's answer them let's not ignore the elephant in the room jan asks will you get more points or a higher score when using idioms in your essay lacvia says can we use idioms in ielts writing task 2 and uh says can we use phrases in formal writing like academic task two maybe let's let's focus on this idea of idioms in writing task two um i've got my idea eli tell us your idea as well sure so um we don't tend to use as many idioms in writing in fact it's quite rare however there's a difference between idioms and idiomatic vocabulary and so idiomatic vocabulary can include phrasal verbs and while you're much more likely to have phrasal verbs in speaking there are certain phrasal verbs that appear in writing as well so things like carry out research so carry out is a phrasal verb and therefore idiomatic and we see that more often in writing however in general we don't tend to use idioms in writing would you say something similar keith i would say something very similar yes and i realized as we were talking about idioms people may be thinking oh idioms i can use in writing by and large those idioms we use are used in speaking much more in ielts speaking and i think as you said it's rare to see them in writing um unless they are for example phrasal verbs which can be idiomatic or different idiomatic expressions which are smaller so i would agree and i think just tying into uh shah's question when he talks about phrases in formal writing everything is a phrase basically but if you mean collocations so for example when we're talking about collocations these phrases absolutely in both speaking and writing absolutely you should be using collocations um but if you're talking about idioms i would say rarely in in the writing very rarely um i would think of those mainly for speaking as we said except for some phrasal verbs or other idiomatic expressions that you may find yeah and i think for example like a phrase like i would argue that so that's a very useful um chunk as you mentioned earlier that would be very acceptable and would help you to get a higher score in ielts writing but it's not an idiom exactly things like um beat around the bush probably you wouldn't use or out of the blue you wouldn't use in writing really not in academic writing to be clear quite a lot of fun but they're fun to learn yes exactly right talking about vocabulary um topic specific vocabulary we've talked about accuracy and spelling this is very important why is it important eli um it's important because it's going to affect your score because it it changes the communication for example um if you said something like uh it improves great then the examiner is going to say what it improves great but if you say it improves greatly or it greatly improves then you're using the word great in the correct form as an adverb if you say it improves great you're causing confusion you're not using the word great accurately and you're going to get a lower score right so i guess there's always a bit of a balance right between using more complex vocabulary and accuracy and making sure you're accurate because it's easier to be accurate with simple vocabulary um so i guess there's always a bit of a balance you have to get there yeah i'd say for for 99 99.9 percent of students it's better to um focus on using vocabulary that they can use accurately and not trying to use advanced vocabulary because the chances are even if you don't think the vocabulary that you're using is advanced examiners will be able to identify what level that is and you'll probably be using more advanced vocabulary than you think and if you're using it accurately then you're also going to get the score for accuracy as well so focus on communicating your ideas and not necessarily on trying to use words you don't really fully understand because you run the risk of not using it accurately fantastic advice great if i could have a little heart i'd be pressing my heart now great spelling here's an interesting one so yes obviously spelling is a part of accuracy right yes so some some typical mistakes here especially with the double letters like essential with two s's assessed with um four s's and then useful with the singular l so um spelling is important and uh a lot of students are very unhappy to hear that because english spelling is often considered to be a total nightmare yeah but i believe we've got a bit of a spelling challenge to go through keith we do have a spelling challenge um so we thought we'd take a moment we're just going to take a little moment we've been looking at vocabulary hello you're back how do i get rid of you get rid of you um we thought we'd give you a spelling challenge just to break a little bit but to focus on vocabulary and spelling let's see how good you are at spelling so if i can find my my the information that i need which i should be able to do before we had this technological nightmare if i call it this so let's try and bring us both back in here we go so we're going to start um with two words i mean one's correct spelling one is incorrect spelling and there's an example uh eli do you want to read the example the cost of student is rising steadily so what is the missing word so the word is going to be accommodation but how do we spell it yep spelling challenge that's right so how do we spell it so bin and everybody else get your spelling hat on and uh tell us just type in what you think the correct answer is interesting so macro has gone for well he's gone for his own answer because that's not one of the two he's gone for double c single m who knows let's see jaz am you've gone for the double c double m anna as well double c double n and the answer is double c double m well done very nice the next one we've got now a day or now a days eli do you want to read the sentence it is impossible to escape the abundance of adverts now well i can't say it don't great so guys choose your answer here is it now a day or nowadays what do you think stefano i like your answer 2c2m nice and brief love it so here are some possible answers saban says nowadays alina you've got your own little answer you've decided to make it into three words that is interesting um layla says nowadays um right i think this says of course a little hippo nowadays let's find out the answer it is nowadays well done the next one now how do you pronounce this because i was listening to a podcast the other day and um i found it quite interesting how do you pronounce this word eli i planted leisure right the podcast i was listening to it said leisure our leisure time and i thought leisure and of course i realized it was the american pronunciation of course yeah you often hear that in the us you do of course both are absolutely right of course they are um leisure eli do you want to read the uh sentence mobile phones have dramatically altered the way that people spend their leisure time or leisure time exactly let's see what people have got great interesting roshan as well we've got overwhelmingly everybody has found this one quite interesting nice to see you here great the answer is it's leisure with an i e next one we've got two more receive or receive eli what's the phrase here so young people who receive anything they want often become spoiled and demanding when they become adults how do we spell receive very true is it actually e i or i e guys come in let us know what you think it's true spoiling little children they get everything they want and they become spoiled little brats is what we call them in manchester jeff says e i ed says e i r t i'm good to see you says e i we've got another e i we've got one or two ie's from jimin and also uh tingy uh we've got a question from little jewel ha ha little jewel duh question you're not sure si van nessen says e-i um and donnie says well okay the answer is e i hurry well done this is where i think these little rules we have are a waste of time because in english don't we say i what do we say i after e except after c is that right that's right so yeah so this has the c so we do have c e i so i after e except after c although you're right there are so many exceptions to this rule that it's almost not a rule exactly exactly but this one follows the rule right i before e except after c good we're gonna do the last one environment oh this is tricky what you downloading i didn't ask you dad stop downloading environment guys what do you think bin says interesting candle after it's applause not laughter bin come on hassan says google helps type the right word yes thank goodness saves my saves me in many situations right well then you're on the ielts writing test unfortunately yeah not in ielts right now that's right so julia says environment with an n m n m not m m's but n and m uh we've also got from anna as well who else and what says with the n sorry i know what didn't get you on uh teens as with the n anybody else semi-chan and m i think this one's a relatively easy one yes so ismail says with the n see how her ma says the second brilliant the answer is of course the second one it's environment very very nice well that's it listen that's the spelling brilliant well done you guys did really really well spelling is key it's very important um to practice and to work on there may be some little rules that can help you um but i think a lot of it comes from just practice and practice right what do you think eli yeah i think people often people who read a lot tend to have better spelling abilities so um read a lot in english and also when you're watching films or a series put on the subtitles and uh and you'll learn the spelling as well while you're being entertained that's very true that's very very true listen let's move on without any further ado let's have a look at um so we've talked about accuracy and spelling um the other part of lexical resource that we haven't mentioned yet is this paraphrasing idea where you re write using different words tell us a bit more about that eli what's the examiner looking for so paraphrasing is the first thing that the examiner is really going to spot and that's because when you introduce the topic in your introduction you're going to take the question so what you see on the screen now and you're going to try and write it in your own words so you're paraphrasing and you're using synonyms so what we'd like you to do is to look at the words that are in pink and to think about what are some possible synonyms for these words so instead of saying teenagers should have regular exams maybe we can introduce the same concept with a different word instead of regular exams so maybe we could put number one number two and then number three here keith and people um or the audience can think about some synonyms for number one regular exams number two secondary school and number three slightly more challenging life after leaving school and then afterwards i'll show you um some synonyms that we decided on your wish is my command it's done right regular exams secondary school life after leaving school is there life after leaving school i think there's more life when you leave school i totally agree actually my life took off after i left school i found school a little bit a little bit restrictive um it wasn't the best environment for me for learning i or i don't know but i just found the the whole teaching method a bit um not repressive but didn't not very creative and incredibly boring at times it was when i left school and went to university that wow boom things just changed radically for me i remember you saying you wanted quite a strict school right you have to wear a school uniform and the rest of it i did i went to this grammar school right grammar school so we had a cap we had a tie we had a blazer i mean great it taught me how to make a tie or to do a tie um for future working life and you know some aspects of the education were very very good um but there was a lot of just memorized learning repeating things reading books there wasn't much engagement or creativity around it and it wasn't and it was always being told step by step what to do and at university it was like go and do what you need to do i was like but what do i do expecting somebody to tell me because i wasn't ready for this autonomy um but i i learned it very quickly and i loved it really liked it yeah i think a lot of people really thrive when they when they enter university um because they appreciate that freedom and that autonomy yep that was definitely my case brilliant i'm gonna bring us back see what people have got synonyms um so for number one frequent exams jd tests regularly secondary school college secondary school and college it's interesting right because college in america is used differently from college in britain and i think you're right in secondary school they do call it college but in england we wouldn't but that's fine life after leaving school adulthood jeff what do you think of these ones eli so number one entrance exams no that's not really a synonym because an entrance exam is the exam that you typically do to get into university whereas we're talking about regular exams throughout high school so that might include exams that you do when you're 15 years old that don't really impact whether or not you're directly going to university so you'd want to be careful about that kind of synonym because but it's not really a synonym here high school again i would say yes for secondary school and graduation life after leaving school graduation the graduation's the leaving school whereas life after graduation is life after school so maybe life after graduation could be yeah yeah yeah like or you could change it for example to upon graduating so you're taking that idea um but you exactly you're showing the fact that it's after you've graduated yeah i've got a quick question for you eli about your school experience when you left school did you when school right not university when you left school secondary school did you have a graduation ceremony yeah we had what's called a levers ball so it's a bit more low-key than a graduation ceremony okay but it was a i think the school rented out a hotel and they had a dj and um i was i went to a school in scotland so most of the men wore kilts you know you are leaving to our leaving ceremony right and there are a couple of speeches made and lots of dancing fantastic that's great because when i i mean i'm going to show my age but when i left school there was no such thing as a graduation do party you're just like thank you bye-bye and you left and that was it but nowadays it seems and i think this comes from america the idea of the high school graduation the prom the ball the uh the big events and big celebration my niece was telling me that she had the same a couple of years ago when she graduated um and it's i think we you know we've picked up this a bit of the american culture maybe i think you're spot on i think the us take it very seriously recently i was watching um admittedly i think this was for a university but um stanford university would um invite steve jobs to come and speak at the graduation you're thinking wow you know imagine graduating from you know high school university and having someone as larger than life steve jobs to come and wish you well upon graduating it is amazing isn't it but nice i think it's a nice i think it's a good good thing to do um excellent so we got lots of ideas from people there um possible synonyms i'm just going to move on to putting some that eli suggests here um eli talk us through yeah so this sentence is introducing the topic so we're taking the general theme and we're just having an introductory sentence to show the examiner that we're on the right track so we're going to say exams are an important feature of secondary education so secondary education is a synonym for secondary school and um i can't remember who it was but like somebody pointed out you could also use high score here and then we say however there is contention so contention means there is a debate so there is contention of the whether frequent exams so that's a synonym for regular exams and somebody also pointed that out where the frequent exams prepare students for post-school life so that's life after leaving school or like we mentioned for life upon graduation nice life upon graduation that's nice yes i noticed we got i i think it was negara who said life after graduation a few people said life after graduation but eli very nice life upon graduation very nice can tell you're a native speaker right lovely lexical resource um we've talked a lot about that now i i did have a quick question for you here and i wanted to actually share something with everybody very briefly because we've talked about what the examiner is looking for right different parts of lexical resource including spelling accuracy synonyms paraphrasing a common question students ask me is well okay how do i build my vocabulary how do i learn my vocabulary um eli any tips here for learning vocabulary so um so i was interviewing a band a writing band a student recently and they had this great line they said um in order to be a great writer you need to be an avid reader you need to be a great reader and i think um when i asked them to elaborate on that they said that they learned so much vocabulary that they could use in their writing test from reading a lot and in particular they were reading a lot of model essays and they were paying attention to the collocations to the synonyms to all of the phrases that were used in these model essays and they were able to apply it to their own writing so i think that's a very useful way to learn vocabulary and learn the suitable context for that vocabulary as well because that's also important what do you think keith i i would agree with that entirely i was just um i was going to share something that actually i think is the thing that you saw as well probably the same thing um on the facebook group i put in a question the other day um and i can maybe just show guys very briefly this um and it was asking people about this particular question well i don't know if i've lost it now about how people learn vocabulary um let me just show you and i'll tell you what i think about it if you give me a moment if i can get this so i was asking how do you learn and build vocabulary for ielts writing and there were some amazing tips in here from people um and i i was really impressed at the the quality of the suggestions i suggest you go and have a look at this guys because there are some really good things from studying word families and noticing lexical chains is really good collocations which we've talked about something simple like esa said just read my favorite articles and take a note for new vocabs as simple as that can be really really good reading example answers can work as well it's a good way of practicing um and also there were others here we had for example i read sample essays and use that vocabulary and complex sentences in my writings repeatedly so the idea of repeating and practicing and practicing it i thought that was nice as well and what else there was some interesting ones here apart from dancing babies huda says i believe vocabulary can be built up during the learning process it begins when we read listen and speak so the vocabulary actually is not just in reading it's connected with your speaking and your listing as well the process may take some time it doesn't happen in a day um and they go on to give you more ideas there so it was actually huda that got banned eight in uh in the writing test which was two weeks ago so huda was the one she got a band eight in the writing fantastic well i'm not surprised because her suggestion here was fantastic so i i interviewed her last week and i'll be putting that video on um my youtube channel rather soon oh fantastic oh that's something to look out for what's the name of your youtube channel so it's english pro tips ielts preparation and i think if you just type in english pro tips into youtube it will come up pro as in pro as in professional pro that's right right fantastic that's great love it very very very nice so well done huda we look forward to that and um for the rest of you do go and check out the website it's the it's on facebook it's keith's mastermind community for ielts speaking if you go into facebook and just um ask to join then i'll let you in and it's full of us sharing ideas answering questions um a great place to find out more and to to get your learning tips as well like that and check out the youtube channel eli's youtube channel youtube channel coming shortly excellent um so i distracted us a little bit there let's come back um because we were looking at lexical resource but we're going to move on to our last area right so just to recap we've done task achievement coherence and cohesion lexical resource and now winding up with grammatical range um okay grammatical range let's have a look here eli what are we going to discuss okay so there's three components of grammatical range and accuracy there's the range of structures so you'll often often hear people teachers talking about complex sentences so you have simple and complex sentences and then um within these there's different structures like the past simple the present perfect so that's what we talk about when we talk about a range of structures but then there's the accuracy which is can you use those well um uh using the correct form um and then finally there's punctuation which is can you use commas full stops capital letters cods and semicolons correctly nice excellent so range of structures as you said people often talk about simple structures and complex structures i like what you've done here you've kind of given them some examples of what are commonly seen as simple like present simple past the name gives it away right present simple past simple independent clauses defining relative clauses and then complex structures as well that's very very nice would you agree that when we're writing you don't want to aim only for complex structures actually you need a mix of both yes i completely agree um so as part of my writing evaluation service um i try and give people three tips to improve their writing and one of the most common tips that i give is um you're trying to fit too much information into one sentence and i think that's what happens when people are focusing on these complex sentences so they try and fit too much information and they keep on adding these subordinate clauses and extra information into their sentences and as a result they're almost impossible to read fluent like um in terms of coherence and cohesion because you need to read them several times to really understand what the central message is so i think you should not focus on using complex structures necessarily i think you should focus on communicating your idea and as a result as you develop your ideas you're going to use a range of simple and complex structures naturally i really love that um focus on communicating your idea that's the first thing right that's really really nice great love it um we've then mentioned grammar mistakes yeah so that that's basically the the examiner is going to identify what kind of structure you're trying to use and the next thing they're going to ask themselves is are you using that structure correctly so if they see for example um a non-defining relative clause so something like um the two teachers who were doing the live lesson so us and who were doing the live lesson is the non-defining relative clause and they'll say okay well they used the the right um uh pronoun uh the right pronoun here so who were doing the live lesson but if you wrote for example um that we're doing the live lesson then maybe that's a mistake yeah so they're going to be looking at um are you using the the best structure and are you using that structure accurately right right exactly very good very nice now we're going to challenge people again because we've done a spelling challenge but we're going to challenge them now with a grammar mistake right mistakes fun um i tell you what i mean we were interested i mean grammar mistakes also well let's have a look at this first and then we can talk about different kinds of mistakes um i've written a sentence here that's incorrect so there is a grammatical mistake here i wonder if there's anybody watching clever enough to spot the mistake let's have a look let me know in the chat box let us know and uh we'll see i'll give you a second to find it out as you're doing that let's go caribbean interesting okay let me put up some ideas we've got hong kong has got also here sx said the government or government uh governments needs the government great nice um well let's have a look what the answer is i think the government needs to take drastic measures excellent now there were some interesting comments there um for example this one eli what do you say to this the government or governments yeah so if if you put the government then you're you're kind of referring to um the idea of the government um and that you also you can also be referring to the government in your country whereas if you say governments then you're talking about governments all over the world would you agree with them yes without context governments would be governments generally all across the world if you were talking about the context of a particular state maybe you could refer to different governments but without context i'd agree and the government is a specific government yeah if i talk to you about the government then i'm talking to you about the british government boris johnson and his team it's very very clear yes absolutely um great the government now and another question that came up is from ed's brand and she suggests i think the government need that i've written i think the government needs so is government singular as in the government needs or is it a plural noun as in the government need elon which one would you choose well which one would you choose in in this sentence you've gone for needs yeah i wrote it for either one um exactly i said the point here is that there are some nouns in english that can be both plural and singular and government is one of them um i tend to use nouns like this like the government needs i tend to use it as a singular right it needs to do something because i think of it as a unit as a organization the government needs to do that but there are other words eli which other words do we typically have that can be both plural and singular yeah so it's actually it's a bit like um team isn't it or family yes family yeah exactly yeah my family needs to take a holiday or the family need to take a holiday it could be both yeah and there's very little difference in meaning there may be a slight nuance in meaning but grammatically they're both correct with these words government family team there are a few others but it's worth noting them great so grammar mistakes um i wonder what other kind of mistakes students make um i mean we can ask guys to tell us the mistakes they make in your experience eli what are the most common grammatical mistakes you find so certainly um subject verb agreement causes a lot of trouble subject to verb agreement like he goes or he go exactly yeah um and especially with slightly more complex pronouns like um everyone right yes everyone have no everyone has a point of view yeah or for example like the number of people the number of people the number of people so be like for example like the number of people um is or are increasing so in this case the number of people is increasing yes yes because that's significant yeah so these kind of um longer noun phrases they're difficult to put with the correct verb form um now on top of that articles cause a lot of trouble in general um so so for example many students will um put a definite article so they'll put the when they're talking about um something in general so they'll say something like the exams are important for the students um whereas because we're talking about exams in general and students in general we would just say exams are important for students we use the then we're talking about specific exams or specific students and what i often recommend to people is that they find out the most common mistakes that are typical for their first language so both of us have spent quite a lot of time in china a lot of chinese students maybe more when they're speaking struggle with the past tenses so they'll they'll refer to the past but they'll use the present simple um and so as a result if you're a chinese student it's worth paying attention to that and also finding out what are the other problem areas for chinese speakers learning english and regardless of what language you speak you can find out the problem areas for your language and what happens when you try and translate into english absolutely very very true i think i mean yeah i it comes to mind having taught a lot of um polish and russian speakers that the the articles are very problematic because in their language either they don't have an article or they use it in a very different way so yeah it's a very very good point the some guys have shared with us i mean huda talks about subject verb agreement being difficult pariso mentions conditionals making mistakes there um absolutely articles as well and we've got somebody spamming um yes never mind never mind okay good so let's um we've looked there at grammar and accuracy what about grammar and pronunciation punctuation the last one any thoughts there yeah just just to be aware of it really um full stops people don't tend to find full stops difficult capital letters likewise there's not usually that many problems with capital letters um commas there are lots of problems with commas um so it's worth spending some time revising that and if you have bought my writing course you'll find um that your own designated lesson where we we go into uh commas in a huge amount of detail and we look at specifically the rules of commas related to ielts writing so essay writing and then also for task one so if you know that commas are something that you struggle with do take time to research that and then finally colons and semicolons which not so common in essays but um always a good idea to learn about because they can be very useful when it comes to essay writing fantastic great good um so actually we've been right through here today we've had a mammoth session despite being broken up in the middle we've looked at the four areas that examiners are looking at and all the different details of each one that you need to be focused on to make sure that you can give the examiner what they want and basically which is to get a higher score that's what you need to do essentially now you may be thinking that's great i mean i think that's very useful and people are saying it is very useful and helpful but there's more right because the next question is well knowing that which is a little bit abstract how can i actually use that to get about nine or even a band seven and band eight um and eli and i would like to help you even more to do that to take the knowledge of today and to put it into practice so how can we put this into practice um very very simple way we've decided um to give you a very simple free training course so it's a free training it's a it's one session it's a webinar session it's a webinar that is recorded and what you can do after today when you finish this session is you can go to the description and in a few moments it will appear there will be a link to the free webinar training and the free webinar training will what we will do both myself and eli together is we will take you through a model essay what we call a band 8 or band 9 model essay we'll go through it step by step showing you the different aspects of task achievement coherence and cohesion lexical resource grammatical range and accuracy and show you why that essay is a band nine what is the person doing to get a band nine and how you can emulate that you can do the same to help you get a band 8 or 9. a little caveat or maybe a warning is of course it depends largely on your ability your writing ability so if your writing ability is level five you're not going to get a band nine just by watching this video right let's be clear you need to be practicing practicing practicing your writing to improve that skill that said having some tips and techniques and understanding how the work the exam works can really really help and i think and maybe eli can tell us more that you do see the difference between a student who can be maybe at a band seven level but has not understood the exam and has ended up with a five or a six because they've just not understood how the exam works sometimes that happens would you agree eli yeah yeah that happens regularly actually people with great english language ability but people that don't understand the format or the little ins and outs of essay writing for ielts and there's a real shame when that happens but it does happen yeah and so i guess that you know the message is keep on practicing but also learn the techniques and that's what we want to show you we want to give you this free webinar where you can look and follow us going through a model lesson a model essay step by step and showing you why it is so good um we'll also in that webinar we'll be giving you a couple of freebies what are the freebies eli so we've got the essay itself with um examiner commentary so you'll be able to see the structure of the essay you'll be able to see um the essay itself and it's a little in its component so you'll see which part is the topic sentence which part is development which part is the link and then on top of that you also have a pdf checklist that's going to help you with your own writing so you'll be able to see for example what you should be considering before you go on to before you write your essay and then also after you've written your essay um there's some boxes that you need to be able to tick so um little things like have i fully understand understood the question and have i introduced the topic have i developed all of my ideas have i restated my position in the conclusion and you can keep this checklist with you when you're writing your practice essays before your ielts test fantastic great good um so you've got those two freebies you can take away that's the model answer and this checklist which should be very very very useful for your practice and for getting ready for that so um bear with me i'm just doing three things at the same time so what i'm going to do now is i'll just show you how this how you can sign up so basically you just need to sign up for the webinar as soon as you sign up you can go in and do it i will put the link right now into the chat so you can see it i'll also put it into the um [Music] into the description of the video but let me show you just how this would work right so if i share with you my website over here and i'll click on the link that i'm going to give you and that takes me basically to a kind of a it takes me here it takes me to a little page um just for this it says that ielts writing it's the webinar how to get a band 9 in ielts writing all you need to do is just fill in your name fill in your email just give a click here and join now and when you click on join now it will take you into the waiting room you can so you can access this straight away this is the great thing you don't have to wait or book until next week you come here and then you press join the room and when you join the room it will take you into the webinar training room and inside that you can watch me and eli together talking through this model essay and how it works there are lots of there's a chat in there as well so you can ask us questions so just to be clear it's not live it's recorded but in the chat you can ask questions and we will see those and we will come back and answer your questions via email so there are also different polls and questions and handouts as eli said that you can get in the training we think you'll love it we think it'll be very useful to help you understand ielts writing and how to get a band seven eight and nine um and to improve your own levels of writing of course as i said in addition to technique practice is key um and actually a great way to get both practice and technique is through the course of eli eli's got the online course right if i remember correctly yeah that's right um so my course is the complete ielts writing course which is proven methods for seven plus in ielts writing and it's for those people who are preparing for the academic and general ielts so it doesn't matter which one you're doing you'll find lessons for you to help you get that band 7 plus and the course kind of goes through everything that you need to know um to be fully prepared for your ielts writing test it starts by looking at task 2 we look at all the different essay types so there are five different essay types from agree disagree questions to double questions and direct questions and we look at structures for all of those questions and we look at how you would write an introduction how you develop your ideas and body paragraphs what information you should include in your conclusion and what are some useful structures to put into all of these parts of your essay there's also a section on vocabulary where we look at different linking words and how we can use synonyms and what are some appropriate synonyms for some of the common words that appear in ielts writing there's also a section on grammatical range and accuracy which this lesson has touched on except it goes in a lot more detail and actually we look at the most common mistakes in ielts writing and then also some advanced grammar that you can use in your ielts essay so things like the passive form non-defining relative clauses conditionals which i think is very useful for some of the students that mentioned that they find conditionals difficult in their ielts writing and then it also goes into task one general which is the letter writing and task one academic which is the report writing so if you've got your ielts test coming up and you're looking for a particularly high score then i really recommend that you check out my complete ielts writing course at the keith speaking academy fantastic it looks like an advertisement it is an advertisement but it's brilliant it's a great course go and check it out love it great so listen um that course um is is well worth checking out i what i can do actually is i can just show you how to find it of course the course is a paid for course right um but if you go over to the the website the keith speaking academy um and that's here at keith speaking academy.com you'll see this box it says online courses and if you click on the online course you'll see the different online courses that we have that in in the in the school here and the complete ielts writing course is eli's course is right here you can click on it there and find out all the information about the course you can see the curriculum what you're going to learn in the course there's plenty of work but it's absolutely brilliant and uh you can get the course there and basically the price is 27 it's because you pay tax in some countries but as soon as you click on the buy now button it'll take you to the the course and you can pay there with either credit card or paypal um and you can do the checkout straight away there it's on the keith speakingacademy.com website so that's the paid for course and it's a great way to carry on practicing and to learn it's a complete guide to ielts right now in addition to that as i mentioned what we are doing both eli and myself is offering you a free webinar training the free webinar training you can get by clicking the link in the messages or clicking the link in the um in the description of this video at the bottom just look for the free training webinar link and that'll take you that's the one that will take you to the the page i showed you earlier which is this page over here right and when you go there put in your name put in your email join now and you can go and watch it which will be great i can see being anne is saying i'm in the room and two keiths are talking two keys and two he lies because you're watching it at the same time right fantastic great so you can do that in a moment as soon as we finish um jan says can you use it more than once um the free webinar training yes is the answer so when you say press join now you automatically get an email from me and eli saying thank you for joining here's the link so you can go back two or three times if you want and watch it again you can't download it but you can go back several times watch it as many times as you need to learn what you need theresa how long do you have access to the webinar um i think we're going to put it up there probably for the next month at the moment maybe more eli what do you think yeah i did this well this was my first webinar it was really exciting and it's um i watched over it today it's absolutely brilliant i love the fact that there's so many interactive polls there's the ability to get involved in the chat box and to download material um so i guess we'll just kind of watch and see and see if it's useful for people right exactly but i would say a minimum probably you know probably a month and maybe longer we'll let you know if it's still if it's still useful pengy i appreciate it you're welcome no problem at all joe hannah as well you're very very welcome um what else anything else we've got i'm just seeing there's any other comments it was very useful thank you very much oh great you are absolutely very very welcome um albert says how much for the private lesson we don't do private lessons albert but the the online course which is self-access is 27 yes okay great okay that's for the course but of course the webinar what you want to do now is go and watch that webinar the free webinar um it's a recorded session it's interactive it's fun i think you love it um and that for us is it for today we've done a lot today eli we've had a lot of um interesting moments with technical problems funny idioms as well as all the stuff that we've covered um big thank you thank you very much for joining us today it's been a really really fun thank you very much yeah thank you to everyone that came today and i hope you enjoy the webinar and thank you keith also for hosting this it's been a real uh fun experience being a live lesson with you again great same here i i've really enjoyed it and of course thank you everybody for watching really appreciate it um look forward to seeing you all well soon my when is my next live lesson i'm just looking my next live lesson is not next week it's going to be the week after so on the 5th of may there'll be another live lesson with with me just with me um we'll be looking at ielts speaking in the meantime you can check out my youtube channel english speaking success eli's youtube channel english pro tips there's lots of stuff for you to be doing but right now go and watch that free training webinar and i think you'll thank us for it later that's it thank you for joining us take care my friends all the best bye great cheerio

Channel: English Speaking Success

Views: 132,393

Keywords: ielts writing, introduction paragraph, body paragraphs, writing ielts, writing for task two, writing strategies, ielts task 2 explanations, ielts writing task 2, ielts writing tips, ielts writing task 2 academic, ielts writing tips and tricks, ielts writing task 2 academic tips and tricks, keith speaking academy, eli ielts writing

Id: bHFG7sIKlcg

Length: 133min 51sec (8031 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022