- [Chris] In this video,
we're going to focus on IELTS speaking,
and we're gonna show you the difference
between what a Band 7, eight or nine student does
in the IELTS speaking test,
compared to someone who is struggling and is getting
about five to 6.5 on the IELTS speaking test.
And the IELTS speaking test is divided into three parts,
part one, part two and part three.
And there are some things that Band 9 students do
that are very recognizable by examiners.
And they're also things that a Band 5 to a 6.5 student
that is very, very, very different
in part one, part two and part three,
completely different
when it comes to the IELTS speaking test.
So this video, we're gonna go through the differences
so that you can avoid these things
and do more of these things,
and then improve your IELTS speaking score.
So one thing that these students do
is there are lots of memorized answers.
The examiners can spot these right away,
and I'll show you a few other little tricks
that the examiner might play on you to really determine
whether these are memorized answers or not,
but it is extremely obvious.
So part one is the only part of the IELTS speaking test
where you can predict the questions.
So you will probably be asked about whether you work
or study, your home, your hometown, things like that.
What a Band 5 to 6.5 student will do
is they will memorize answers
and then just regurgitate them.
But this is not actually helping them improve their score,
because think about what is being tested.
Are they testing your ability to memorize answers?
No, they are testing your ability to speak,
to clearly communicate in English.
Memorization and clear communication in English
are not the same thing.
Linked to this one,
these students will often give very long answers.
So you will ask the student for example,
about their hometown and they will not only just tell you
a little bit about their hometown,
they'll talk about the history and the architecture
and the places tourists go to
and places where people go to eat
and the transportation links.
And it's because they have memorized all of these things.
This is not how you naturally answer a question.
This will often also so lead them to going off topic.
So again, you'll ask them,
tell me a little bit about your hometown,
and they'll regurgitate this memorized answer,
and they will go off topic.
And they will also sound very formal.
Not always,
but a lot of the time these students sound very robotic.
So this might be to do with
that they're very nervous, they're stressed out.
Often students who feel this way
will talk in a very formal, academic, robotic style,
or they have been told by their teacher
that IELTS is a very formal academic test,
therefore you must speak to the examiner in this way.
And then also in some cultures,
that is just how you naturally speak to a teacher
or someone in authority.
Again, what are they testing?
They're testing if you move to London or New York or Sydney,
one of these English-speaking places,
will you be able to talk to people?
Very rarely will you be speaking to people
in a very formal academic setting.
You will normally be speaking to people
just normally, naturally.
So this again, is an indication to the examiner
that you are towards this end of the spectrum,
and they're not going
to give you one of these higher scores.
Band 7, eight, and nine students,
it feels like a normal conversation.
When you are speaking to someone, especially at a Band 9,
it doesn't feel like an IELTS test.
It just feels like you're in a coffee shop
with a friend or a colleague,
and you're just talking naturally about these topics.
Because they are just answering questions directly,
and they're answering them very naturally.
And in terms of development,
in terms of the length of their answer.
So they are developing their answers enough,
but not going off topic.
And generally they don't give very, very, very, long,
long-winded answers in the same way.
And many students would think like the longer my answer,
the higher my score, not necessarily.
And these students don't really think
about length or development at all, really.
They just think about,
have I adequately answered this question?
So Band 7, eight, and nine students in part one,
what they will generally do is answer the question directly
and then add a little bit more detail.
That could be an explanation,
an example, some further detail.
They're going to give the examiner enough information
to judge their pronunciation, their fluency,
their grammar, their vocabulary,
but they're not going to memorize, give memorized,
very, very, very long answers like these students.
Move on to part two.
In part two, you will be shown a cue card
that will have a main topic,
and then it will have four bullet points,
and you'll have one minute to prepare your answer,
and then the examiner will ask you
to speak for up to two minutes.
So these students, what they do
is they often rigidly follow the bullet points.
So you'll get four bullet points.
What the students will do
is they will often talk about bullet point number one,
then bullet point number two,
then bullet point number three,
then bullet point number four.
And this is a very unnatural way to speak about a topic.
And often they will get at least one of the bullet points
they don't feel very comfortable talking about,
and that gets them into all sorts of trouble
because they will start to be mh, ah, mh,
I don't really know how to deal with this bullet point.
Okay, let's move on to the next one.
And then whenever they finish talking
about the fourth bullet point,
often they have run out of things to say,
and their fluency goes down even more.
So they really rely on the bullet points,
and can't really talk about anything
other than the bullet points.
Again, this is often not the student's fault.
They have often been taught that you must do this.
You do not have to do this.
You can use the bullet points if you want,
use them to help you if you want.
But the only thing you need to do
is talk about the main topic at the top of the cue card.
So they will run out of ideas.
And this will affect their fluency.
And this can also mean
that the rest of their test is just a disaster
because they think they have failed at this stage.
And often they will be speaking for around one minute,
and then they have nothing else to say,
and they just get really, really stressed out.
Not always, but it can affect part three as well,
because the more stressed you are,
that's going to affect not only your fluency,
but it can also affect your pronunciation,
your grammar and your vocabulary, the four marking criteria.
Some other students in part two.
So they use some kind of a trick.
So they learn some kind of a trick strategy
that they think will trick the examiner
into giving them a higher score.
An example of this is something
that we often see, which is PPF.
Now, when I was teaching
at the British Council more than 10 years ago,
we would teach PPF and which is past present future.
But we would just use it
to help students fill out their answer in part two
if they couldn't speak about some of the bullet points.
But what we see these days
is there are many YouTube channels and online resources
that teach students, just talk about the past,
then just talk about the present,
then just talk about the future.
If you do that, it's really easy.
And you kinda trick the examiner
into giving you a high score.
Well, the problem is is that you will often get cue cards
where you cannot talk about the past
or you cannot talk about the present
or you cannot talk about the future,
or it's really, really difficult for you to do that.
And often that leads to a poor performance,
bad fluency, students getting stuck.
So you're not going to trick the examiner
into doing anything.
And to be honest, this is probably
the most popular way of doing this now these days.
The examiners hear this 20 times a day.
It's not going to trick them into giving you a high score.
They know what you're doing.
So if you are memorizing answers in part one,
and then you think that you're going to trick the examiner
using PPF and then some other trick in part three,
the examiner has seen it a hundred times.
What Band 9 students do is,
the main thing they do is they focus on the main topic.
So this is the main topic at the top of the cue card
for the whole two minutes when they're speaking,
they will be talking about that main topic.
So they don't really focus on the bullet points.
They just speak naturally about the main topic
for the two minutes.
And they use the bullet points,
but they're used to use the bullet points
to help them speak naturally.
So this student is relying exclusively on the bullet points.
This student is looking at the main topic
and talking just naturally about the main topic.
And they might use some of the bullet points,
they might not, because their main focus
is just speaking naturally about the main topic
for the whole two minutes.
Then we move on to part three.
Part three, they're going
to ask you more abstract questions.
Part one is about you,
part three is more a discussion of ideas.
Part three, the questions
will be a little bit more difficult,
and often this results
in these students giving very short answers.
So this is kind of the opposite of what you should be doing.
In part one, the answers don't need to be that long.
But because they have memorized those answers,
they give very long answers in part one.
Part three, you need to develop your ideas a lot more,
so you should be giving longer answers.
But these students are giving very short answers
'cause they don't feel comfortable talking about this,
'cause they cannot memorize these part three answers.
Because part one is predictable,
part three is completely unpredictable.
So this is the little trick that IELTS are playing on you.
If you are giving very long memorized answers in part one
on questions that you predict are coming up,
they will always ask you questions that are unpredictable,
that are very strange.
This is where you often hear people complaining
about the speaking test and saying,
well, why are they asking me about hats or cakes
or these very strange topics?
It's to test you on a range of different topics
that you are not expecting.
And if you're giving these very long memorized answers
and then very short answers here,
it's a clear indication that you are relying on memorization
and you don't actually know how to speak in English.
Memorization and actually communicate in English
are two very, very different things.
This student will often also memorize lists of vocabulary,
lists of idioms, lists of phrases,
and this will actually lower their grammar
and their vocabulary score
because they'll never be able to use them effectively.
They also might not attempt some answers.
So part three, one of the things that they will do
is they will ask you increasingly more difficult questions
to really test, are you a Band 6.5 or are you a Band 7
or are you a Band 8 or are you a Band 9?
They will stretch you
by asking you more difficult questions.
If you get to part three and you just shake your head
or say I don't know,
you're basically just saying to the examiner,
I don't deserve to be here, I deserve one of the scores.
You often get the impression
that these students just Want it to be over.
So these students are just exhausted at this stage
'cause the examiner has really stretched them.
This is getting to the 12, 13, 14-minute stage.
And you can tell that by giving very short answers
or not answering them at all,
the student just wants this to be over.
And again, that's an indication
that you don't deserve one of these higher scores.
And the range will be limited.
So the examiner will ask you
maybe three different topics here,
a fourth topic here, five or the fifth
or six different topic here.
What the examiner is doing
is they are testing your range of vocabulary
and your range of grammar.
Often these students
will memorize vocabulary and memorize grammar.
So when the examiner asks them a question
that they weren't expecting,
the range is obviously very, very limited.
So this is why you should not memorize new words
and phrases and idioms, you should learn them effectively.
So if we can trust that
with the Band 7, eight or nine student,
what they will do in part three of the IELTS speaking test
is they will at least attempt every question.
Even if they don't know the answer
or they're not familiar with the topic,
they will at least attempt it.
This student will often either laugh or say, I don't know,
or just shake their head or just start crying.
That very rarely happens, but I have seen it happen.
Whereas this student will be, again,
it's like being in a coffee shop with someone.
If you were with your friend in a coffee shop
and you ask them about a topic they don't know about,
they would say, well, I've never even thought about that.
I don't really know much about that.
But if I had to give an answer, this would be my guess.
And they will explain what they think
based on the knowledge that they have.
And there will also be lots of development.
So they will answer the question directly.
And then again, you're talking about ideas,
so they will explain why they think that
or explain why other people think that.
They will give examples
to help provide evidence for their point of view.
They will really develop those answers.
And finally, they will have no problem
or little problem talking
about a range of different topics and scenarios.
So they will get to the end
and it will be clear to the examiner.
When we asked you about the three different topics here,
you had no problem with lots of great topics,
specific vocabulary in here.
Same with the topic we asked you about here.
And then there's two or three different topics in here.
You had no problem talking about those.
And then they're going to ask you about different scenarios
requiring you to use different grammatical structures.
They'll ask you about the past, the present, the future.
They'll ask you to compare things,
to talk, give your opinion about things.
They'll ask you to use conditional structures.
And these students
have no problem answering any of the questions.
Not because they're so familiar with the topics,
but they have just a great command of English
and just like a native English speaker,
you can ask them about anything and they can comfortably
and naturally talk about anything.
Now, do you need to be at a native English speaker level
to get about nine?
No, absolutely not.
Certainly not for a Band 7 or a Band 8.
If you really want a Band 7, eight or nine
in IELTS speaking test, it's not so much doing these things
as not doing these things.
If you just avoided all of this
and did a little bit more of this,
you would dramatically improve your score.
If you want more information
on how to improve your IELTS speaking score,
I have a free course that you can get.
Just go into the description below and click on it
and you can join our free IELTS speaking course,
it goes into all of this in a lot more detail.
Now, there are three parts of the speaking test
and there are four marking criteria.
I intentionally didn't go into detail
on the four marking criteria, I'll do that in another video.
Hope that you enjoyed this.
If you didn't, feel free to give it a dislike, unsubscribe,
go and check out another IELTS channel
if you didn't like it.
If you did like it, and you want more information,
click on the description below
and join our free speaking course.
Thank you very much.
And I hope you enjoyed the video.
(upbeat music)