- Hey everyone. Chris here from ieltsadvantage.com.
Thank you very much for tuning in.
I was doing a Zoom session with my VIP students,
with my VIP speaking students.
And in those Zoom sessions, we have like 20 or 30 students
and it's like a virtual classroom
and we can chat to each other.
And I was listening to a lot of their part three answers
and giving them feedback on it.
And about a third of the students were making this mistake.
And this mistake is the most common mistake
that I hear in Speaking part three.
And it's also the mistake that can,
if you can fix this mistake,
it can really, really improve your performance.
So what I'm going to do now
is I'm going to state a question.
So the question is
what are the drawbacks of working from home?
So typical part three IELTS Speaking test question.
What are the drawbacks of working from home?
And I'm going to give you two performances.
One from a student who is making this mistake,
and one from a student who is not making this mistake.
And I want you to try and think about what the mistake is
and how it might affect your overall performance.
And then we'll talk about it a little bit,
and then we'll talk about how it affects your fluency,
your coherence, your grammar, your vocabulary,
and maybe even your pronunciation,
but definitely the first three.
Okay, so the question is,
what are the drawbacks of working from home?
So this is student A, all right.
So student A would say,
"I think the first drawback is being less productive.
You don't get as much stuff done if you work from home,
and then you also need a lot of discipline.
So you're not as disciplined when you're working from home
as opposed to working in an office.
There are also lots of distractions at home.
So there's like TV and you can go to bed
and all these different things at home.
And,
also you're not really connected to your coworkers.
So if you're working from home, you're not in the office,
you're not talking to anybody
and you might even lose out on a chance for promotion
because your boss or the management of the company
might not be able to see your work
or see you working hard.
And so, yeah.
And what else?
Yeah.
So yeah, so there are lots of drawbacks
about working from home.
Yeah, and those would be,
those would be the ones that I can think of."
Okay, so that's student A.
So let's compare that with student B.
I'm not saying student A is better or worse than student B.
I just want you to compare and think about it, okay.
So student A is asked the question, the exact same question.
What are the drawbacks of working from home?
"Okay, so I think the first drawback of working from home
is you're going to be less productive
and there's something called Parkinson's law.
I don't know the law exactly,
but Parkinson's law states that the amount of time
that it takes to complete a task
fills the time allocated to it.
In other words,
the more time you give to something,
the less productive, the less efficient you become.
And so within the context of working from home,
if you're sitting at home all day,
you have absolutely all the time in the world
from you get up until you go to bed
to get everything done.
Therefore you become less efficient.
If you compare that to working in an office
where naturally you're going to be working from, you know,
nine to five, nine to six, or 10 to eight,
or whatever it is, there is a boundary,
there is a limit to the amount of time
you're going to spend in the office.
And by limiting the time,
you're increasing the efficiency of your work.
For example, I used to work from home
and I would get up at, say 8:00 a.m.,
and I would work all day until like 9:00 p.m., 10:00 p.m.
And I would get a lot of stuff done,
or I thought that I would get a lot of stuff done.
And I didn't realize how inefficient I was
until I moved to an office.
And I would get all my work done before lunchtime
and the same amount of work that I would get done all day.
And I think it was because
I had other people needing my time,
and there were restrictions on my time,
therefore, I got a lot done.
Another way of describing it is a lot of students
when they're doing their coursework,
they'll often procrastinate and put off their assignments
until like the week before or the day before,
or the night before even,
and they manage to get it all done.
Whereas other students who give themselves like three months
and might get the same amount of work done
in a three-month period
because they allocated that amount of time to it.
So I think that is the main drawback of working from home."
So, as you can see two very, very different answers.
So what are you,
what do you think are the main differences
between student A and student B?
And which student do you think is going to perform better?
So have a little think about that.
Put it in the comments below the video.
It's always good to, instead of, you know,
passively sit back and watch these videos
is to actively engage in them, and try and engage your brain
and commenting and thinking about the video
really does help you learn from them.
So, the main differences between student A and student B
are something I call listing.
So,
student A just listed as many different ideas
as they could think of.
Whereas student B picked one idea
and went very, very deep on that idea.
They fully develop the idea,
they fully explained the drawback, and why they think that.
And they gave an example and they even,
I think they gave two different examples.
So think about it this way, which person listening,
so student A, the person listening to student A,
or student B, the person listening to student B,
which person has a better idea
of what they think about that topic
or what they think about that idea?
Student A, the person listening to them,
basically they know very, very little about
what they think about that.
All they did was just give a list,
like a shopping list of ideas, but didn't really explain,
they explained a little bit about each one,
but didn't fully explain them and didn't give any examples
or anything like that.
So there's a few things happening there.
Number one,
you're not as coherent if you're doing that
and you're not going to be as fluent.
Why is that?
Because what that person was doing,
and this is what students do all the time,
and especially part three,
is they try and think of as many ideas as possible
and that uses up all their brain power.
So imagine your brain is a computer or a phone or whatever.
And these electronic devices
have a certain amount of memory,
a certain amount of RAM in them.
Your brain is the same way, not exactly the same, obviously,
but you could only think and speak about things
at the same time, to a certain extent.
Normally when students really are thinking very hard
about ideas, their fluency drops and their coherence drops.
So in what you're doing, really,
if you're listing lots of ideas
is you're making it more difficult for yourself.
Whereas if you just pick one idea, just think,
you know, take a second or two to think of that idea,
and then go deep on that idea and explain it,
and use examples.
It's normally much, much easier to do that
than to just think of like six or seven different ideas.
So you're making it much, much easier for yourself
to be as fluent and as coherent as possible.
Also,
generally, this is not applicable to every single student,
but most students that I deal with who tend to list things
and do a lot of thinking as they're speaking,
make more grammar and vocabulary mistakes.
Why is that?
Well, the analogy of RAM and the memory
that you have in your computer or your phone,
if you are thinking and speaking all at the same time,
then you're not giving yourself enough space
to focus on the grammar and vocabulary.
In general, I find that the more students think about ideas,
the lower their grammar and vocabulary score,
not always the case, but often the case.
It can even affect pronunciation at times,
not to the same degree as grammar and vocabulary,
but it can do.
So, what can we learn from this?
What we can learn is number one,
limit the number of ideas that you have
in the Speaking test, in Speaking part three, especially,
and go deeper on them, make it easier for yourself.
And this is not something you can do
by just watching this video
and then immediately doing it in the test.
You have to practice this.
Go and download or look up Speaking Practice questions,
just Google, you know,
Speaking Practice part three questions,
and practice doing this yourself,
and you'll get into the routine of doing this.
Some students that I work with every week,
they make this mistake.
And I said, "I told you two or three weeks in a row
not to do this.
Did you not practice it?"
And the ones that keep making this mistake, don't practice.
The ones that do fix this mistake are the ones that practice
and are the ones that improve.
So it really is going to improve your performance.
If you do that, it's much, much easier.
And it's all about, like what this says if you can see it,
keeping it simple.
The speaking test is not an ideas test.
It's not a knowledge test. It's not an IQ test.
It's a speaking test.
So give yourself every opportunity to show the examiner,
how good you are at speaking English,
not limiting yourself by thinking of 17 different ideas.
Just make it as easy as possible for yourself.
Hope you enjoyed that video.
Let me know what you think in the comments,
and I'll see you soon, bye-bye.
(upbeat music)