Hi friends, this video is going to be really helpful for you because I'm with an IELTS expert teacher today
and he's going to share three tips to help you improve your speaking. Okay, before we jump into those tips, I
want to introduce my friend here today, his name is jack, and he runs the popular YouTube channel IELTS
Plus, so if you're interested in the IELTS exams, definitely visit that YouTube channel. So Jack, do you want to
introduce yourself quickly?
Yes, hello, everyone. My name is Jack, and I'm an IELTS tutor here in South Korea. I have my online business,
as Luke said is arts plus. And we have lots of videos or podcasts, various things over there. So I'd love to
see you.
Cool. And today you're sharing three tips on how to improve your speaking for isles and Duolingo. Right.
Yeah, right.
So, you know, the isles speaking and the Duolingo speaking have a lot of similarities, right?
Yeah, exactly. So especially the read den speak question, Where do you then go test that is really
similar to the isles part two, right, you're given a prompt where you read and have to respond for 90
seconds for Duolingo? Two minutes for
isles? Yeah. Which is really challenging. And then in the isles test the speaking test, we have part one,
which is sort of short answer. And then part three, which are kind of bigger issues we deal with and
require a longer answer.
Right, right. But Part two is very similar to the Duolingo speaking. So we're lucky today because jack is
going to share three tips on how to improve your speaking score.
So tip number one is regarding how to lengthen your answers. It's really hard, right? You know, it's very
easy to give a direct answer, which is short. But how to add information to that a lot of my students
struggle.
Yeah, and that's actually really important for the Duolingo test. If you go onto the scoring criteria on
the Duolingo guide, then fluency is a big part of that. And the fluency, it says how long you can speak for
round. So if you can speak for longer, let's say 70 seconds or 90 seconds, then you're gonna probably get a
better score overall,
right? And it's the same in the isles test. If you don't get to two minutes. In part two, you're
penalized. And with the other questions as well, you really have to add as much information as possible to
so what's your tip? So isles plus I give my students trigger patterns. Now, trigger patterns are designed to
trigger a long example. Okay, so a lot of my students really struggle to give an example. And I thought,
well, how can we fix that. And I made a number of patterns you can use, which will trigger a story of
some sort. My favorite ones are when I was young. So of course, you're going to tell a story from your
childhood, probably, which is very easy, right? We can very often link an answer to our childhood. Another one
is last week I went to and very often you can easily link that to an answer and maybe you went to a
supermarket or church or something like that. And naturally you'll be able to add a story to your answer
and lengthen the answer.
Okay, great. So should we try? Okay, yeah.
Why don't you give me like a typical question you get in the Duolingo test? And I'll try my trigger method,
trigger pattern method.
Okay, great. So a very common question that comes up on the Duolingo practice test goes like this. Describe a
time you were surprised what happened? How did you feel?
Recently, I was hiking with my friends, and we climbed a mountain, and I slipped on some rock and fell down.
So that made me very surprised. When I was young, I used to do rock climbing at home, I was actually quite
skillful at rock climbing, and I had lots of experience. So I was really shocked when I actually
slipped on a quite an easy hike.
So what do you think? I think that worked really well. So you were able to talk about a recent experience and
link it back to your childhood. Yeah, you're able to develop your idea and speak for longer.
Yeah, awesome. My next tip is about vocabulary. Very important. Yeah. And as we all know, and I think a lot
of your viewers will be thinking they want to upgrade their vocabulary, right, right. There's so many ways to
do it, but I'm just going to give you my very quick and easy method to do it. And that's by using extreme
adjectives okay. So firstly, what is an extreme adjective. This is an adjective that means the same as
very plus adjective. So for example, very hot is the same as boiling boiling is the extreme adjective. The
reason I I say this as a quick tip to improve your vocabulary is you can make a list of your very common
adjectives good hot, cold, tasty, find the extreme adjective very easy. There are lists, I have a video on
my channel. And you can, you can upgrade your vocabulary in that way. So you can add those new
extreme adjectives and just try to use them in your answers, it's actually fairly easy way to add 20 or 30
words to your spoken English.
And as you guys know, lexical diversity is the scoring criteria for the Duolingo English test. And this is
what jack is talking about. We don't want to use repeated vocabulary. Instead, you want to use different
words to express different things. So extreme adjectives is an easy way to do this.
Yeah, exactly. So just to give a quick example, rather than saying the movie was very good, and you'd say the
movie was fantastic, rather than saying, the weather is bad, you'd say the weather is awful, very easy. My last
tip is about intonation. So what is intonation?
This is like the music in our sentences. Yeah, ups and downs of our voice when we're speaking.
Yeah, right. So it's very important to sound more fluent, which, of course, is a part of the scorecard
fluency, fluency and coherence for Isles. You've got to have nice intonation and not robot light voice like
this. And so how can we do that? I think my number one tip for that is focus on the start of your answers. You
know, it's very hard while you're speaking to think, oh, I've got to have more information. It's very hard
to do that, right. But it's quite easy to always start your answers powerfully. So could you just ask me a
question?
Yeah. How was your weekend?
It was really interesting. So in that case, of course, it's a little bit exaggerated. But rather than starting
flatten, it was really interesting. I'm hitting it very hard from the start. And naturally, the rest of your
answer will tend to follow on with more intonation. And
just like jack said, using intonation will definitely improve your to lingo school using things like
intonation for at the end of sentences and stress in a sentence to Yeah, it was really interesting. For
example, the word interesting will get the main stress in that sentence.
Yes. Good. So very important for your fluency. And something Yeah, I spent a lot of time on with my
students.
Okay, so those were tips. But before we finish, jack, where can our students find more about you?
Yeah. So firstly, thank you for having me on today. I really enjoyed it. And you can come and see me on
youtube at isles plus. So if you search the arts, plus, you'll find me there. I focus on the isles exam, of
course. And I think one of the features of my channel is the podcasts. So I have a weekly podcast every
Wednesday. Every podcast is a different topic. So I hope you come and enjoy that it might even help your
Duolingo
I'm sure it will. Yes. Okay. That's all thank you very much for watching and see you soon.
Yeah, see you soon. Bye bye.