- [Chris] In this video,
I'm gonna show you how band eight and nine students
remember and use vocabulary using a pair of scissors,
some pens and paper.
So recently I asked some of our students
who got a band eight or a band nine
in their IELTS speaking and writing,
how do they use vocabulary?
And one of the key things that they do
is they use one of these four techniques
for reviewing and remembering and then using vocabulary.
And these four techniques,
I'm gonna share them with you today,
and anyone can use them just using these easy things
that all of you have.
Okay.
So the first technique that I'm gonna show you
is something called matching.
So get your piece of paper and write some of the words
that you have recently discovered.
So here we have innovate, develop, device, modify,
breakthrough, obsolete, intuitive, and censorship.
So this student was reading an article on technology
and they noticed these new words,
so they wrote down these new words
in their vocabulary notebook.
And one of the review techniques that we show them is,
we get them to write synonyms of each of these words,
beside the new words that they have learned.
So not only are they learning one new word,
they're learning a additional new word that is a synonym.
Synonyms are extremely important,
not only for writing and speaking,
but also for reading and listening too.
So how do we get the students to remember these words is,
we get them to cut up these new words
and make them into cards.
So now we have all of these words on cards,
and what you can do is you can spread these out,
and what you do is you match them, all right?
So we have antiquated, all right,
which one is antiquated, obsolete, all right?
And we could check the meaning of those,
so the meaning is on the back.
Obsolete means not in use anymore,
antiquated, not in use anymore.
So this is correct.
And then we match these up and then we just keep going.
So modify, develop, no, breakthrough, no, adapt.
So adapt the verb, adapt and modify, these matches together.
And then we just keep going until
we have matched all of them together.
And this is really going to help you remember the synonyms.
What we've also done, so the second technique,
is we have the meaning of these words
on the back of these cards.
So what you could do is put these with the word facing down
and the meaning facing up.
So we'll just use a few of them.
And then what you can do is you can just read the meaning
of the word and then, okay, what is that word?
So simple to use, what word could that be?
I'm gonna guess, intuitive.
Yay, I got that one correct.
Not in use anymore, obsolete.
Yeah. I got that one correct.
Using new methods or ideas,
original, no, innovative, okay?
So by doing that,
I am checking the meaning and remembering the meaning.
The next thing that we can do
is we can categorize these words.
So there's different things that we could categorize.
We could categorize them by topic,
so let's say you have some words
that are related to technology,
some words are related to education,
some words are related to the environment,
you could categorize them by that.
Or you could categorize them by word form.
There are nouns, adjectives, and verbs here.
So device is a noun, so we're gonna put the nouns here,
original is an adjective, develop is a verb,
obsolete, adjective, restriction, noun, discovery, noun,
As you can see,
we are just categorizing them by the different word types,
the different word forms.
You could even categorize by pronunciation
or number of synonyms.
There's lots of different things
that you can do to categorize.
And categorization really helps our brains remember,
and then use these words effectively on test day.
But we do always need to remember
that we are not going to simply remember these words.
Remembering the words is okay for listening or reading,
but remember for speaking and writing,
we actually have to use these words.
So how we can do that is we could take some of these words
and tell a story.
So let's take just a few of these words randomly.
This was actually done to me in a job interview once.
When I was applying for a job as a lawyer,
they gave me four random words and says,
"Okay, create a story."
So let's take four random words.
So we're gonna have this one, obsolete,
this one, modify, this one, restriction,
and this one, innate.
And then what you could do is think about the meaning
of these words and then create just a very short story
that uses these words effectively.
So you could practice your writing doing this,
or you could practice your speaking doing this,
and you could actually record yourself on your phone
and listen back and think about,
did I use these words effectively or not?
So what I'd like you to do in the comments, pause the video,
can you write a story,
like, or one or two paragraphs,
using these words effectively?
I'm going to think about this for about 10 seconds
and then create my own story.
So I recently switched from an iPhone to a Google phone.
The reason why I did that is lots of people said
that when you switch to a Google or an Android phone,
you can do lots of modifications.
You can modify many of the things within the ecosystem.
As the problem with iPhones
is they put lots of restrictions in place
and they restrict the amount of things
that you can change in the operating system.
However, after using my Google phone for about a week,
it was pretty obsolete for me because I was so used to iOS
and the operating system,
that it just made using the Google phone useless.
And I couldn't use it at all,
because I've been so used to using this operating system
for so long that it is innate
and so intuitive and easy for me to use the iPhone,
that I had to switch back.
So, as you can see,
what I did was just take those four words randomly,
and believe me, this is random.
I didn't spend, you know, two hours thinking of that story,
as you could probably tell from how bad the story was.
And it doesn't matter how good the story is,
it doesn't need to be, you know,
a Hollywood blockbuster and level story.
All you're trying to do is just understand
how to use these words in a sentence,
and then you'll be able to remember them.
That is far more effective than what most students do.
What most students do is they get long lists of vocabulary
with the word, and then maybe the meaning,
and then maybe the translation into their native language,
I don't know any other language other than English,
so I'm not gonna try that one,
but they just read these lists of words.
And this is useless.
You're not going to remember words by just reading them
and the meaning and never use the translation
because that causes all sorts of problems on test day,
you're going to be translating
rather than actually thinking in English.
Band eight, band nine students think in English.
That is a huge difference between someone struggling
at a band five on six level
and someone getting a band eight or band nine.
Band eight, band nine students do stuff like this,
they don't do stuff like this.
Because doing stuff like this forces your brain
to think in English and use English, this is easy.
Anything easy, doesn't help you improve.
This is a little bit more difficult, but as you can see,
it's pretty fun.
You could play a game,
you could play this with other people,
you could play it in the classroom if you're at a school,
on the key,
it's going to help you remember all these new words.
And if you did this once a day,
you know, how many words are here?
There's not that many.
If you did this every single day,
learned, you know, 10 new words every day,
after 10 days, you've hundreds and hundreds of new words,
and then you're able to play even more games,
review them even more, match even more,
categorize even more, tell more stories.
You could write a whole essay, just using these words.
So, I hope you find that useful,
if you did, that's great,
if you didn't find it useful,
feel free to give it a thumbs down
and feel free to unsubscribe if you don't like it.
If you did really like this
and you want to improve your vocabulary even more,
I'll put a link below.
There's a free vocabulary course
that we offer completely free
and all you have to do is go down, it's on YouTube,
just click in the description,
or there'll be a little button somewhere,
I don't know where,
but it's probably popping up somewhere,
click on that and it's a full vocabulary course for you.
Thanks very much.
And if you need anything more,
go to ieltsadvantage.com
and you'll find a huge number of free resources there
to help you with your IELTS preparation.
(gentle piano music)