- [Chris] Chris here from IELTS Advantage, and in this lesson we're going to look at the most common words in
Band 7, 8, and 9 essays. What I did was I asked my team to give me 100 Band 7, 8, and 9 essays
that we had corrected, that we had given our
students feedback on, and those students have gone on to get either a Band 7, 8, or 9. And what we've done is we've analyzed all of the words in these 100 essays so that we can help you guys learn what the most common words are. We're going to look at the top 20 words, and the percentage of the
top 20 words is unbelievable, so stay tuned for that one. Then we're gonna look
at the top 20 keywords, or the top 20 nouns that kept
coming up again and again. This is gonna help you
with those common topics that come up in Task 2. Then we're going to look at
the most common linking words, and we're also going to analyze the percentage of high-level words and the highest-level words that were in these Band 7, 8, and 9, we're going to give you a list. And if you stay until
the end of the video, we're going to give you a link
to the most powerful resource for Band 7, 8, and 9 students for free. So how we teach our VIP students is very different to how most schools, most courses, most online teachers teach their students about vocabulary. What we do is we emphasize that students should keep it simple, whereas most other schools emphasize that in order to improve your score, you should use mostly high-level words. We focus more on accuracy
and helping students be as accurate as
possible with their words, whereas most other schools emphasize improving the range of your vocabulary. We do don't really help students improve the range of their vocabulary. What we do instead is we help them use their existing vocabulary
to improve their score. Whereas other schools, especially online, especially YouTube, they encourage you to learn lists of words and then put those words into your essays. We focus more on topic-specific words, whereas most schools
focus on complex words. So we're going to look at the data now and we're gonna see who is the winner and which one is going to
help you improve your score. So when we looked at
all 100 of those essays, these were the top 20 words, words like the, to, of, and,
in, that, are, this, they. In fact, just these 20 words made up 33.5, more than 1/3 of the
total words in essays. The was the most popular word, to was the second most popular word. So what does this teach you? Well, number one, the
vast majority of the words that you're going to be using are going to be very,
very, very simple words. So a problem that we see a
lot is students focus too much on improving the range and
complexity of their vocabulary and they don't focus
too much on these words. What we do with our students
is we teach them how to crawl, we teach them how to walk before we teach them how to run. The other interesting
thing about these words is it shows that it is impossible to write a good essay
without repeating some words. Try and write a Band 9
or even a Band 6 essay without repeating some of these
words over and over again. So if your teacher is teaching you that you can never repeat
a word, show them this. It's impossible to write an essay without repeating these common words. So don't worry if you
repeat these common words. So let's see who's the winner
for these common words. Simple, I think we get that one. Accuracy, focus on using
the simple words accurately rather than trying to improve range. I think we win that one. Use existing vocabulary. This is, you know, every
student we work with, this is within their existing vocabulary, so we don't have to
teach them anything new. Topic-specific, there's no real
topic-specific words in there, there's no real complex words in there. so we'll call that one a draw. Here are the top 10 keywords that we find in those 100 essays. We used a a very broad range of questions and these were the top 10. So people, children, time, companies, parents, life, school,
health, employees, and diet. Again, very simple words. As you'll notice, all of
them are about people. Even companies are just made up of people, people go on a diet, employees are people. So you better get used
to writing about people. Most of these are very topic-specific. So you'd say education,
that could also be health. Parents, education, health as well. School, education, health,
health, diet, health. What are the two most
common Task 2 topics? Education and health. So if you're focusing on,
you know, big complex words, like plethora for example is a
very common word that we see. How does plethora help you
write about education or health? It doesn't. Simple words that are topic-specific help you write about these things. Also, if you know people
is going to come up, children is going to come up, you should have synonyms ready
that you know are accurate so that you can vary your
vocabulary as much as possible. I know we said that it's
okay to repeat a word, but you should try also
to vary your vocabulary as much as you can. So let's see who's the winner here. Simple, of course, accuracy, use existing vocabulary,
there's nothing new in there, and topic-specific. Now let's look at the
most common linking words. Some people call these linkers, some people call these cohesive devices, but they're all words like this, and these are the most
common ones that we find in those 100 Band, 7, 8, and 9 essays. For example, in conclusion,
however, although, for instance, as a result, and therefore. Again, very simple. All of these are just
functional and practical, because we teach our students what the examiners are
going to think about these. The examiners do not give you extra marks for having complex, fancy linking words. They give you extra marks for using them appropriately
and accurately. So it's much better to just
learn a few simple ones and use them appropriately and accurately than it is to learn a bunch of ones that are very complex and
take up a lot of time. So if we just take this
for example, in conclusion, how many conclusions
are you going to write? Are you going to write
more than one conclusion? No. You will only write one
conclusion for your entire essay. So our students spend their time learning one way of doing that because they're only going to do it once, and then they can spend their time focusing on other more important things. How many times are you going
to put examples in your essay? For example, for instance, that's it. So if your teacher is teaching
you 17 different ways, and I've actually seen videos, you know, 17 different
ways to write a conclusion, why would you spend time learning 17 ways to write a conclusion for
your IELTS preparation? Are you going to write 17 conclusions? And also the thing to learn here is you don't need that many. You have ways of ending your essay, you have ways of giving an example, you have however, although,
as a result, therefore, you don't need much more than that. So that's why these ones came up again and again and again and again. And the other interesting
thing is the Band 9 students were exactly the same
as the Band 7 students when it comes to linking words. In fact, the Band 9 students
used fewer linking words than the Band 7 students. So let's see who wins this one. Simple, accurate, use existing vocabulary, you don't have to learn anything new. Again, there's nothing
about topic-specific there, so we'll leave that one as a draw. Okay, so here's where it starts
to get really interesting. Let me explain what these mean. So there is some software
that you can use, it's actually produced
by Cambridge English, and what it allows you
to do is put in text and it analyzes the level of
each word within that text. So we put in all 100 essays and this was what the
software came up with. So what is this? A1 is the simplest words that you can use. B1 and B2 are kind of intermediate words, but by most student's
standards, A1, A2, B1, and B2, all of these, most students would say that these are simple words if
you showed them these words. Then C1 and C2, these are
your high-level words. So out of those 100 essays, about 20% were A1, about 15% were A2, 25% B1, and about 20% were B2. So the vast majority of the
words were A1, A2, B1, B2, simple everyday words that students have within their existing vocabulary. So the Band 7, 8, 9
students that we work with, they focused on using
their existing vocabulary to clearly communicate their
answer to the examiner. Why? Because your main job when
you're doing the writing test is to clearly communicate
your answer to the examiner. They only used complex
vocabulary, high-level vocabulary, when they couldn't use
one of the simpler words. That's what we teach our students to do. So, less than 10%, so I
think came out at about 7%, less than 10% of the
words were high-level. Think about it as a cake. You know, what are the
main ingredients of a cake? If you're baking a nice cake, most things are simple ingredients, sugar, flour, milk, everyday ingredients, but then you put a few sprinkles on top. So the sprinkles might be
10%, and that makes your cake. That's what most of the Band
7, 8, and 9 essays look like. The vast majority of words were simple, everyday words
that most students can use, and then about 7%, 5% were
just the sprinkles on top, those complex words. But these words were very topic-specific. These unknown words, so these are spelling mistakes, the software can't pick those up, or just words that are
not in their database for whatever reason. So let's see who's the winner here. I think yes, definitely simple. Accuracy, the simpler the words, the more accurate you're going to be. The more you push your range the less accurate you're going to be. Use your existing vocabulary, and focus on topic-specific
words, not really complex words. Now let's look at some of the
words that our students used. I want you just to look
at these and think, are these words that you know that you could use in your own essays? What percentage of these words are words that you already know and are pretty confident
that you could use them in your own essays? And also think like, how
high-level are these words? So now that you've thought about that, these are C1 words,
and these are C2 words. I've only used the A, so
I literally have a list of all the C1 and C2
words in those 100 essays, but I couldn't give you them all. It wouldn't fit on the paper. But if you look at these words like accountable, adolescent, advocate, allocate, aspirations, assault, none of those words are
particularly complex. What a lot of students
think complex words are are big words that you
don't know the meaning of and that are very rarely used in English. That is not the case. These are very topic-specific, functional, practical words that most students are
able to use already. So, simple, accurate, within your existing
vocabulary, and topic-specific. It's a pretty one-sided victory. So of course, I'm going to be biased, because, you know, I run the VIP course and I'm not most teachers or most schools, so of course I'm going to be biased. But the difference between what
you'll see on the internet, I know the internet is full of people telling you that they're the best. What we do is we post proof
of one-on-one interviews with our success stories. Go to the link, click on that, and it will take you to
all of our success stories. That is the most powerful resource if you are hoping to
get a Band 7, 8, and 9. Don't listen to me, listen to real students
who actually did it. Go to that page, you'll find people from your country, you'll find people from your occupation. Click on there, watch a few of them, and you will see that
they all say these things. So, who is correct? The data and thousands
of successful students that followed this method, or your YouTube guru who wants
you to click on their video? Hope that you enjoyed this video. If you need any help with
your IELTS preparation, always feel free to get in touch, you'll find my contact
details on the website, and I hope you enjoyed the video. (groovy music) (music stops)
