Welcome back to 8IELTS and the world of television.
We gonna introduce to you a little bit of the television world.
This is the OB truck and inside the truck we have.
Hello everyone.
We have Anh Trong, who is our DOP.
Dũng, our production assistant.
This is anh Dũng, our OB truck technician.
And all of these materials and equipment is really complicated.
I don’t understand all of these, but one day I do wish to.
But an interesting thing about this topic is that this is where all the magic happens, this is where the direction happens.
It’s one of the coldest places that you can find in a television station.
And it’s also at night, this is where all the mist go to, because this is always outside.
But despite the fact that you saw a bit of the technicality of television, today’s episode we will be talking about television with a very special guest.
And it’s gonna be the human aspect and human experience of television.
So be excited and we gonna give you a tour into our life.
Welcome back to the studio.
Guys, guess what, you ask and we listen.
And today topic is on Television and we have our guess that you’ve been all waiting to meet.
And she is right here shooting with me in this studio.
Let’s welcome Duong Tran.
Hello.
Hello, hi.
Thank you for coming.
Thank you. Thank you for having me here on the show.
I’m very excited to join in 8IELTS.
How does it feel being a guess this time?
Oh God, I think I’m really used to posing questions.
So if I seem a little bit on the spot today, feel a little bit hesitant, it’s because I’m always used to posing questions.
So this is new for me.
I guess today is a conversation.
I ask questions, you’re free to ask questions too if you like.
Ok, first question, you were an environmental major as well as French major, how did your path to television start?
It seems quite random, doesn’t it?
I graduated from school and like all graduate back then, I had no idea what I want to do obviously.
In Liberal Art School in the States, people embrace this image of a graduate going out there to kind of save the world.
Once you get out in the real world, especially for me coming back to Vietnam that time.
It wasn’t like I could go out and have a job that would allow me to be like this hero or save the world as in the books that I learnt during college.
So I started a translation job because that’s what I knew, I knew English.
That’s how I ended up in VTV and television.
And then people started giving me jobs and things that I’d never done before.
It started from the voice and it started “Ok, we need someone to stand in for this person to read news”.
I can't do that, but I did, eventually I did.
One thing just led to the next.
You’re doing your Journalistic TV; you’re also doing a little bit of the broadcast TV.
What is the difference in these experiences?
It’s a little different in term of practicality obviously.
When I first started out being in front of the limelight in talking, being able to express your idea fluently and at the same time being very mindful of what audience think,
whether they be Vietnamese or international, those are kind of first challenges.
But overtime, the challenges are to stay and continue to be creative and love what you do.
Obviously, people that I meet, they are the biggest inspiration.
I’m lucky to be able to work in different variety of fields.
Those things give me inspirations to continue on my next show and to continue this path.
Whether the differences in journalistic and then broadcast, obviously, in a lot of the feature that you have more fun in terms of you get to experience more lifestyle or sides of broadcast.
Whereas, with journalistic, I get to practice a lot of what I learnt in school later on, in grad school.
That’s kind of the basic of the journalism and journalistic identity, where you try to portray what you see as closely as possible.
Obviously, there’re differences between features and news.
A lot of the time when you think about television, especially television in Vietnam, and probably similar around the world in sense of that people love drama.
You know, people like to see all that crazy motions on TV.
And sometimes people on TV, they love that kind of stuff as well.
So are you a drama person or are you not a drama person when it comes to your work?
To answer straightly, I would say I’m not a drama person.
I do a lot of news on TV on a daily basis; I try to keep it as straight-forward as possible, quick and simple, but at the same time very true to the story.
We also broadcast to international audience, so it’s also about how the international audience sees Vietnam.
And I see myself having to film real huge truth because that is about portraying the whole country.
When it comes to news, we’re very careful.
But obviously when it comes to feature, we try to portray Vietnam in the best of ways, but also in the fun of way, interesting.
One of goals is to get people to come to Vietnam, to know about Vietnam, to know what is going on.
Now that you’re a mom, and you’re working mom, what’s your day like?
Right now it’s definitely hard being a working mom.
I definitely have a huge respect for all moms once I turn to mom.
And even more so now as my baby’s growing up older and especially more appreciation for my mom.
And all of the hard work that she had to go through to raise me up to be who I am today.
But in terms of my day, definitely I try my best to, you know, see my baby as much as possible.
I’m very lucky to live right next to my work, so I go home as much as possible and try to work once he goes to sleep, if I had work to do at home
But it’s going well so far, definitely stressful and it gotta give me so much appreciation for all the working moms out there.
And it probably trains you to be a lot more to recognize your identity and another aspect of the Vietnamese identity, right?
It’s an identity that’s so close and dear to the heart of so many Vietnamese people that Vietnamese women are strong.
Strong in terms of not only physically strong, but mentally strong to be able to balance all of the things in their life, a career, a family, children and still having great to all of that.
Those are my role models, and my mom is a great role model in that aspect, someone I aspire to become in the future.
I mean I’m not sure I’m doing such a great job now, and it’s still so new for me, jungling all of this in one life.
But we’ll see how it goes and I have a lot of people who’ve gone before me to look at and to be a role model too.
Now talking about that, there’re a lot of people in universities, in schools, and young working adults who really look up to you as a role model.
And actually, we invited some people here today, to the studio but we’re gonna meet them later.
Before you guys have a chance to meet Duong, we’re gonna play a game.
And if you already know, we have the IELTS MARATHON and Duong’s gonna take for it.
OK.
Have you ever taken the IELTS before?
Yes, I took the IELTS once, actually for my graduation at school.
Not the TOEFL for the undergraduate and then the IELTS?
Yes, exactly.
- Ok. Let’s go! - Thank you.
Hey! You’re now with us at the 8IELTS MARATHON challenge and of course, with this challenge, we always will have our contender.
Our contender today is Duong Tran.
And to prepare for the IELTS MARATHON challenge, what have you done?
I don’t know. I’m quite nervous and hopefully I do well.
OK. Your first task is basically dig your hand around all of this mess and you’re gonna have to be blindfolded.
You’re gonna find the passport, you’re gonna find the keys and also you also gonna have to find the confirmation letter.
Alright.
I’m gonna leave you to the first box. Can you feel the box, four boxes?
First box, second box, third box and then the fourth box.
OK. Ready and set. Go!
First box. She’s digging through what we call Spaghetti.
OK. What do you feel? What does this feel like to you?
It feels like spaghetti, but like nylon spaghetti.
I feel a paper. I don’t know.
- Is this the confirmation letter? - That is the confirmation letter. You’ve got the first one.
OK. I’m gonna check to see if there is anything else in this box.
Alright. So you’re onto the second box.
OK. There might be something in here.
What is this? I think it’s cotton.
Cotton. What does that feel like to you?
Very furry.
Very furry. You though it’s an animal?
Yeah. It was my first initial reaction.
I find the keys.
- Oh. She has the keys. - I found the keys. Ok.
So your fingers work very well.
I check again. This box seems to have anything else.
This is your third box. You only have one more item. One more item.
Stuffed animals.
I found it.
Oh! Congratulation!
Can I take this off now?
Yes, you can. That’s very fast.
OK. Beautiful. How did that feel?
Good. Yes. OK I see what I’ve been touched. Flowers.
So you’re on to the next challenge.
What am I doing here?
You got to set the timer to couple of seconds, ten seconds.
And you gotta go on to that spinning wheel, spin one round and make sure it snaps right at the moment where you’re in front of the camera.
I’m gonna take off my shoes if that’s OK.
That’s a very smart move.
Alright. Press it.
Alright. OK you go!
What I have to do? Turn it?
Spin it and make sure at the last minutes.
The last seconds.
Oh. It’s taken the picture of you. Very beautiful back.
So I have to do it again?
Yes. You got to do it one more time.
It’s too difficult.
Be careful.
Beautiful. You’re on to the next one
So number two is the City Gallery.
Number two is the City Gallery. Is this correct?
You’re onto the next one.
Now it’s the PARAPHRASE challenge.
OK.
Yeah. You just three words and find three synonyms and you’re off to go.
Alright. Nearest is the closest.
Major is large
And support will be help.
Support will be help. That’s absolutely correct.
Alright, next to the PRONUNCIATION challenge – the final challenge in this section.
You’re gonna read the whole paragraph. You should see one sentence fully recognized to pass.
OK. Shall we begin?
3, 2, 1..Action!
Alright. You’re on to the next challenge. Go over here.
What do you think about all of these challenges, just now?
Yeah, it’s very fun to take these challenges.
I mean you definitely get a little bit nerve wreck at some points.
So, your final challenge is gonna be called the SNEAK OF SHAME.
You’re gonna be sneaking up to the letters.
And then I’m gonna have to turn around.
And everytime I turn around, you got pauses and freeze. So whatever stand to you’re standing.
Sure. Ok.
And that is just the rule of the game.
So are you ready for THE SNEAK OF SHAME?
Yes, I am ready.
OK.
SNEAK OF SHAME, a new edition starts now.
One, two, three.
One, two, two and a half, three.
You just look like you haven’t moved.
One, two, three.
One, two, two and a half, three.
One, two, three.
I have a four.
I have all the letters.
You have all the letters.
This is O, R.
I hold some for you.
O and R
H, C and A
What can that be?
Remember I have a secret letter as well.
Without it, you may not be able to form the word.
What would you tell me to give you the last letter?
Please?
Since you said please, here’s your last letter.
O, R, C, H, A, N.
I have no idea.
Let’s me hold this for you, so you can have a visualization.
Oh my God.
What does Anchor mean?
Anchor means presenter.
What do you want to say to all the young people that want to get to the television?
Are there any tips to remain in this industry?
Yeah, I mention this abbreviation one is to stay opened and open is OPENED.
O stands for Optimism.
P stands for Patience.
E stands for Eagerness.
N stands for Nimbleness.
Another E stand for Explorations.
D is for Determination.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much for coming to play.
Thank you for sharing a lot of really good skills for people who’re interested in speech publicly and also for people interested in television.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Of course guys, we’re not done yet with Duong Tran.
Because next up, we gonna have a little segment of surprise for all of you.
Let’s follow us and listen to our campaign out there on our Facebook, ok.
Stay tuned, you gonna meet a couple of ones up next.
Welcome back to the studio. We had selected some people to be here in the studio today with us.
These are the amazing people that’s going to have a little bit of a lesson, a skill lesson from Duong Tran today, ok?
Let’s move on over and this is the group of the lucky people.
So what are we gonna do today, Duong?
We gonna do some vocal warm-up, basically to warm up your voice, so you can project better.
This is the skill not only for television people but also for daily life also, so that you can project in speech better, so that your voice resonate with other people.
What are we gonna start with?
We gonna start with the first what I call the 'one two three'.
It’s basically counting from one to ten, slowly increasing in volume.
So I’ll do a demonstration so basically.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Shall we do it?
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Are we ready for the vocal games?
Yes.
This one we call the Meet and Greet, because all of the audience here just came here today and they’ve already made friends with each other.
But we gonna say hello to one another using different vocal techniques.
What is going to happen is that we’re going to line up, like this.
And then we’re going to say hello to one another from Cong to Phoebe.
We gonna say hello from one person to the next but say hello longer each time. You can so it either he...llo or hello..., any way you want.
But remember to project your voice, ok?
And we do it once that time, and we gonna go back.
Are we ready to begin the Meet and Greet?
Yes.
Three, two, one, action.
Hello.
Hi there.
That is the end.
So everyone gonna go home and utilize those skills, right?
Thanks so much Duong for great tips.
That is for this section with Duong Tran, some really interesting, really useful tips there when you’re talking in front of the public or taking the IELTS exam.
Project your voice.
Next up is the IDIOMS OF THE WEEK section, we know you love it because it has some very interesting phrases, where you can use over and over again.
Not just in the IELTS exam but also in life.
So stay tuned, take a look at the idioms this week.
Hey, you’re back with us in the studio and with every IELTS episode, we will have to have expert’s opinions.
Because at the end of the day, in order for you to study well for the IELTS, we want to show you what really goes on in examiner’s head, as well as some of the points you really need to focus and take notes of.
So of course, to help us with that today is Oliver Homes.
Hello again. So nice to see you again.
Thanks for coming back.
This week, we’re talking about television.
That’s very appropriate.
Very appropriate, right?
So today we have a person who is in TV a lot.
She’s an actress and her name is Lan Phuong.
She’s going to be talking about television a little bit.
So let’s have a look at the STAR DO IELTS this week.
So Lan Phuong, take it away with your STAR DO IELTS section.
Hello, I’m waiting for my turn to go into the room to do speaking test and this is my second time.
I hope that I’m not so nervous inside the room.
So please wish me luck. I have to go now, bye.
Good morning!
This is the speaking test of International English Test Language System (IELTS).
My name is Julian Burnley.
Can you tell me your full name please?
My name is Nguyen Lan Phuong.
Can I see your identification please?
Thank you. That's fine.
Now, in this first part, I’d like to ask you some questions about yourself.
Let’s talk about your freetime.
So what do you normally do in your freetime?
In my free time, I will have some coffee with my best friends.
I have one best friend and we can share everything.
I can talk to her and she can talk to me and we love listening to each other.
If you have more freetime, what will you do?
If I have more free time, I will take piano lesson.
I love piano and I wish I had a piano at home, so I can play anytime I want.
Now I’m going to give you topic and I’d like you to talk about it for one to two minutes.
Before you talk, you have one minute to think about what you’re going to say.
You can make some notes if you wish.
Do you understand?
Yeah, I understand.
Here’s some paper and a pencil for taking notes.
Here’s your topic.
I’d like you to tell me about a recent event in your life that makes you happy.
Alright, remember you have one to two minutes for this, so don’t worry if I stop you.
I’ll tell you when the time is up.
Please start speaking now please.
So when I write down in the paper and I try to recall all the events and which event makes me happy, then I realize that all the events related to Japan make me so happy.
I was so lucky that I just went to Japan in June, just last month to do a TV show.
I was like a host in a show introducing about Japanese culture, Japanese technology to Vietnamese audience.
Whenever I go there, I just feel amazing, I just feel so happy.
I love everything about Japan, I think I can talk to you about Japan nonstop.
But now I will try to go into the point.
When I went to Tokushima city and Awaji island to visit many places, one amazing thing is solar power plant.
I went there and I learnt that 20 years ago, there was a plant there.
But it was destroyed absolutely from the earthquake and the Japanese just rebuilt the plant in just one year.
And since there, for 19 years, it keeps operating and produces the electricity for the whole island.
And the I went to visit the LED light exhibition.
I learnt that there was one Japanese who created the LED light and the blue light in LED.
He got the Nobel Prize for that.
I know that there’re so many earthquakes in Japan, so they create a system of a lot of LED light.
When the earthquake happens, all the lights will go off and all the LED lights will turn on to lead people to go to shelter.
Would you like to go back to Japan?
Yes, sure. In the end of the year, I will go back and that will be my tenth time to Japan.
Thank you.
We’ve been talking about something, a recent event in your life that makes you happy.
I’d like to discuss with you one or two more general questions about this.
Let’s first talk about happiness.
What do you think make someone happy?
I just make a video exactly like that, about what make you happy.
I go with some friends with the camera.
We go around in Sai Gon to interview people about what makes you happy.
But we interview mostly with the poor people, people who have to work very hard on the street.
And their answers are very nice.
Some they just said “When I can sell a lot of cake, I’m happy”.
When I see my children go to school and learn thing, I’m happy.
Some said “There’re some passengers passing by me and give me some coupons and that makes me happy”.
Some of them were selling cakes, right?
So that’s to do with money.
Do you think money is the key to being happy?
Everybody needs money and everybody needs food, needs a home to stay.
So you can only have money, then you can have those things.
But money is not all, because I can see that from me and from people around me, we need more with love and care.
Thank you very much Lan Phuong.
That’s the end of the speaking test.
Thank you very much.
What do you think of Lan Phuong’s performance?
Generally, I think she’s great.
What I like about her performance is her confident enough to continue speaking, even if she knows sometimes, she makes small mistakes with the words, but she just keeps on speaking.
That’s great.
She got really good uses with the emphasis.
As well, she speaks very naturally and I think, personally, her pronunciation is a strong point.
Are you surprised that she’s able to deliver the English language so well?
After living in Vietnam for several years, I’ve heard many Vietnamese students to reach very high level of fluency, so I’m not surprised when people actually do have this kind of level.
Ok, Lan Phuong, I realize there’s a little bit of timber, a little bit of rashness in your voice.
Was you sick in that day?
Yes, my voice is a little bit bad because recently I have to use my voice a lot in acting and practicing the sound and accent, because I’m going to do a Southern girl, like a Mekong downtown girl.
That’s why my voice is very bad.
So Lan Phuong, you was really nervous before the exam, was you less nervous now that you’ve gone through the whole process.
I’m still nervous and I don’t understand why.
I think I hate examination, I hate going to the test.
I think I’m lucky that I don’t have to go into so many tests.
In the second part when I have to speak by myself for two minutes, I still feel nervous and I think I made a lot of mistakes in words and grammar.
I hate myself for that.
I’m blushed.
And then it’s better when the conversation starts.
I can hear the questions and then I can answer.
But especially in the third part, I try to think “Oh, now, he gives me questions, more questions”, then it can be like conversation.
Then I can be more relax.
But I don’t know. Maybe this is the examination.
It’s the test. They just go into my blood and tell me that this is the test.
So I cannot be natural and free and be Ok with the conversation.
So I hope I didn’t make so many mistakes.
Can you share some tips with the audience after you performed that speaking exam?
The biggest tip is shouldn’t be nervous.
This is very hard advice because when you’re nervous, you’re just nervous.
I think maybe you just breath and smile more and try to think the teacher is your friend.
Once you can feel that he is your friend, and now you guys are just having a conversation, like normal friend.
Then I think you can do better.
The second tip maybe you shouldn’t think too much about what you’re talking, like me.
Sometimes I keep thinking about what I’m talking and I realize “Oh, I make this mistake and this word is wrong”.
I think we shouldn’t do that.
We should just feel free to talk and just talk.
I think when you’re confident, and when the teacher feels you’re confident, he will give you high score.
Yeah, when the teacher feels that you’re confident, he’ll give you a high score.
I think she is quite right.
I think being confident will allow her to just keep on talking and not worry about the mistakes that she made.
I think she’s right in that regard.
Although I would say and I do say to a lot of my students that if you have nerve, that can be the advantage as well.
She’s right. It’s not a normal conversation.
You really have to show off all the range in your vocabulary and grammar that you have.
You do have to be aware that you’re aiming to show the examiner that your awareness of the past and the present, the future tenses, conditionals, relative clauses, idioms.
When I was in university, I did feel a lot of stress before my exam, but it was this nervous energy, which I think helped me to write faster.
I think it’s actually quite useful, but you need to harness that energy.
Absolutely.
Now that you mention writing, I think it’s the perfect transition to our WRITING section.
And guys, today our writing section is going to be on coherence and cohesion.
Take a look at the following clip and we’ll talk more about the writing section.
So Oliver, when it comes to writing coherently and cohesively, they’re very important to write the linking devices.
Tell us a little bit more about how to link.
In task one and task two, both of the tasks, linking words are very important.
I think in term of coherence and cohesion, there’re a few different factors we need to think about.
First of all, the linking words like however, as result, consequently.
Then we need to have a wide range of cause and effect language.
For example, “one possible consequence of this is that”, “another possible result might be that”.
Generally, higher scoring students will tend to use larger phrases.
So instead of using phrases like “firstly, secondly, thirdly”, they use thing like “the most important point is”, “one of the most significant advantages of X is”, “another significant benefit is that”.
Another things that the examiner are really looking forward is referencing.
This is to avoid your writing to be repetitive.
If you repeat the same thing all the way through your essay, then you’re not showing a range of language.
So it’s a good idea for students to become very comfortable with using referencing.
When you have a subject in one sentence, in the next sentence you refer to it using things like this idea, this problem, these issues, those people who are affected by this.
This, those, that are kind of referencing.
Some really good writing tips.
Let’s go on to the next section, which is the VOICE OF THE WEEK section.
For this week’s VOICE OF THE WEEK section, the person’s going to be talking about a piece of TV show that they really enjoy.
Alright, so let’s take a look.
So, the moment I read the question, the first thing that crossed my mind was the news about the historic visit of President Barack Obama to Viet Nam.
I first heard the news when I was having lunch with my family together.
And I heard the news broadcaster mention on TV that he was to pay an official three-day visit to Viet Nam
And I have to say that every single member of my family was so excited.
We were also very curious about what he would do or where he would go, what food he would eat in Viet Nam.
Even my grandmother was so very interested. And I think there are many reasons why this news was considered to be so too terrific and so positive to all Vietnamese people.
Firstly, I think we were very hopeful that President Obama’s visit would shape a new promising future between the two countries.
And we were also expecting our economy to thrive and we were also expecting a lot of collaboration in the area of national defense, education and health services.
And I think another reason why the news was so good to me was that President Obama is a man of virtue himself.
He has set a lot of shining example of modesty, good parenting, of happy marriage and you know, proficient country leadership.
So I think, when he visits my country, there would definitely be a lot of lessons to be learnt, and he would probably motivate or encourage young people in my country to act differently.
OK, so I think that is the reason why so many people, including me, were so interested in the news.
Yes, he talked about President Obama’s visit to Vietnam.
I follow that with great interest.
Me too, it’s been covered widely.
What do you think of that delivery?
I mean he’s got a few pauses at the beginning when he’s thinking about the content of what he’s saying.
That’s really not a problem.
Overally, his delivery I would say it’s pretty much like an native English speaker.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he used to live in another country for a year or two, because his way of speaking is quite natural and his range of vocabulary is unusually wide.
Thanks so much Oliver for spending the time with us for this episode on television.
Thank you so much.
To sum up, can you maybe tell our audience some of the good idioms and vocabulary to use for these television topic?
Well, I think one that might be appropriate for me and perhaps to you is “to love being in the limelight”.
Or maybe “to hate being in the limelight”.
It means being famous or being well-known.
Another, one more idiom that we can use is perhaps “sweep thing under the carpet”, which mean to hide an issue.
For example climate change, the destruction of the ecosystem, these things are harder to sweep under the carpet, television makes us more aware of the issue.
Thank you for all that very useful tips and useful vocabulary and phrases.
Guys, if you go away and you cannot remember a lot, just remember the phrases that Oliver had said.
To sweep things under the carpet.
As well as to love or to hate being in the limelight.
Good one!
Alright, thanks so much Oliver for coming on.
Guys, every week we always remind you to do one thing, do you remember what it is?
As always for every week, you know, we always remind you to take a video. We always remind you to use social media, use Youtube, use Facebook, to send us your video so that you can feature on the VOICE OF THE WEEK section.
So for next week, we hope to go through all the videos and feature you again.
Are you glad that today you have a chance to explore what it really is like in the television industry?
There’s another thing I want to share with you actually.
Television industry is not as glamorous as it looks on TV.
Within all the glamour and the limelight on the stage, there’re also a lot of hard word and a lot of people that are involved.
Television itself is really hard work.
I think this is something that the greatest thing about television, because it’s the communication platform but it’s also a hard-working platform.
Until next time, I hope that you take away a little snippet of television to use in that IELTS exam.
We’ll see you again soon. Ciao.