hi there i'm andrew and welcome to this my latest IELTS video today we're going
to talk about task 2 in the IELTS speaking exam which is known as the long
turn this is the part of the exam where you have up to two minutes to show the
examiner your skills in English you have to speak for up to two minutes about a
particular topic that will be contained on a card that the examiner will give to
you so you have up to two minutes to speak and this is your best opportunity
in your whole speaking exam to show the examiner how good you are at English so
you really should try to speak for the full two minutes in this video I am
going to show you how to do well in terms of grammatical range in your task
two there are four criteria that you will be assessed on so this is how your
score will be calculated fluency and coherence lexical resource pronunciation
and grammatical range and accuracy in this lesson we're going to be looking at
grammatical range and I am going to show you how you can make sure that you use
the past perfect tense in your answer to pretty much any task 2 question I'm
going to show you a method that you can use to make sure that you can do this so
what does grammatical range mean well it means things like showing that you know
how to use the active and the passive voice a range of sentence structures but
it also involves a wide range of tenses and that is what we are going to look at
in this lesson but be advised the key is to use the language appropriately so I'm
going to show you how you can include the past perfect
tense in your answer to almost any part to task so the past perfect tense when
should you use this tense well we news this tense to describe a
situation where two things happened in the past but were one of those things
happened before the other thing it's very important or crucial to note that
both events must have been completed do not use this tense to talk about
anything that is still happening right now so here are a couple of examples of
the past perfect tense in action number one Peter had eaten before he went to
the party so Peter ate and then after that he went
out to go to the party note both Peters meal and the party are already over they
are completed events in the past they are not continuing now example two Tom
had planned to play football last week but he changed his mind because the
weather was too cold so here Tom thought that he'd like to play football last
week but he decided not to because of the cold weather again the same two
things apply both Tom's desire or wish to play football and the cold weather
happened at a particular point in the past they are completed events they are
not continuing now so how do we form the past perfect tense well hopefully you
will have picked up a little bit about how we do that from the examples as they
just gave but if not he is an explanation for you first news had plus
the past participle to describe the event that happened first
for the second event news the simple past tense so news the simple past tense
for the more recent event so Peter had eaten that's the first event before he
went to the party the second event so in the first case we have had and eaten
which is the past participle of the verb to eat and in the second case we have
went the simple past tense of the verb to go and exactly the same thing is in
operation with the second sentence tom had planned to play football but he
changed his mind because of cold weather so with rich part 2 tasks can you use
the past perfect tense all of them absolutely all of them because we often
use this tense to talk about plans that we had made but were then forced to
change then what you can do is tell a small little lie to make sure that you
include this tense in your answer to any question and here is an example question
and before I talk specifically about this question I also want to make a
general point here you will see that this question is written in the present
tense describe a park that you like you should say what it's called where it is
how often you go there and why you like it so much so here is a big piece of
advice for you to help your grammatical range score never fall into the trap
never make the mistake of answering a task two question by only using the
present tense always use examples and talk about the past because when we talk
about the past then we gain the chance to use lots of
different tenses so let's look at how we could use the past perfect tense as part
of our answer for this question I like going to go keep our
it's in Moscow and is about a 20 minute walk from my house I remember the first
time that we went there we'd planned to go out to a restaurant for lunch but it
was such a nice day that we decided to go to this park and have a picnic
instead note here that we news we'd in spoken English so when you are writing
the past perfect tense you say we had planned but we shorten this to we'd when
we are speaking and this is an example of how you can use the past perfect
tense to answer a question asked entirely in the present tense let's look
at one more example describe a hobby that you like to do you should say what
it is how long do you have been doing it for how often you do it and why you like
doing it so much let's look at how we use the past perfect tense here I love
to bungee jump the first time I tried it was back in 2004 and it only happened
because of a last-minute change of holiday plan I'd intended to go to
Thailand but tragically the country was hit by the tsunami so I spent my holiday
in New Zealand instead and it was there that I did my first bungee so again this
is part of an answer to a part two question where we have used the past
perfect tense ID or I had intended in the first part for the first event and
then the simple past tense of the verb to spend in the second part so I spent
my holiday in New Zealand instead in the next lesson I'm going to show you how to
make sure that you can use the present perfect continuous in basically any part
two speaking tasks perhaps you have some questions if so my email address is on
the screen there English with Andrew at virgin Mediacom I will also leave lots
of my contact details below this video if you found this video
useful please subscribe to it and please leave comments if you have any other
questions that you don't want to email me about okay so I hope you found this
lesson useful I think you will have done and good bye and see you next time