- Hey, Chris here from IELTS Advantage.
So about three weeks ago,
we released a video showing a real student,
Rashmi from India, doing a mock IELT speaking test with me.
And in three weeks, it has nearly 400,000 views.
So obviously, you guys love this type of interaction.
And the comments were that you loved to see
how I was able to help a student in real time
and help them improve their speaking.
So what we decided to do,
was bring Rashmi back in to our office
and do a brand new series of videos with her.
And what we did was we split it into part one,
part two, part three, so we're gonna have three videos.
And each part, at the beginning,
I'm going to give Rashmi advice and feedback
on how to do her best in each part.
So you guys can watch that and learn from it yourselves,
then see Rashmi's performance,
and then I'm gonna give her feedback on her performance.
Talk about her pronunciation, her grammar,
her vocabulary, and her fluency and coherence.
Without further adieu, here it is.
Okay Rashmi, so what we're gonna do first
is I'm gonna give you some advice
on how to perform to your best in part one, all right?
- Okay.
- So we're gonna talk about part one itself first,
some strategies, some techniques.
And then we're going to talk about
the four marking criteria, so pronunciation,
fluency and coherence, grammatical range and accuracy,
we'll just call that grammar,
and lexical resource, we'll just call that vocabulary.
Okay, ready? - Okay.
- [Chris] All right, so part one.
The best way to describe part one
is just normal everyday, small talk type questions.
They're all questions about you,
so you can't get them wrong.
Don't try and think of impressive ideas
or anything like that, just think of it
as having a normal conversation with somebody.
Let's say you and I were colleagues, or classmates,
or something like that, and I was getting to know you.
So I'm asking things about your hometown,
where you live, your interests, your hobbies,
just normal getting to know you questions.
Does that make sense?
- Yes.
- Yeah, so like we talked about before,
one of the things that students do in this part
is give very, very short answers.
So for example, where are you from, Mumbai.
Or what's your job, data analyst.
And in a normal conversation that would be fine,
but because you're in an English test,
the examiner needs enough data, enough information
to judge your fluency, your pronunciation,
and your grammar, and your vocabulary.
So try and develop your answers a little bit more.
An easy way to do that for part one
is just answer the question,
and then add a little bit more detail.
So you could give an explanation,
or an example, or a little bit more detail.
Let me give you an example.
If somebody asked me, what's your job?
I wouldn't say teacher.
I would say I'm a teacher,
and I specialize in teaching IELTS,
primarily I do it online.
I have a company.
You know, a little bit more information.
And it will also allow you
to develop more complex sentences,
if you say things like hello, my name is Chris.
That's a very simple sentence,
but if you add a little bit more detail,
or an explanation, or an example
it makes the sentence a little bit more complex.
And for someone like you who is aiming
for the band eights, the band nines,
that's what you would need to do.
So any questions about part one?
- No.
- All good, okay.
I think the main
criticism last time for part one,
was just shorter answers.
The other thing is, not too long either.
I know that's frustrating advice,
not too short, not too long.
The thing is,
the examiner has to ask you a range of different questions,
and they only have four or five minutes to do that.
So if you talk, and talk, and talk, and talk,
the examiner will keep stopping you.
And then often students can feel like,
"Oh, what did I do?
"I'm doing something wrong."
They'll get stressed out and that can affect their fluency,
so I don't like to give students number of sentences,
or number of words.
So just follow the rule,
answer the questions a little bit more detail,
two or three sentences maximum.
And if you're going over four or five sentences,
probably that's a bit too much.
But don't be thinking counting words,
or counting number of sentences, or anything like that.
Okay, so for fluency,
last time your fluency was great.
There was a few mm's, and ah's,
and likes, and fillers like that,
but good fluency
is not about never mm, or ah,
none of the little audible pauses.
If you listen to the greatest speakers of all time,
they all pause and have little audible pauses.
That is not what good fluency is about.
Good fluency is just speaking at a normal pace
with adding a natural number of pauses or hesitations.
And you do pause and hesitate,
but naturally like everybody else.
When I'm speaking,
and when anybody in the world is speaking,
you pause 'cause you need to think.
Your fluency, no big problems there.
Coherence, you do answer the questions,
but sometimes they're a little bit too short,
especially for part one.
We've already talked about that.
For pronunciation, your intonation, your sentence stress,
your connected speech is all really, really good.
You're clarity is also good.
One thing though, you're a shy girl, I know.
You're a little bit timid.
Sometimes when people,
not that there's anything wrong with being shy,
I was shy when I was your age too.
People who are shy tend to speak
on a low level.
The volume, it can be a little bit low.
They don't enunciate their words as clearly,
so you could improve your pronunciation
by pretend your speaking to me
and I'm standing a little bit further across the room.
And speak from your diaphragm, not from inside.
A lot of people speak from inside their mouth,
whereas people who enunciate very well
speak from their diaphragm, their stomach.
So if you try, don't shout or anything.
But pronunciation is really good for you,
just a little tweak.
It's nothing, no big deal.
Grammar, your grammar is incredibly accurate,
very, very accurate, a nice wide range.
I think that by extending
and developing your answers a little bit,
you will add complexity to your sentences as well,
so we don't need to worry about that.
Your vocabulary is also very, very good.
However, I think to push on to the next level
during your preparation.
Like this is preparation, this is not the real test.
You could try and take a few more chances,
not trying to use fancy vocabulary.
But the best way to improve your vocabulary, I think,
is to think of more topic specific words.
So if we were talking about data analysis,
there are certain words that we would use.
Such as...
You tell me some words.
You know more about data analysis than I do.
Analytics, AI, artificial intelligence,
you would only use those words really,
when your talking about that topic.
So when we're talking about these topics,
try and think of topic specific words.
But be careful,
it can also affect your fluency
if your trying to think of big words.
So you're like, I wanna think of this word,
and then it affects your fluency.
So only if it comes naturally,
you don't want to be sitting there thinking,
hmm, what big word will I use?
But I think try and improve it a little bit.
Does that sound good?
- Yeah. - Yeah, good.
Do you wanna start?
- [Rashmi] Yes.
- Okay, so first Rashmi, do you work or do you study?
- Oh, I study.
I'm studying at Queen's University,
and I'm starting a master's in marketing.
I'm majoring in marketing analytics.
- Excellent, why did you choose that degree?
- Oh, I chose to study analytics,
because I'm interested in big data,
and big data is becoming very popular these days.
A lot of companies have now started
to look at their down data.
Down data, which means like data which was collected,
but they have not done anything about it,
it just laying around in the database.
So now companies are starting to use that data,
to analyze it and look at trends, past and future trends,
which is falls in the predictive analytics category.
So I'm very much interested
in looking at both the behavior of data
and the consumer behavior, which the data tells you.
So analytics lets me study that,
and look at the data in terms of
how you can manage your customers better,
so I want to learn analytics because of that.
- Is there anything that you would like to study
in the future?
- I would like to study Python programming language.
I'm currently studying that, and I would like to master it,
because it lets you create and develop your own programs.
Because these days,
the data analytics software is very expensive.
So it gives you much more power
to control your own dashboards,
and you can create it on your own.
So I want to learn Python programming because of that.
- Excellent, now let's talk about your hometown.
What kind of place is your hometown?
- Oh, I come from a very small city in India.
It's in north western region.
It's called Baroda, and it's a princely state.
We still have a king who lives in a palace there,
so there are lots of palaces throughout the city.
And it's called the cultural capital of my state,
because there are a lot of like reading,
and exhibition arts, and culture.
It's very much promoted there.
- What's the most interesting part of your hometown?
- I would say the palaces.
There are a lot of palaces throughout the city,
and they are like really beautiful.
In the past, only the king was allowed to be there.
But now it's open to the public,
so we can go around and see all those palaces.
And there are lots of museums and 1,800 years of history,
so it's really great.
And also we have a river, which flows through the city.
And it's very famous for having a lot of crocodiles in it,
and it was featured on National Geographic.
So because it's the largest river in a city
with most number of crocodiles in it,
so that's a custom attraction I would say.
- And what jobs do people do in your hometown?
- Well like I said, my city is very small,
so most of the people have small businesses.
They are business owners.
And the students there,
they don't really have too many opportunities,
so they go either out of the city,
or they go out abroad to study,
or to look for an occupation.
But in my city, there are not too many opportunities.
But we have some big companies
like pharmaceuticals, and we have chemical industries.
So those type of jobs we do have, yes.
- Good, and now let's talk about colors.
What's your favorite color?
- I don't really have a favorite color.
It depends on my mood,
but I am told that I'm most of the time
I tend to wear white or black.
That's what I'm told.
But I don't really think of a color
when I go to buy clothes,
I just pick anything.
I don't think I have a favorite color, no.
- Are there any colors that you dislike?
- I dislike red (laughs).
It's because I had a traumatic experience once,
so that color scares me.
But other than that, there no color that I dislike.
- And are there any colors in your country
that have a special meaning?
- Yes.
India is a secular country, but most of us are Hindus,
so orange is the color of my religion.
So you will see orange flags on temples,
So orange is very prominent.
But the Muslims, they are in minority.
But there are a lot of Muslims in my country,
so they have the green flags.
So whenever there is a Hindu Festival,
you'll see people wearing orange and waving orange flags.
And when there is a Muslim Festival,
you would see people in processions carrying green flags
and wearing green.
- Well done, okay.
How did you feel?
Was that different from the one that you did last week?
- Oh, I can't judge for myself.
- You can't judge (laughs).
I'm the teacher, I should just tell you, huh?
- Can you tell me the comments would say (laughs).
- Well, let's talk about the differences.
The main difference
was you developed your answers much, much more.
And so that would have helped your coherence,
would have helped your fluency,
would have helped you your grammatical range as well.
So you did a really, really good job there.
There was only one
where you you talked quite a long time,
but you only did it for one answer.
The examiner would probably only stop you,
if you did that for every single answer,
because they need to ask you a range of different questions,
so you did really, really well in terms of coherence.
You answered every question.
Everything that you said was related to the question,
so you did a very, very good job.
Grammar, again, extremely accurate and wide ranging,
used a range of different tenses and structures,
And your sentences were more complex that time,
because you were adding in more clauses,
because you were adding in more detail,
and explanations, and examples,
and elaborating a lot more on the answers.
In terms of vocabulary, you did an excellent job.
I think that you used even more topic specific vocabulary,
and you tried to push yourself a lot more.
And again, the most important thing is accuracy.
And your vocabulary is extremely accurate,
so you did a very, very good job there.
With pronunciation, again the intonation was great,
the sentence stress, connected speech, all really good.
I could understand 100% of what you were saying.
You did try and enunciate a lot more.
The people watching might say
I didn't hear this or hear that,
because it's the microphone,
because of the sign on their list,
watching on their little iPhone, or whatever.
But in the studio here,
I can understand everything that you're saying,
which is great.
One of the things
that was brought up in the comments before,
was that you have a tendency to say like.
There's a lot of different ways
that you can use the word like.
The primary way that you use the word like, is for examples.
So when you're writing an essay,
you would write for example, for instance.
That's a more formal academic way, or such as.
But when you're speaking,
if you listen to high people from this part of the world
give examples,
instead of saying for example, they'll say like,
which is totally normal.
You're not using it as a filler,
you're using it to exemplify things to use as examples,
so that was totally fine.
And one of the questions,
I asked you about a color that you dislike,
and you said red.
You were talking about an emotional thing,
something traumatic that happened to you.
So anyone watching,
I've had this happen to me during the test
where you ask a question that is quite innocent,
and the person thinks of some horrible event
that happened in the past.
And then they start to think about that event,
and they start to get very nervous,
and stressed out, and emotional,
and that can affect their performance.
So anybody watching,
I would avoid talking about traumatic things.
- [Rashmi] I didn't think about it.
- Yeah, it's totally natural, it just pops into your mind.
Like the very first lesson I ever taught,
I asked this lady about her family.
And I didn't know, but she was a refugee,
and her whole family had died.
And I was like, oh my God, you know?
And she kind of fell apart, 'cause obviously,
it was a traumatic thing for her to talk about.
So if it happens, if you're watching this video,
avoid emotional traumatic things
because it can put you off, you know?
But you did an excellent job,
any questions about Part One?
- [Rashmi] I don't know what intonation means.
- Intonation, okay, so intonation is the tone of your voice.
So we convey meaning
When we're speaking English,
we convey meaning through words,
through facial expressions, but also the tone.
So a good example would be if I came home late,
and I said hi honey, to my wife, how are you?
And she said, fine, fine, like with a rising intonation,
that means she's fine.
But if my wife said, fine with a downward intonation,
that means it's not fine (laughs).
Or if a student came into the classroom,
and they were late, and I said please sit down,
please sit down, so going up and then down,
that would mean that I'm totally fine
and it's a polite way to ask him to sit down.
But if I said please sit down, please sit down,
it sounds very serious
because there's just a falling intonation.
But you have very natural intonation,
it's very difficult to learn
for non-native English speakers.
You're doing a good job with that.
(upbeat music)