- [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.
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