you are now listening to the IELTS Podcast learn from tutors and ex-examiners who are
for masters of IELTS preparation your host, Ben Worthington hello there IELTS students
in this episode, we are going to look at speaking strategies and more specifically, we're going
to look at how to expand your answers and I want to help you with this subject because
as you probably know, over the last couple of weeks, I started accepting online students
for tutoring to help them pass the Speaking part the reason I did this was because in
the future, it's going to be a service we offer, a new service, and I want to perfect
the technique and at the moment, I'm doing the classes, but in the future when it's a
service offered to help more students, it'll probably be myself and another tutor that
I trained now, I've got two techniques that I really like using and I like using them
because they help deliver fast results and especially by delivering sort of like quick
and automatic answers now, what I've realized over the last couple of weeks doing these
classes is that these techniques are good, very good and very effective especially for
fluency and especially for building confidence and they've become even more effective when
we applied them to IELTS, but they needed to be adapted this is why I was doing the
classes now, here's some useful advice because these questions are good, these techniques
are good to get you started to get rolling, so to speak, with your answer, but then once
you've answered for example, tell me the good qualities a friend should have yeah and a
student made an answer, a friend should be loyal, they should be trustworthy, they should
be punctual and they should be there if you need a hand now, where do we go from here?
you've answered the question, but the examiner did not ask you that question to find out
if you were going -- if you had the characteristics of a good friend you know they weren't asking
about what you think are good traits of a friend because they want a friend for their
daughter okay they're asking you, you probably know this, but they're asking you these questions
because they want to hear your linguistic ability it's not about if you're a good person
or not they don't really care about the books you've read they want to know if you can express
yourself so as I was saying we answer the question a friend should be loyal, they should
be friendly, they should be there when you need them, they should be generous, etc. we've
answered the question now what?
now what?
well there's a few different ways we can take this answer we can say because and we can
say they should be loyal because if a friend is loyal, you know that they will stand up
for you, that they will be there for you in difficult times and for example, maybe you
lose your job but if the friend is loyal, you can be certain that they will stick around
yeah now we've answered the question and we've also gone into details we said because and
it slipped out that this is going to be my next point we gave an example for example,
if you lost your job and we can go for detailed examples and we can also go for hypothetical
examples we can go for detailed, real-world examples for what?
explaining what happened in the past yeah a friend should be loyal for example, a few
years ago, I lost my job in the bookstore and it was because the new manager wanted
to clear out old employees, but my friends they stuck up for me, and they helped me fight
my case against the new manager and eventually, I managed to stay there so there we go that
was my example and that was a real-world past example now, I kind of slipped on to the next
technique of giving examples or expanding your answers and the third technique that
I want to share with you are stories now you might think that a story is a long, elaborate
conversation and you have to do all these different sort of like techniques and details
but no a story has three components: a beginning, a middle (what happened), and an end beginning,
middle brackets, what happened brackets, and then end for example I went to the shops I
bought some Cadburys chocolate I came home (beginning, middle, and an end) that was the
most basic story you'll ever hear granted, I understand however, that's a story yeah
going back to what we were saying what are the quality is a friend should have? a friend
should be loyal because for example, once I worked at a bookshop I got fired my friend
helped me argue my case, and I got my job back okay three cases – or sorry, three
stages of the story beginning, middle what happened, and an end yeah I've reduced it
down to three if you want to go a little bit further you can say and this is important
because you know so I got fired I lost my job my friend helped me argue my case to get
my job back eventually I got it back and this is why I think loyalty is important because
without loyalty, my friend would have just abandoned me and I would have had to fight
the manager and the company on my own, by myself so just to summarize what I've said
so far we can expand by saying ‘because’ we can expand by saying -- by giving details
you know we can expand by saying because, by giving examples, and in the examples, we
can say hypothetical ones or we can use real-world past examples we can give stories with the
beginning, a middle, and an end and we can also, in those stories, we can expand those
stories further with details going back to my bookshop experience, we could say I worked
in a bookshop in Huddersfield it was a small bookshop that specialized in nautical books,
books about a seafarer, about the Navy and about boats and my -- the new manager, David
came in and he came up from London he was a manager of a book store down in London and
the owner brought this manager up but we didn't get along and the manager wants to cut cost,
so he fired me but my loyal friend, who's also called David, decided that it wasn't
fair that I was getting fired and he helped me fight the case against the new manager
and eventually, I got reinstated and this is why I think loyalty is an important quality
so here, I went through the six-question words I didn't go through all of them because it
was just too expansive but the six-question words, who, why, what, where, when, and how
okay the who in this story was the David’s yeah the where I mentioned two locations one
up north in Yorkshire, England, Huddersfield, my hometown which is near Manchester and also
London and I said he came up from London and I'm expanding my answers with the details
and a story so remember, the main point of this tutorial is you – fair enough, we may
be doing classes together and I can get you to the point where you're giving answers quickly
and automatically, but still we need to develop them and my final point is that different
students need different classes or different -- obviously, different skill sets like some
students for example, I've noticed this that they will sprint and then crawl and then sprint
and then crawl I'll give you an example of what this sounds like so I used to work in
a shop in in in in in Huddersfield it was a bookshop filled with Navy books and sailing
books and a new manager came and he he he -- a new manager came and he he he wanted
to fire me to cut cost and you see he was sprinting then was slowing down and stopping
and then was sprinting again okay this is not a good technique if this is how you speak
then you need to focus on your delivery okay another way that this might -- this problem
might manifest itself is if you're stretching words yeah so a new manager came up and he
fired me because he wanted to reduce costs yeah and when you're stretching the sound,
stretching the vowels and stretching the words, this is a common trait for speakers of Latin
languages especially Portuguese, Spanish, Italian they stretch the words because this
is possible in their own language also from my experience as well with Indian speakers,
they have this sprint, crawl, sprint, crawl pattern, and I think this is because this
is possibly how they communicate in their own language as well where it's like speed,
and maybe stopping and then speed again, but in English if you have this issue in English
then you need to focus on your delivery and the homeworks I’ve been studying and have
seen great results from are, it’s mimicking I've talked about this before you listen to
an audio and you try and repeat it exactly not only word for word but also sound for
sound the intonation, the rhythm, the pronunciation everything and we're only focused on delivery
and this way we can see -- this way we can improve later, we look at techniques for expanding
your answers for example or we look at techniques for improving your answers and using different
grammatical structures, but for some students, all we need to do is work on the delivery
so that's it for me this is just a quick tutorial that I wanted to help you with I wanted to
share just some tips for the Speaking, and if you are interested in improving your speaking
abilities then at the moment there are still some spaces left for classes, online speaking
classes it's one on one it’s Skype classes had a lot of students go through the course
already and yeah I'm pretty certain as well soon we'll be having some success stories
online which I'm quite excited about maybe you'll be a part of those success stories
that would be fantastic but yeah as I said at the moment, it's me doing it probably,
in a month or two, there'll be a new tutor taking over, who's trained, who I trained
up and yeah, it’d be a good opportunity for you to practice all these techniques so
my name's Ben Wellington thank you very much for listening have a great day and all the
best with your IELTS preparation thanks for listening to ieltspodcast.com