- Hi, everyone, Chris here from IELTS Advantage.
And here we are again today with Michelle, David and Damien.
In our last video,
we talked about IELTS myths and misconceptions,
and that video went so well.
We got so many views.
You can check it out on our YouTube channel here.
I'll link it above as well.
And what we did in that video was we asked you guys
do you have any questions for our IELTS experts?
Cause it's very rare for you to have access
to an array of IELTS experts, IELTS examiners
that can answer your questions.
So in this video,
we're going to take all those frequently asked questions
and answer them for you.
Okay, so first question, how can I improve my grammar?
Anybody wants to take that one?
- Yeah, I'll take that one.
So obviously if you're aiming for advanced seven or higher,
you need to focus on grammar.
You need to make sure that you're not making
too many mistakes with your grammar.
And a lot of students think
that by doing more grammar exercises,
they can improve their grammar.
So you get one of these grammar practice books,
there's nothing wrong with them,
but simply going through fill in the blanks
or matching exercises,
isn't actually going to really improve
your use of grammar in writing.
If it did, that'd be great,
'cause that'd be easy in a sense.
And I'm not saying that it's more difficult,
to do something else to improve your grammar,
but it is more effective.
So basically what you need to do to improve your grammar
is you need to figure out exactly which rule
you're not following or not understanding.
And that's why these grammar books can be useful
because like let's say for example,
you're making mistakes with articles.
And a lot of students do.
It seems very complicated.
And you do lots of fill in the blanks
and you get some wrong and you're not really sure why,
and there's all these exceptions, right?
You may have had a teacher in the past who said,
"Oh, well this is an exception."
And that's not necessarily the case.
So let's take a look at,
for example, making generalizations.
And what I see a lot is students use "the"
with a plural noun to make a generalization.
Now, if you've ever made this mistake,
and if you've had a teacher cross out that article,
then you have not understood the rule
that we do not use the, with general nouns to,
sorry, with plural nouns to generalize.
And you need to go and study that rule.
You need to understand why.
And the reason why is because we use the definite article
and we definitely know
exactly which ones we're talking about.
And when we're generalizing,
we're not talking about like one particular group.
So I could say the school uniforms are a terrible idea.
And then all of you guys who are listening to me
are going like, "Well, which school uniforms exactly?"
Cause I've used the definite article,
but I don't want to say, "These particular school uniforms."
I just want to say,
"Generally, all school uniforms are terrible."
So I need to use the plural noun
without the definite article.
So if you realize that you don't know that rule,
or you're not applying that rule,
then you keep it in the back of your mind
or you have it written down in your notebook.
And when you're checking your writing
and you're checking your sentence
and you're trying to generalize,
then you look very carefully at the grammar.
Have you done it correctly or not?
And that's how you improve.
Not by doing a million more
fill in the blank exercises with articles.
- Good, good, any input from yourself, Damien or David?
- Yeah, I think Michelle's absolutely right
talking about prioritizing the mistakes.
So let's imagine you get some feedback from a teacher.
And they say, "You have like 11 article mistakes,
but you have four tense mistakes."
There's no point you try and do everything at the same time,
because it becomes overwhelming
to have so many different issues.
So it's best that as Michelle says,
like focus on those article mistakes, get them down.
And then maybe the next essay,
you make two article mistakes, but for tense mistakes
and then your next objective would be,
"Well, I need to focus on the tense mistakes."
So it's by prioritizing what your key mistakes are
rather than looking at it as one big whole,
breaking it down.
- Absolutely.
- Win one battle and then go on to the next one.
- Yeah, if you broke your leg and you went into hospital,
they wouldn't try and fix all of your other bones.
They would just try and fix that one bone in your leg.
A shocking number of IEL students
have only one or two really key areas of weakness
when it comes to IELTS.
And it's really following what we would call the 80/20 rule.
There's a small number of things
that cause a huge number of problems.
And so it's identifying those little things
and focusing on them.
David, anything you would agree or disagree or any input?
- I have to completely agree.
A lot of the times students tell me
that when they get feedback from a teacher or from school,
"You need to improve your grammar."
They're often very overwhelmed.
Grammar is a very, very big subject.
So students don't know where to start.
So following the advice that Michelle and Damian
have given there it is the best thing you can do.
Rather than trying to tackle grammar as a whole
let's focus on your weaknesses,
possibly articles one week, prepositions the next week.
So, don't take everything
or don't try to do everything at once.
Focus on small things.
- Yeah, I'd say that most grammar books,
not many students make it to the end of those grammar books.
Cause if you buy like a big thick grammar book,
you'll get through the first couple of chapters
and then you'll be like, "Ah."
It's really, for which chapters within a grammar book
or which modules within a grammar course
do you need to focus on
and it becomes much more manageable.
And feedback is obviously important as well
because it's going to really help you speed up the process
of understanding which mistakes you're making
while you're doing it,
trying to figure it out yourself is good.
And it's useful because you need to put the work in.
But get some help with your grammar mistakes
because you might be making mistakes
that you're completely unaware of.
So thanks very much for watching.
If you have any other questions that you need help with,
and there's two things you can do.
Number one, you can go to our website, ieltsadvantage.com.
You can also check out the rest of this YouTube channel.
It's got 100s of videos that'll help you
with your IELTS preparation.
Second thing you can do is send us an email.
We answer a 100% of the emails that come into us.
Chris@ieltsadvantage is my email address.
You can send me an email and either me or one of the team
will answer any IELTS questions that you have.
If you've enjoyed this video, give it a like.
If you have any other questions as well,
feel free to put them in the comments below.
We read all the comments and we'll try our best
to answer any of your IELTS questions.
David, Damien, Michelle, thank you so much for your help.
And I'm sure we'll be seeing you again soon, thank you.
- Bye. - Bye.
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