hi there and welcome to my first video in which I provide free tips or pieces
of advice about the IELTS exam if you find these tips useful then please
subscribe to my channel to get more tips in future now this first video is about
the section that many of you dread or fear the speaking exam my first tip or
piece of advice is this there is a clue in the name with this exam speaking exam
so what's the worst possible mistake that you could make in your exam is it
using a word wrongly is it making a grammatical mistake is it not having
something interesting to say about a topic no no and no your biggest mistake
the biggest mistake that you could possibly make in your exam is the
mistake of silence silence silence you must avoid at all costs during the
speaking exam you must speak as much as possible if you are silent then I
guarantee I promise you that you will score zero marks during the time that
you are silent worse you will lose marks for hesitation because hesitation or
waiting before you say things is a bad thing in the exam and will get you
marked down the examiner is there to assess or score your spoken English he
can't do this if you're not saying anything
but every time you open your mouth you have the chance to score points in this
exam now what a lot of you might say is this
some of the questions are difficult I need time to think
so of course I'm going to be silent for a few seconds that's okay isn't it no
it's not okay it will not help you to get the score that you need or want to
go and do the thing that you want to do with your life so if you need to think
about a question what can you do rather than being silent the answer is that you
need to use something that we call fillers so what are fillers and how can
you use them to get a better score in your IELTS exam so a filler is something
that you say to give yourself or buy yourself time as we say in English there
are different types of filler that you use for different types of question in
this exam in this lesson we're going to look at suitable fillers for the type of
question that you get in part 1 of the IELTS exam now what are the part 1
questions in this exam about well one of three things your interests your
activities your experiences what you like what you do and what you have done
in the past now if the examiner asks you whether you like sports of course you
probably know the answer to that you can answer quickly if he asks you what you
do on a typical weekend the same should be true but what if he asked you to
remember something that you have done in the past for example he could ask you
how you celebrated your 18th birthday if like me you are really old it might be
difficult to remember this piece of information I can't remember
I haven't got a clue what we did on my 18th birthday but you must not go silent
whilst you try to recall or remember this information so you need a suitable
filler and here are three suggestions of fillers that you could consider using
when you are asked to remember something but you need to take a few seconds in
order to do the remembering a my word my mind has gone blank for a moment let me
think B let me wrack my brains for a moment hmm I remember now we see wow
that's really taxing my memory a bit let me see if I can dredge up an answer ah I
remember now so these are three different ways of giving yourself a bit
of extra time to remember some information and they are far far far
better than being silent the best thing about these three particular suggestions
is that the first two news very native or idiomatic expressions and the third
one uses some rarer vocabulary and if you use rare vocabulary in your IELTS
test if you use idioms that will help to get your score moving in the direction
we want it to go up okay of course you could just say I can't remember right at
the second let me think oh yes that final one is probably the easiest to
remember and if it's the only one that you can remember then use it rather than
being silent but better if you can to use one of the other three suggestions
for the reasons that we've just talked about okay so finally let's have a look
at the meanings of those words contained in that final expression
that news's rarer language so to tax in this context means that something in
this case your brain is being put under pressure or made to work harder this is
the same verb as the verb we news about paying money to the government for
example a government taxes its people but the meaning here is completely
different to dredge the literal meaning of this word is to get something by
scraping something from the bottom of something such as the seabed which is
the bottom of the sea but in this context it means to search really really
hard for a memory to try and find or locate a memory from the deepest parts
of your brain so these were suggestions for fillers that you could use if you
need to in part 1 of the IELTS speaking test the next set of tips that I will
offer will focus on fillers for part 3 of the IELTS test thanks for watching
and if you have your exam soon all the best of it
or as we say in English break a leg which means good luck finally if you
have any questions about the tips given in this video please leave them as
comments below the video and I promise I will answer them quickly thank you and
goodbye