Hello, it's chris from IELTS Daily and I'm back with another wonderful collaboration.
We have a very special guest coming up today.
Maybe you know who this person is because they have many years of experience
and is one of the best places on the internet to improve your IELTS speaking.
So, if you want to know who this person is, stick around they're coming up in just a few seconds.
Alright as promised this person is ready and waiting at the other side of the world.
I'm going to put my earphones in and we're going to talk to this person and all the way from Spain.
It is Keith.
Keith, it is so good to see you.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
Hello, Chris.
Nice to see you too.
I'm really pleased to be here.
Thank you so much for the invitation
and yeah delighted to be here with you all.
Most welcome
and I just all of our students on the IELTS daily channel will be so happy to see you.
I'm sure they've already seen your videos.
Keith, tell us a little bit about IELTS speaking success.
Right, well that's very kind Chris.
So I have a youtube channel, "English Speaking Success"
and it does focus as you mentioned on helping students with their IELTS speaking.
That's the main thing that I do.
I've had the channel about two and a half years now
and it's just full of videos to help students with their speaking,
their confidence, their fluency as well as some tips for the IELTS speaking test.
It's a phenomenal resource.
So if they haven't checked it out, they definitely should.
Now, we would like to know a little bit about you if possible.
If you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about your life,
where are you based and what's your IELTS history.
Right, okay.
So I am based in Spain.
I live in Santander.
I've been here for about three years now.
I'm actually from the UK.
So I was born in Manchester in England and then I left England after university.
I was teaching english for 10 plus years in Spain and France
and then decided to move and I moved over to Asia, I moved over to China
and I was working there with the british council on different education projects.
So still in education but away from teaching, I was I was doing projects to support
english teachers in primary and secondary schools in China, Taiwan and Malaysia
and then, I kind of shifted I think I I shifted I kind of missed teaching
I missed the direct interaction with students.
And so having done a master's degree when I was working in digital digital education,
I decided to go alone and to set up an online space to help students of English and I chose IELTS.
I began teaching IELTS.
I began training students in IELTS
and slowly over time from classes to doing online courses
and then I began the the youtube channel
and it's just taken off since then and I'm just...
I love doing it
It's great.
So rollercoaster, ups and downs
It's part of life, isn't it?
We all have things that we we love to do and we sometimes come back to them.
So good on you and thanks so much for sharing all your knowledge with the students.
And that's what brings us on to today's kind of collaboration.
I want to teach students that they have a great resource in you
and we are going to have a look at a kind of a common topic that may appear in the test
and we're going to discuss some language around that topic
and hopefully you'll be able to share some of your experience with us and with me and we can talk about that.
So, you know what the first topic is, don't you?
And i've given you a little bit of preparation.
The topic is names and I'm going to put forward some questions to you
and you're going to maybe help me out
and help the students out on some vocabulary, some ideas on what they can do in the test.
So, are you ready to start?
I am indeed. Yes, let's do it.
So the topic is names and this is a question that may appear in the test
but it could be something that you have in everyday life
So, do you like your name?
Well, let me answer the question first and then we can talk about it.
So, do you like your name?
Actually it's a strange question because I've never thought about whether I like my name or not.
I think in England, we don't tend to put too much importance on names...
unlike China for example, where I I remember parents would spend hours
trying to choose a an auspicious name for their child.
It has huge importance.
So, I I like my name but I don't think too much about it.
Wonderful, thanks.
Now, is your name short for anything?
Because I want to talk about the idea of long names, short names, nicknames.
So is your name short for anything?
Actually, my name is not short for anything.
It's one of those kind of single syllable names.
Keith
And I read somewhere that "Keith" is a no-nonsense powerful name because it's one syllable.
So it's not like a lot of people in England may have double-barrelled names.
Here in Spain, there's lots of double-barreled names.
There's Jose Maria and Manuel Jose and they have longer names but I yeah, I just have Keith
and I I don't have a nickname either maybe because it's already a very short name.
Now, my name Chris, is actually short for something and i'm going to ask you
Can you guess what my name is short for?
I'm guessing your name is short for Christopher.
That is absolutely correct but it's not the only shortened version that Chris could be.
So Chris could be Christian or maybe even Kristoff
So, there are a few different ways that Chris can be shortened but the most common way is Christopher
which is my full name.
I'm...
Ryan.
Wonderful.
Do you have a middle name?
I do, actually yes
tradition
We have a family tradition that we give the middle name of the uncle or the aunt in the family.
So my father's brother is called Michael so my middle name is Michael.
Incredible.
Do you know I have a middle name?
My middle name is Ryan and my middle name is actually the surname of I think, it was my great grandma.
So that's the tradition in my family that we actually take the surname and we use it as a middle name which is somewhat interesting.
I want to lead us on to another kind of question now
and this question is about remembering names
and this is a common thing that people talk about maybe at parties or you know at work.
Are you good at remembering names?
I'm going to use a bit of a classic idiom right but it's true
I have a memory of a sieve.
a memory like a sieve
I am not good at remembering names.
Particularly that situation you talked about when you're at a party and you bump into a group of people
and they reel off their names one after the other.
You know Jack, John, James, Tony, Brian
and you've got you know no chance of remembering their names.
So I find it very challenging.
How do you go about trying to remember people's names?
I have the same problem as you that that it's really difficult sometimes for me to put faces to names
and I'll you know I work with so many people like yourself and in with students
and I tend to meet them and I'll have a course with them
and I try to picture them as somebody else that I know and so I use this kind of visual technique
and it it's really hard when when we deal with so many people all the time
but one of the great things about names that I love being a teacher, we have so many of these wonderfully exotic names
and I love to hear names from different parts of the world
and it's a
a a fascinating thing for me to to learn about how you know that the origins of names
and the different cultural kind of significances that that happen with names.
It's it's really interesting.
And I know that in Spain, you have this thing called name days, is that right?
name days
Are you talking about the Saints days?
Correct yeah
Yes
Absolutely.
So every single day in the year is named after a saint and I didn't realize there were so many saints
but the spanish obviously have found them and so people are named after saints
and and that will be your name day as you call it so.
If for example, San Jose is tomorrow then if my name is Jose
then tomorrow will be my Saints Day and a day that you can celebrate.
It's it's a catholic country.
So obviously, the religion plays a a key role in in names and traditions like that.
Incredible
and that would be something that any student in the IELTS test could say you know
I in my country, we have name days or you know saint days and mine is in january
and and they could talk about that and it would allow them to expand their answer which would be wonderful
Now, there's a few pieces of vocabulary that I want to ask you about and maybe you can explain that to the students.
So what would it mean if i said somebody made a name for themselves?
Right. That's a nice expression.
Basically, that means that they have become famous in a certain field or well known for something.
So we could say, for example, that you Chris have made a name for yourself in the field of IELTS
Online IELTS
Well, yeah great
and what would it mean if I said something has your name on it?
Oh, then that means it's it's something that is destined for you, something that you should have.
You know if we get if we go shopping and my sister says to me that "hat has your name on it Keith"
then it means I it's for me.
I should buy it.
It's a perfect match for me.
What a great expression.
Now, what about if I said somebody stop dropping names or that person is a name dropper.
Yeah.
One interesting expression, nothing to do with dropping the name
but I think it comes from dropping the name into the conversation
So if you're a name dropper, then you're mentioning famous people's names especially people that you may know to kind of show off to other people you know.
I may say, "Oh I was having lunch with them, Donald Trump's son last week.
and i'm just dropping the name Donald Trump as a kind of a way to show off my connection with them.
It's not true by the way
Now, if you were a party and and you didn't hear somebody and they introduced themselves,
how would you maybe ask them to repeat?
What would you take?
I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name. Could you say that again?
Yeah. It's a good expression, isn't it?
and it's this idea of catching your name and that could be something that in an IELTS exam
"Sorry, I didn't catch your name"
if if the examiner if you didn't hear the examiner's name
It's totally normal to ask those type of questions.
The examiner is just a person and I say this all the time to the students
"If you don't if you didn't hear a question or if you didn't catch the person's name, you are welcome to ask those types of questions."
There is nothing formal about the IELTS speaking test
and I think a lot of misconceptions are around this this topic that you can only use formal language.
Yeah.
I totally agree, Chris.
I I think there's an over sense of formality.
I think some students almost feel that the examiner is a police man or a police woman
that they're going to catch them out
and throw them into prison.
It's not.
You're absolutely right.
It's very relaxed.
It's informal.
It's conversational English.
You know, just speak as you would as I am to you now and you'll be fine for students.
One thing that I I see all the time and this is just before we wrap up and finish here
is that some students say that you're not allowed to use the word "you" in an IELTS test.
For example, if i'm having a conversation with you and I say "Well you might have heard about this"
and I've used the word you in there and people in different countries think that you're not allowed to do that.
Is that true?
Yeah.
You're correct that students think that and you're also correct in saying it's a mistake
that it's not true
that you can say "you" to the examiner.
It's absolutely fine.
Again, it's a trait of natural spoken English.
You can say "you know" "you might know this".
It's absolutely fine.
I I suspect that maybe some trainers are becoming a bit overly formal
but without being fully aware of what the criteria is.
So it's absolutely fine.
What an incredible piece of advice.
Thanks so much for that.
Now, that brings us to the end of today's video which we've looked at the topic of names.
I hope we've given lots of food for thought for students to think about this topic
how they would maybe answer it
We're going to come back for another video, aren't we?
We're going to look at a different topic and this video is actually going to be released on your channel.
So, I recommend that everybody who's watched these videos today goes over to Keith's channel.
If they haven't already subscribed , subscribe to Keith's video.
Subscribe to Keith's channel and then you will have the access to the next video which we're going to release very soon.
Keith, thanks so much for today.
It's been a real pleasure.
If you have any closing closing words before you go.
Well, the same here Chris, is fantastic.
I I enjoy collaborating.
I enjoy this idea of collaborating to help students get really good quality material to support their study.
So it's been a pleasure and I look forward to the the next video just around the corner.
Exactly.
So thanks to you guys for watching.
We'll see you very very soon.
Take care.
Bye for now.