- Hi everyone, Chris here from IELTS Advantage
with another one of our success stories.
So, today we have Ayesha,
who was struggling with her writing.
She's a doctor and she wants to move to the UK.
In order to get to score that she needs,
she needs seven, but she was struggling
because she was getting a six in her writing.
So today, we're gonna share how she moved
from a six to a seven in her writing,
and you guys can learn from Ayesha's story as well.
So, Ayesha, can you just start off
by introducing yourself to everyone?
- Hi, my name's Ayesha Aziz.
I'm from Mirpur, Azad Kashmir.
It's an independent territory in Pakistan.
- Mmhmm, and let's talk about writing.
What did you find difficult about writing?
Or what were you struggling with
when it came to IELTS writing?
- Everything. (laughs)
I was studying with awful confidence of writing.
I had band scores,
band score six in my first attempt.
I wanted at least a seven band in writing.
So, in order to improve that, I first identified
my weak points and I came to know
that my grammar, vocabulary, task achievement,
everything is weak.
- Mmhmm.
- I worked on everything, actually.
First of all, I watched all the modules
of your course,
there were 12 modules for each task.
After watching all the modules
and taking notes, my own notes (loud buzzing)
from the modules, I downloaded an app named
The Guardian to read it because I remember
you saying that a good writer is a good reader.
So I just started reading books as well.
I started "Success" by Napoleon Hill
and I'm writing in the vocabulary book.
Whenever I used to learn a new word,
I used to write it on that vocabulary word
on that vocabulary book, along with the meaning
and how it can be used in sentences as well.
- Mmhmm.
- Then I downloaded some grammar apps.
I practiced it a lot.
I used to write task one and task two daily.
After a lot of practice,
I came to know that in grammar,
I'm not making good use of prepositions and articles.
So, I watched a video, two or three videos,
on YouTube, I downloaded an app for grammar,
and I just started practicing how
to use articles and prepositions correctly.
- Mmhmm, mmhmm.
- Then, another thing was
I also not only get my writings corrected by you,
I also told my brother to check
my writings on daily basis.
He didn't know anything about IELTS,
but I told him that you need to make out,
you need to tell me which sentence
I am using in the wrong way
because his English is better than mine.
So he used to point out that,
you are making this mistake, this mistake,
and different things.
I used to get it judged daily by him.
Also, I sent you four corrections.
In my first correction, my score was six
and after reading all the things
that you highlighted and working on them,
I sent another correction and in that correction,
my score improved to 6.5.
- Mmhmm.
- Then I worked again for almost one month
on everything and in my third correction
that I sent you, it was eight
and in my fourth correction, it was seven.
So after getting the score two times,
I gave the test and got the score.
- Excellent, excellent.
So, let's talk about a few of those things
in a little bit more detail.
So, you said you downloaded The Guardian app,
a newspaper here in the UK,
and you said that a good writer is a good reader.
How did reading help you improve your writing?
- It improved my vocabulary.
- Mmhmm.
- Number one.
Number two, I also read every sentence very carefully.
As I told you, I was having problem
with the use of prepositions and articles.
- Mmhmm.
- So what I used to do, I used to underline
every article and every preposition
that I came across in every paragraph,
in each line.
And then I tried to understand how it has been
used over here and where am I making mistakes?
Like, where am I not using them properly?
- Mmhmm.
- So after doing that,
I think my writing improved.
- Yeah, so one of the things that we do
with our students is instead of teaching them
everything about grammar, we identify the exact
problems that they have with grammar.
So, Ayesha is a, is a doctor.
If I come into the ER and I have a broken leg,
you don't fix my arms or my head,
you fix my leg, right?
So, the same thing with grammar.
If you have no problems with punctuation
or tenses or verb-subject agreements
or any of those other areas,
you just have a problem with prepositions and articles,
so we focus on that and fix that.
So that's a much better way than, you know,
trying to read a whole grammar book,
because that's very boring as well.
(laughs)
So I wouldn't recommend that.
And the other thing that Ayesha did,
one thing that we always tell our students is
that you should be reading on a daily basis,
but actively read.
A lot of people read or watch TV or listen to podcasts
and they passively listen or passively read,
whereas we tell our students
to do something while you're reading
or do something while you are listening
and try to do something related to your big weaknesses.
So for Ayesha, she needed to improve
her vocabulary so she underlined those new words
and recorded them in her vocabulary book
and then she underlined all of the prepositions
and articles and practiced that.
So she was not only reading every day,
she was improving those weak areas every day
and anybody listening,
that's what I would really focus on
is your weak areas and taking action
to improve those weak areas.
Would you agree, Ayesha?
- Yes, I totally agree.
I also want to highlight one other thing.
Many people have problems with idea generation.
- Mmhmm.
Lots of doctors have a problem with that I find.
(laughing)
- I love the technique that you told in one of your modules.
It was about the coffee shop method.
- Mmhmm.
- Before learning the technique, I used to take
about an hour or sometimes half an hour
to generate one simple idea.
But after using that technique,
I think idea generation wasn't a problem at all, for me.
It used to take hardly one minute, two minutes,
to generate a simple idea.
So number one, coffee shop method that you taught us.
Number two, simplicity.
Idea has to be very simple, not really very complete.
(laughs) - Yeah.
- And, third thing was practice.
- Yeah.
- I think after a lot and a lot of practice
it didn't become a problem for me in the exam.
- Yeah, and a lot of doctors have a problem
with idea generation because they make everything
more complicated than it needs to be.
Whereas, a big struggle that we have
with doctors is they're so intelligent
and they're so used to dealing with complex theories
and complex things that we tell them,
just make it as simple as possible.
Think of the most obvious, straight-forward,
easy idea, and when they,
they start to think about that, they're like,
"Oh really, I don't have to think
of the most complicated thing?"
I was like, "No, you're not in hospital now."
You know, it's just an English test.
And the other thing you said was practice.
You know, a lot of people will, even people who join
our course, and we'll teach them a technique
or a strategy and they'll try it one time
and they'll say, "It doesn't work."
It's like, yeah,
because you just learned the theory, you know?
You need to practice it.
Yeah, so.
And I would say that to anybody.
If your teacher is teaching you something,
don't try it one time and then say,
"Oh, it doesn't work for me."
If you trust that your teacher is helping you
and knows what they're doing, you need to practice
that technique, practice that strategy.
You know, same in medical school.
The first few years you're learning theory,
but you need to practice and put it into practice.
You can't go from medical school to,
hopefully not working in hospital with just,
with just theory in your head.
You need to apply that theory
and put it into practice. - Exactly.
- And the other thing I really liked about your,
sorry go ahead,
I've made notes so I can come back to this.
Go ahead. - I just,
I wanted to add just one thing.
I also noticed that in order to switch
from band six to band seven,
one needs to have a lot of error-free sentences.
- Yep.
- What we do when writing,
we do not focus on the mistakes,
on casual mistakes that we usually make,
and we are not focusing on them.
These are the mistakes that can be picked up
if we read our essay after writing it.
We read every line after writing it.
These mistakes can be a worry.
So, one, another key for achieving band score seven
is to write as many error-free sentences as possible.
- Mmhmm, yeah.
And what you said is totally true.
To get a seven or above, you need to have,
most of your sentences have to have zero errors,
an error-free sentence.
And as you said, often people can make careless errors.
So when I'm writing, I'm a native English speaker,
I make errors all the time.
Everybody does make careless errors.
When you're writing in your native language
you probably make little errors, as well.
That's just part of being human.
But you need to understand what your weaknesses are
so that when you are going through your essay,
for you, you would be hyper-focused
on prepositions and articles.
For someone else, let's say they had a problem
with tenses, they can understand that's a problem
and then when they're checking their work,
they can focus on those and avoid those careless errors.
So that's really good advice, Ayesha.
The other thing that I was going to say was,
the thing I really liked about your story was
you submitted your writing to us
and we gave you a six.
Then you waited a while
and then you submitted another one, and it was 6.5
and then you waited a whole month
and submitted another one and it was a band eight.
So, because what a lot of people do is,
they will submit writing, get a six or 6.5,
and immediately do another essay and submit it again.
And we're like, "No, no, no, no, no.
"You need to fix all of these issues
"and work on these problems."
You know, it would be like someone coming into hospital
with a broken leg and saying,
"I want you to fix this in one week."
Like, no, we can fix it, but it's going
to take six weeks or eight weeks, not one week.
You can fix everything, but it takes time
and you need to do that.
To allow yourself enough time to fix your weaknesses.
So get the feedback, fix the weaknesses,
and then submit another one.
So that's really, really good to hear
that you did that, Ayesha,
and I think if you didn't do that,
you would get frustrated and you might give up.
And be like, "Oh, this is a silly test."
- And then a vicious cycle starts.
You just can't improve if you keep on doing that,
because not only,
the stress of failure leads to more and more stress.
If you don't work properly
and then give another chance and fail,
so that's of no use.
- Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
And that's what, on the course we talk a lot about
mindset and how important that is,
because if you don't have the right mindset
or you don't have the right motivation,
you're going to really struggle.
And, it's a lot to do with mindset.
So, Ayesha, I wish you the best of luck
in your future and I know that you're coming here
to the UK to become a doctor.
I hope I never see you because I don't want to--
(laughing)
I hope I don't have to go to hospital.
(laughing)
But, I thank you so much for choosing the UK
and I'm sure you're going to make this place better
by helping people get better and helping people
with their injuries in the ER and all those things.
So, best of luck with that!
- Thank you, and thank you also.
I think you have helped me a lot.
I have, I had given up the dream of going to UK.
I had this dream since my childhood.
But, once I was just going through Facebook
and I watched one of your videos,
it was on, it was on five days course.
Crash course.
And just after watching that
I thought that I should go for the subscription
and I should practice video and learn from you
and it really helped me
and I helped me to fulfill--
- Oh, you've muted yourself there, Ayesha.
But, anyway.
(laughs)
So thank you so much for helping me out
with this video and helping the other students.
I really, really appreciate it.
And in the future,
if you need any advice on places to live in the UK
or life in the UK, just feel free to email me
and I'll help you out with that, okay?
- Okay, okay thank you.
- Thanks Ayesha, bye bye!
- Bye bye.
- Hey, Chris here again.
Hopefully you enjoyed that success story video.
That student was part of our IELTS VIP course.
And on that course, we show students
exactly where they're going wrong
and exactly what to do
to get the score that they need.
We give them all the help and support
that they need in order to get a seven, eight,
or even nine in their IELTS test.
Now, we only work with a really,
really small number of students.
Because of the level of help and feedback
and support that we give students,
we can only work with a very, very small number of them,
but we also have more success stories
than any other online or offline course in the world,
which has created a huge amount of demand for our course.
So we're the only course in the world, I believe,
that has a very, very, very long waiting list.
If you want to join that waiting list,
all you have to do is just click here
and you'll be able to add your name,
add your email address,
and then when one of our students becomes successful
and leaves the course, the next position
can be for you.
Hopefully see you in there!
Bye bye!
(funky guitar and drums)