deas. So the two things, the two primary things that a conclusion is, is it's a summary of your main ideas. And it's a clear statement of what you think about the question, your opinion, or another way to say your position. So the conclusion is your position plus a summary of your main ideas. Read any academic paper, any academic journal, and you'll be able to find the main points in the introduction and the conclusion. The best advice that I ever received from a teacher was from my old high school science teacher. And he used to give us, he was an amazing teacher, and he was always pushing us to go further and to learn more. And he's a very inspirational guy and taught me a lot about science and about teaching. And he used to give us university level, academic, scientific, academic journals. And we would look at them and say, like, oh, these are like thousands and thousands of words long. How will we ever learn this? His name was Mr. Rafferty. And he said, easy. What you do is you read the introduction, then skip everything else, and then just read the conclusion. By reading the introduction and the conclusion, you will understand everything in that journal article, because that is where everything is summarized and stated, and everything is very clear and easy to understand, and you don't need to read the rest of it. And that was the best advice I ever got, because it meant that I did really well in university, because when I looked at journal articles, I would just read the introduction, read the conclusion, and it was very easy for me to understand everything in it. This is why you need to write a good introduction and conclusion, because that's what they're supposed to do. They're supposed to, the introduction is, hello, Mr. Reader, Mrs. Reader, this is what we're going to discuss, conclusion, hello, Mrs. Reader, Mr. Reader, this is what I just discussed, a summary of everything. But there's no opinion, so many of you might be asking, like we didn't do opinion questions, we just did double questions. So if you think about it, every single question on the IELTS Reading Task 2 paper is asking for your opinion, asking for your position on something. Let's think about this for a second. Imagine you get a question that says, what are the advantages and disadvantages? What they're asking you is asking you, what do you think, what do you think the advantages are, what do you think the disadvantages are? In other words, what is your opinion on the advantages and disadvantages? If they ask you, what are the problems and solutions? What they're asking you is, what do you think are the problems? What do you think are the solutions? So every single question might not be asking you for your opinion, so asking you, in my opinion, I think this, by stating what you think the advantages and disadvantages, problems and solutions, answering the double questions, you're stating what you think about something, and that's what you need to do in your conclusion. If you got a double question like this, why is this? That's asking for your opinion. Is it a positive or negative development? That's asking for your opinion. It's asking for your position on, do you think this is a positive or negative development? So once you start to understand that, the questions become much easier and more straightforward. So there's three elements to a good conclusion. A cohesive device, which is a linking word, your opinion, in other words, your position, what you think about the question or questions, and a summary of your main ideas. That's all it is. Okay, so let's look at each of these elements in more detail. Cohesive device. You're only going to write one conclusion in your IELTS writing test. So learn just one way to start your conclusion. Some students that I work with say, can you give me 10 different ways to start a conclusion? It's like, why? Why? That would be a complete waste of your time and waste of, your brain can only store a certain amount of information. You're only going to write one conclusion. So just learn one or two ways to start your conclusion. And those are in conclusion to conclude. You don't get any extra marks for writing anything fancier than that. So why would you learn 10 or 12 different ways to write, you know, in conclusion? Also, don't ask me in the comments, how about this way? Or how about this way? Or can we do it this way? Can we do it that way? The reason why I'm saying don't do that is you only have a certain amount of time before you start writing your test. The clock is ticking between now and you doing your test. Don't waste time on things that don't matter. The other 10 ways that you can start your conclusion do not matter. Just focus on what actually matters and ignore all the things that do not matter. And that will mean that you're spending all your time focusing on things that will actually improve your score. And you're not wasting your time on anything else. Now you're going to reiterate your opinion. Reiterate means state again, because you've already stated your position or your opinion in the introduction. Now you're going to state it again. Number one, do not worry about repetition. Many of you have been saying to me over and over and over again, my teacher says you can't repeat anything. My teacher says you can't repeat anything. Okay, if they say that to you, number one, say why does Chris get all these really, really high marks? Are they fake? Is he lying to us? Or maybe you have not understood the official marking criteria. This is the official marking criteria. This is what the examiners use in every single country in every single sentence or center, sorry. And what does it say here? Presents a clear position throughout the response, throughout. Presents a clear position in other words, opinion throughout the response. So not just in one place throughout the response. So maybe your teacher is correct and I'm wrong and the official IELTS marking criteria is wrong. I'll let you decide which one is who is correct and who's not correct. So paraphrasing, do not worry about repeating your main ideas again, but this does not mean that you can copy the same word. So you have already stated your position in the introduction. If you don't understand this, go back and look at the introduction module, the introduction video. So we take our main ideas from the introduction and we paraphrase them. This makes it extremely simple to write a conclusion and ensures that your position is clear throughout the whole essay. And again, some of you might be saying, but I don't know how to paraphrase. If you don't know how to paraphrase yet, you're not ready to get the score that you really want yet. You will get there eventually. But saying, you know, I want a high IELTS score, but I don't want to paraphrase. You know, it's like me saying I want to buy a Ferrari, but I don't want to spend any money. You know, what you want and the price that you have to pay, you have to pay a price for everything you want. That price could be money. Like if I want a Ferrari, I have to pay money. For you guys, what you want is a high IELTS score. The price that you have to pay is work and effort and sometimes money by seeking out someone who can show you exactly what to do. There's a price to be paid for everything. Summary of main ideas. Someone should be able to read your conclusion only and tell you what your main ideas are. So somebody should be able to look at your writing, your essay, ignore the introduction, ignore the main body paragraphs and just focus on the conclusion and tell you exactly what you just wrote about. Exactly what your main points are. Exactly what your whole essay is about. Again, don't worry about repeating your main ideas, but you just paraphrase. You must paraphrase. This will make the conclusion easy to write and ensure you summarize your main ideas. So here's a demonstration of that. Okay, so here is my introduction. Robotics increasingly play a role both in the home and the workplace. So that was the question being paraphrased. Okay, that was the very first sentence. This is occurring because of advancements in technology. So that is my opinion plus my main idea. This is occurring because of advancements in technology. That's my position on the first question. And that's my main idea also. And it should be seen as a positive development. That is my opinion, because it reduces a person's workload. That's my main idea. So what the question is about my position on it, my main ideas are all in the introduction. Now we need to just take this and we need to create a conclusion. Let's see how we've done this. In conclusion, machines carry out tasks for us due to the fact that engineers and computer scientists are pushing the boundaries of science and engineering. And these innovations should be welcomed because they emancipate humankind from routine toil. I used a lot of really high level vocabulary in there, guys, because many of you were asking for this and saying that the stuff that I was writing was too simple. The reason why another reason why I don't use like really, really, really high level vocabulary is it makes it really difficult for you guys to understand it. Many of you might be looking at this and going like routine toil emancipate. What does that mean? I mean, this is way beyond a bad line. You do not need to use vocabulary at this level. But for you guys that are complaining that my work is too simple, there you go. Always check the question again. So you should be going back to the question. You should be thinking about the question. You should be thinking about your introduction. Does it match up? Does it answer the question? Then your conclusion, okay, does it match up with the question? Does it match up with the introduction? Does it mean the same thing? And then you're done. Remember, the examiner should be able to look at your conclusion only and understand that you've understood the question, that you have a clear position and what your main ideas are to support that position. Do that and you'll write an excellent conclusion. But that's not the end of your journey. You need to proofread. Why do you need to proofread? Number one, everyone makes mistakes, guys. Everyone. I, every single time I write an essay, I make mistakes. Every single time I do a lesson like this one, I make mistakes. I have to proofread it. Every single person on planet Earth has to proofread. So if, you know, if Oxford professors or Cambridge professors need to proofread, then you probably need to do that too. I make crucial errors every single time I write something. You make multiple crucial errors in multiple sentences every time you write. This is not a, oh, I'll do this if I have time. This is not an option. It's an absolute necessity. You need to do this if you're going to get a high score. So how to proofread? You should proofread three times. Once at the end of each sentence, then once again at the end of each paragraph, and then once again at the end of each essay. So when you write your sentence, full stop, read it, is it grammatically correct? Is the vocabulary correct? That's what you should be asking yourself. We're going to talk about all the other things you need to worry about at the end. That's what you should be thinking about. Then once you finish your paragraph, skip a line and look back at your paragraph. How is my grammar? How is my vocabulary? Does it make sense? Then at the end of your whole essay, read it all again, check it all again. So many of you might be thinking, I don't have time to do this, Chris. I barely get, you said that I have to plan everything, then write everything, then check everything, then proofread at the end. I just don't have time to do this. Unless you have time to do this, you won't be able to get the score you need. You're not going to be able to do this through time management tips or time management techniques or anything like that. Have a look at this. Look at the guys behind you saying Bolt. Look at how bad these guys are at time management. So do these guys need time management tips or do they need to run a bit faster? This is exactly like, this is someone getting a band nine and this is everybody getting six, six point five. You do not need to work on your time management. You need to work on your grammar, your vocabulary, your task response, your coherency, your cohesion. You need to work on task one, you need to work on task two, you need to work on introductions, main body paragraphs, conclusions, planning, proofreading, all of these things. Once you master all of these things, you'll be like Usain Bolt. Until you master all those things, you'll be like these guys, struggling to catch up. Is this impossible? No, it's not impossible. As you've seen all the results that I just showed you, every single one of those people that are celebrating today, because they got the results that they needed, all of those people were in exactly the same position as you are today. They had the same fears, they had the same doubts, but the difference between them and all of the people today who failed is they actually took action and improved themselves. So how are you going to proofread? As with everything I teach, you should be thinking of one thing and one thing only. What does the examiner want? You should only be looking for mistakes that the examiner will pick up on. As with everything I teach, you should also be thinking strategically, focus on your areas of weakness and get proper feedback on your work. So we've had lots of students over the years and every student is different. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Some students might really need work on articles, another on prepositions, another on tenses, another on vocabulary collocations, another on spelling, another on introductions, and any combination of those things. Becoming aware of the main reasons why you are getting 6 or 6.5 and not getting the score that you need is the most important first step to proofreading your essay. Because if you don't understand those things, you don't really know what you're looking for. If you have an expert giving you feedback on your writing, you know the things because they'll constantly, like when I send back essays to our VIP students, it's just a sea of red. They just see red everywhere, you know, fix this, do this, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong. And that's not me being overly critical, it's just to be honest with them and open with them and show them these are the things you need to improve. And then when they're in the real exam, they'll be looking out for those things. So here are some of the things that you should be looking at when you're proofreading.  Did you answer the question? Is your message clear? How you answered the question? What you think about the question? Your position? Is it clear? Are your points consistent? In other words, does your introduction, main body, paragraphs, and conclusions, do they match up? Is your position clear throughout the essay? Did you develop your main ideas or do you just have lots of ideas that are undeveloped? How's your grammar range and accuracy? How's your vocabulary range and accuracy? How did you use cohesive devices? How's your paragraphing? These are just some of the things that you should be thinking about. These things should be at the top of your mind. So what you're actually thinking about when you're preparing, when you're practicing, when you're planning, when you're writing, when you're proofreading.  And you do that by starting today, by preparing properly. And then when you're practicing, think about your weaknesses. When you're planning on exam day, think about the things that you need to do. When you're writing, think about what, how do I give the examiner exactly what he or she wants? And then when you're proofreading, your proofreading is easy, guys, because you're just looking at it and going, okay, just checking off of I know that I prepared properly and I practiced and I've got feedback on my work. And I know exactly what to do.  All right, guys, so this is your turn to put into practice everything you've learned this week. Artificial Intelligence will soon replace teachers in the classroom. Do you agree with this statement? What is an alternative to traditional face-to-face teaching? Write the whole essay using everything you've learned to write a band seven essay. Hello and welcome to the final lesson of IELTS essay builder. Well done for making it this far. And what we're going to do is give you your final feedback and do this through a live demo. So what we're going to do is I'm going to do a full demo lesson. So what I'll do is I'll share my screen and I will do the question myself. And what I'll do is I will take you through how I would think about the question, how I would think about writing it and write it live on the screen for you. So this will bring together all of the things that we have learned throughout this course and so that you can learn from it and compare your own writing and compare your own thinking. Also, what we'll do is we'll talk about how to take things to the next level. We do have a very small number of places available on our VIP course and I'll tell you a little bit about that at the end of this video. Okay, so hopefully you can see this. This is a document on Google Docs. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at the question that you have already attempted and I haven't looked at it. I haven't prepared an answer or anything like that. And I'm going to just do it as if I was a student and doing the test. Obviously, I have to talk you through it and because you can't read my thoughts. But I'll try and talk as much as I can about how I'm thinking about the question and as I write it. Now, because I'm doing it live, I will make small mistakes and that's all part of the process and I'll go and edit it at the end and as you would do in the real exam. Now, let's start. So the first thing we need to do is we need to understand the question. So artificial intelligence will soon replace teachers in the classroom. So artificial intelligence, AI, deep learning, computer learning, whatever way you want to put it, will replace teachers in the classroom. So this is going to understand this. I need to think about teachers and education. So what we're going to have is we're not going to have teachers. Instead, we're going to have artificial intelligence. So students will be learning by looking at computers or speaking to an AI robot or something like that. And it will be in the classroom. So I understand that and that's going to be in the near future. So it hasn't happened yet, but it will be in the near future. So in the test, the first thing I would do is just sit calmly and I'm not trying to think of any ideas or not trying to think of how to answer the question at all. Do one thing at a time and just think about what this means. Because if you don't understand what it means, then you're not going to be able to answer the question. Next thing I do is I would look at the type of question it is. So we have two clear questions here. So it's a double question. So I understand what that one is. So what I would do now is I would just separate this side. Most people are not good at multitasking. And what you want to do is give each question just total focus. So I'm going to ignore this question for the time being. And I'm just going to look at this one. So do you agree with this statement? So there's only two possible answers to this. Again, as I always say, keep it simple. There's only two possible answers. Yes, artificial intelligence will soon replace teachers in the classroom or no, they won't. Now, you could give your personal opinion. But the best way to answer this is just which one can I easily write about? Which one is the easiest to think of an idea, explain that idea, and to support with an argument and support with evidence. And I think the easiest one, because it's the near future, you're not talking about 100 years. No, I don't think that they will replace teachers. The reason for that is I can think of, you know, immediately two or three really good reasons why they won't. And I can think I can explain that and I can support that with evidence. So I'm going to think no for this one. So what I need to do now is think of an idea. So I would just think, if I imagine I'm sitting with a friend, and they said to me, do you think that artificial intelligence will soon replace teachers in the classroom? No, so why would I think that? What would what would be the first reason to pop into my head? Another way to think about it would be if this question was asked, if 100 people were asked this question, just randomly, what would be the most common reason? And I'd say them, there'd be two most common reasons would be teachers are needed for support. So that's things like feedback, discipline, things like that. So a computer can't really provide feedback, can't really get control children, especially young children. So that would be idea one. An alternative idea would be AI is not advanced enough. AI just isn't smart enough yet to really teach children or teach anybody. It's not just children. So I was talking about the classroom, but I'd alter in the classroom too, so it wouldn't just hone in on children. So what I'd do here is kind of put these together and put AI is not advanced enough to provide to educate. And I'll just put some ideas here, because remember, it's just the ideas phase. We haven't begun writing yet. And obviously, you wouldn't take this amount of time. I'm explaining this and talking through it. And in the real test, I would do this in one or two minutes. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep that one. How would I explain this? So a teacher needs to give feedback and support and discipline. Again, just very basic notes. I know that that's not grammatically correct or anything like that. It's just just doing quick notes. I think example I would use for this would be Google Translate. So if you look at Google Translate, it has two major flaws. The first major flaw would be it's not very good at translating language, demonstrating that AI is not advanced enough. The other thing is that a program like Google Translate obviously can't identify strengths and weaknesses, provide practice, things like that. So this is a very an example of AI, an example of a computer program that is a tool that is involved in education, but it's just not there yet. Maybe in 20 years it will be, but not there. So we already have the bones of the structure of an argument here. You wouldn't go into too much detail, just very brief notes. And then what you would do is just stop thinking about this one and move on to the next one. And again, it's taken me, I don't know how long to do that, but in the real test it would be a minute or two just to note down these things. So what is an alternative to traditional face-to-face teaching? So the idea that will pop into my head would be an online course, because I run an online course, but online course, a teacher can remotely do all of the things that a regular teacher can also do, also access to the best teachers in the world. In your local area you might not have access to really good teachers, but if you're using an online course normally you could have access to literally the best teacher in the world, and they could be on the other side of the planet. Example, so a lot of the best universities in the world have online courses now, where they record the lectures and they put them online and then they provide individual classes and practice activities and all of these different things. So already I have, this is my paragraph. So to check back, always check back to the question. So this is good. Do you agree? No I don't. Here's my reason. What is an alternative? Here's my alternative. Here's an explanation about why, you know, why is it a good alternative? And then an example here. I could use my own course, but I'm not going to. Okay so this is my argument. Now what you could do now is you could do a full, let me just, obviously you won't be able to color code in the real test, but just, it'll make it easier for you to understand this. Main body paragraph one, let's put soft, I'm not going to get into an argument about what soft skills are, but just for the sake of in the test, if I know, if just to encapsulate what that is. And let's put the main body to my courses. That could be two separate ideas and two separate explanations. What I tend to do when I'm planning stuff out is I don't really delete stuff. If I have a couple of ideas or a couple of explanations or a few different examples, I normally just keep them in here so that that gives me the freedom when I'm just in case I do use that, because when you start writing ideas pop into your head and you can go in different directions. So it's good to just have a few different options here. Conclusion, summary of above. So what this does, so now we have our complete plan. And what this does in the real test is, it allows us to be certain about what we're doing. Because if you don't have a plan, you don't know where you're going.  And the same is true for this. Like someone with a very, very high level of English who just starts writing without any plan might not do as well as someone who is more organized and has the plan down. Because what happens is you start to write without a plan and then you change direction and you get lost and then you have to start again and time is running out and you're in all sorts of trouble. So doing something like this. And again, in the real test, this would take me, you know, just a few minutes, but it is an investment of time. We know exactly what to do now. Okay, so now we're ready to start. When you are paraphrasing, always have this with you. So normally, you wouldn't just abbreviate words, like I've shortened artificial intelligence to AI, you know, let's say, FBI, everyone knows that that's the Federal Bureau of Investigation CIA, everyone knows that's the Central Intelligence Agency. If it's commonly known, everybody knows that AI means artificial intelligence. So if it's a common thing, then that's no problem. But you couldn't, you know, replace, replace teachers with RT, like that's not commonly known, BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation, you know, you can do that. And so just be careful with shortening stuff. But for this, for the purposes of this, this is fine. So AI could so AI artificial intelligence could take the place of will soon replace could take the place of teachers, I'm going to keep teachers. Because in the test, what might happen is when you're paraphrasing, you might be like, teachers, teachers, teachers, I can't think of anything. Oh, I can't think of it. And then you're wasting time and then you panic, like if you have to replace one word, or you can't replace one word, that's no problem. They're not going to mark you down for that in the near future will soon replace will soon in the near future. So that's fine. I'm happy enough with that. Also, students get so obsessed with not repeating words. For key words that have no that have no or very limited ways of changing them. It is fine if you do repeat them, you should change them as much as possible. But only as much as possible, there's just there's a limited number of ways that you can change teachers, teachers, you could have educators, education, you know, people that teach things like that. And we'll try and do that as much as possible. But remember the purpose of the test, the purpose of the test is to assess whether you can clearly communicate in English through writing an essay.   So let's remind ourselves of the question. Do you agree with this statement? So this essay. This agrees with this statement. Because computers, which is kind of a catch all term for AI are not advanced enough yet. And second question. Always refer back as students can effectively use online courses. So what you want to do is you want to instead of immediately jumping into the next paragraph, read this and make sure that it makes sense. There's no mistakes. You're going to make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. I'm doing this live. I will probably make a series of mistakes. AI could take the place of teachers in the near future. Many believe that this essay disagrees with this statement because computers are not advanced enough yet. Students can effectively use online courses instead of attending class. Very clear. If you gave that to someone, they would know exactly what I thought about that. Two very clear reasons. Okay, so computer learning is not at the stage where it can do the job of an effective educator. Okay, so I'm saying that they're not advanced enough yet. Exactly what I said up here. And this is so we need to explain that this is because students require is because students require many things that a computer cannot provide, such as feedback, emotional support, and assessment. These soft skills the teachers have are absolutely essential for the proper education of a child or adult. There is no computer program that can compete with human beings. And there is no computer program that can compete with human beings at this level. Let's read this. Computer learning is not at the stage yet where it can do the job of an effective educator. This is because students require many things that a computer cannot provide such as feedback, emotional support, and assessment. These soft skills are absolutely essential for proper education of a child or adult. And there is no computer program that compete with human beings in these areas. Okay, for example, so I'm not going to use, I know up here we put translate, but just as I was writing, I was thinking of a better example that is linked to this because we want to link all this together with the example. And that's Grammarly. Grammarly, you can check it out. It's a tool that checks your English checks your grammar. But it has some major weaknesses. So that's so it's perfect for this. For example, Grammarly is a program, an application that can check for grammar errors, but it falls short for English learners because it cannot tell someone what their main weaknesses are or explain why the mistake was made or how it can be fixed. So for example, Grammarly is an application that can check for grammar errors, but it falls short for English learners because it cannot tell someone what their main weaknesses are or explain why the mistake was made or how it can be fixed. Okay. So I'm happy enough with that and we can move on to the next one. Alternative. Check back here. However, online courses can be used by teachers to improve lessons. Okay, so just explaining how to do online courses make education better. So compare IELTS is a really good example. Compare your local IELTS teacher who maybe doesn't know much about IELTS, but is working out of their local school and compare that with the very best in their fields who can record lessons and through things like Skype, provide interactive feedback or through online course platforms, provide practice activities and it just enhances the whole experience. For example, the very best universities in the world and I offer online learning platforms that allow anyone in the world to learn to enjoy their courses for free and also have the option of having feedback sessions with their tutors through Skype. Okay, let's have a read of this. However, online courses can be used by teachers to improve lessons. That is to say that they can enhance their ability to teach by using technology. This allows the very best in their field to reach anyone in the world to record their lessons and provide interactive feedback. For instance, the very best universities in the world named IELTS for online learning platforms that allow anyone to enjoy their courses for free and also have the option to of having feedback sessions with their tutors through Skype. I want to link it back to the question a little bit. This does not replace the teacher but makes them even effective and available to pupils. So I'm happy enough for that and I can do the conclusion. So the conclusion what I'm going to do is look up here at the introduction and I'm just going to paraphrase this. Although Neural they've not reached the point where they can educate on effective level due to lacking pedagogical is a fancy word for education. So although Neural Networks have made great strides in the past number of years they have not reached the point where they can educate at an effective level due to lacking however teachers I know I've repeated teachers many times I'll explain this in a second however teachers can never probably repeated technology as well don't be freaking out don't be like many people do teachers can use technology. Okay so I mentioned vocabulary there and repeating words so what I find with both students and myself is often you'll get to the end or even in the beginning or it doesn't matter where but particularly at the end you'll get and you'll be like oh I've used this word so many times or I've used this word so many times and it actually stops you thinking and writing and what you need to do is you need to write you need to think you need to get the answer on the paper. So a lot of people think that it is a vocabulary test instead of a writing test so it's better to repeat some words and then what you can do is you can go back and look and see you know have I repeated these words is there any way that I can vary them at the end because it's very very difficult to think of vocabulary writing ideas all of these different things at the same time um it's better just to focus on one thing at a time so I need to read this although neural networks have made great strides in the past number of years they have not reached the point where they can educate on an effective level due to lacking pedagogical skills however teachers can use these tools particularly online courses to enhance their teaching and help even more people learn so now what I need to do is I need to read the whole thing again to check grammar to check vocabulary to check all of these different things so let's read that many believe that AI could take the place of teachers in the near future this essay disagrees with this statement because computers are not advanced enough yet students can effectively use online courses okay computer learning is not at the stage yet where it can do the job but of an effective educator this is because students require many things that a computer cannot provide such as feedback emotional support and assessment these soft skills are absolutely essential for the proper education of a child or adult and there's no computer program that can compete with human beings in these areas for example grammarly is an application that can check grammar is but a fall short for English learners because it cannot tell someone what their main weaknesses are or explain why the mistake was made or how it can be fixed however online courses can be used by teachers to improve lessons that is to say that they can enhance their ability to teach by using technology but this technology because we're referring to online courses this allows the very best in their field to reach anyone in the world record their lessons and provide interactive feedback for example the very best universities in the world let me hover now for online learning platforms allow anyone to join their courses for free let's say lectures and also have the option of having feedback sessions with their tutors through skype this does not replace the teacher but makes them even more effective and available to a wider audience although neural networks have made great strides in the past number of years they have not reached the point where they can educate on an effective level due to lacking pedagogical skills however teachers can use okay so now what you can do is you can go through and see if there are any ways that you can improve the vocabulary a little bit so what you do is just check see if there are any words so teachers change that one to lecture because we're talking about universities teacher and you're not going to have time to really spend an hour thinking about different ways to write teachers instructors just to keep to keep the vocabulary Nazis happy online courses we did put a let's put distance learning and there's no other way of saying that there's no without getting really contrived so here we have computer computer one thing is to remember that you shouldn't just look and see computer computer you've you should look at the collocation so computer learning computer program that wouldn't be considered repeating that so don't worry computers plural form of it you know so don't worry about that you can drive yourself crazy with this and really mess your whole essay up by changing things in a way that's just wrong feedback feedback sessions change that to evaluation changes to comfort so i'm happy enough with that and and if you had time you would give it one last check you know for any little grammar errors or anything like that and but what you would do is use that checklist and that i gave you in the previous lesson to think about your own essay don't look at your own essay and be like oh i can never use grammar or i can never use vocabulary the way chris does or anything i'm a native english speaker i was lucky enough to be born in an english speaking country and it's also my job to teach english so you know don't think that you because your vocabulary is not as advanced as mine don't think you're going to fail you only probably need a band seven and which is much lower than on the level of this essay and so don't worry about compare don't make too many comparisons and also don't worry if your ideas weren't exactly the same you can use different ideas what you want to be doing is thinking about the core things so did you paraphrase effectively is your introduction effective is your main body paragraph effective if your is your other one effective is your conclusion effective is your grammar as accurate as it can be is your vocabulary as accurate as it can be it are your main ideas clear i'm well developed i have you clearly answered the question and if you can answer those those questions and then you'll be absolutely fine and way above what most people are and but you probably need a little bit of extra help and let's talk about that now so taking things to the next level so if you need help with more help with writing help with task one test help with the other types of questions you need help with speaking reading listening anything you need is included in the most successful online or offline course in the world we have helped more students get the scores they need than anyone else in the world whether that's an offline or online course does it actually work well let me show you something so no other course in the world has this number of successful students we are not saying that we are the best in the world what we do is just ask people to judge us on our results and more importantly our student results as you can see here this is just one person after the other all out of seven or above you know if you if you look at these in detail you'll see that it's all life changing stuff here and it's just one happy person after the other and if you consider that we only work with a very very very small number of people the number of happy students is unbelievable and then if you also look here you know a lot of other schools have testimonials no other school has one-on-one interviews with their past students every single one of these videos is a one-on-one interview with a past student all of them talking about how happy they are and how life changing it was to join IELTS VIP so if you're ready to take things to the next level you need to be aware of a few things we only allow a very very small number of people to join our course it's a VIP course we're going to give you VIP treatment we cannot give that VIP treatment to everybody because it's just impossible to do that so we only work with a very small number of people and we have to keep numbers low to keep standards high and you've seen this week what happens when we don't so what's the difference between this like mini course this essay builder course and the VIP course so this essay builder course was good it's kind of like a tuk-tuk it'll get you to where you're going but it's not obviously a Rolls Royce VIP course is the Rolls Royce of IELTS courses it's going to take you by the hand and show you exactly what you need to do in order to get the scores that you need so what now so you can join here we have a few places available that you can join immediately but you can only join at this link this is a special link just for you if you go to other links you will not be able to join it's closed to the general public so if you go to IELTSadvantage.com slash VIP Academy you will be able to get in today if you have any questions you can email me Chris at IELTSAdvantage.com and either myself or one of my team will get back to you but go and have a look at this link we'll also email it to you there's a video telling you everything you need to know about what's included and how to join and pricing and all of those different things go to that link and then if you have any questions feel free to email me so now you know how to improve your task to writing and we're going to move on to speaking and help you with that but one of the biggest challenges that students have when it comes to speaking is where to find real genuine questions and how to use those questions at home for free to improve their speaking that's exactly what we're going to give you we're going to give you more than a thousand real IELTS speaking practice questions and show you how to improve your speaking at home for free without paying for a course or a teacher so without further ado here's how to find those questions I'm going to give you hundreds of real IELTS speaking questions but I'm not just going to do that I want to improve your scores not just give you a bunch of questions band nine speaking students and we work with hundreds of them use questions very differently from students who struggle with the test so we're going to give you three things on top of giving you all of these questions number one I'm going to show you what band nine students do not do with speaking questions there are some key differences between what they do and what they don't do so first of all we're going to go through the don'ts then we're going to show you how students actually do use these speaking questions to practice and improve and get the score that they need then finally I'm going to share a VIP strategy with you this is a strategy that we give our VIP students that uses AI to allow them to practice their speaking questions at home and actually get feedback for free so you can not only use these real questions practice and get feedback all of this is 100% free but we're not just going to give you a link so that you can go and look at the questions because that is not going to help you improve your scores you have to watch the whole video to get access to the questions so without further ado let's get into it let's start off with the don'ts these are things that you should not do and these are things that band seven eight and nine students do not do when they're using IELTS speaking questions number one don't get overwhelmed sometimes when we give students hundreds and hundreds of questions they get completely overwhelmed and they think that their job is to analyze and look at and practice every single question and they need to be aware of all the different questions you do not need to do that don't look at hundreds of questions and think that you must have an answer for all of them or be aware of all of them just use them in the way that we're going to show you in this video so important don't get overwhelmed number two don't worry if you see a topic in there that you're not an expert in remember that it is a speaking test it is not a knowledge test or an intelligence test number three you should not try to prepare answers and memorize them and try to improve your speaking score in that way IELTS examiners are trained to spot this and they can easily spot it and what they will do is they will ask you other questions that you are not prepared for and they will base your score on those unprepared questions because IELTS is not a test of memorization because it is testing communication you don't use memorization when you're communicating with people in any language so don't try to prepare answers for any of them number four don't try and anticipate the different topics that come up if you go through all of these you will see that there are no common topics you could be asked about anything so you'll see lots of things online uh by you know youtube videos saying these are the common topics that might come up or here are the predicted topics that might come up this is just to get you to click on those videos none of those are actually real so don't try and do that this is a big one don't compare your performance with so-called band nine students that you find on youtube this is going to damage your confidence and it is also highly misleading now not to bash any other channels and not doing that or not going to mention specific channels but just looking at those you know band nine mock speaking tests or band eight or whatever they are the vast majority of them either are not actually band nine or band eight or the people giving feedback are not real teachers those videos are incredibly popular so what's happening is companies are hiring fake teachers and then hiring models and actresses to make IELTS videos about speaking but none of them are accurate so if you're comparing yourself to those people it's not a fair comparison and if you're watching too many of those videos you might be getting bad advice from unqualified teachers and the last don't is something that a lot of students don't really think about don't take these questions and look constantly for feedback so some students what they do is they'll look at the questions and then they'll ask their teachers or some online services to just constantly do mock speaking tests and constantly do feedback tests with them and give them lots and lots of feedback those things are important you should be practicing you should be getting feedback but the real improvement comes after you get feedback so if a teacher gives you feedback for example on pronunciation or fluency or grammar or vocabulary doing another mock speaking test is not actually going to improve those things at all there is such a thing as too much feedback so don't take these and just do lots and lots and lots of feedback sessions work on improving the things that you need to work on and you're going to see far more improvement if you work on your weaknesses okay let's get into the things that Band 7, 8 and 9 students do when they are using these practice questions okay so Chris here this is how you find the article with all of the practice questions in it I'm going to show you how to access them in three steps so step one what you're going to do is you're going to go to google and you're going to type in IELTS speaking once you have IELTS speaking up in google you're going to scroll through all the different websites and go to IELTS advantage so it might be on the first page it might be on the second page probably be in and around the middle of the first page you're just going to click on IELTS speaking how to get a band 7 or above IELTS advantage you're going to click on that that's step one one of the big things successful students do is they treat each part of the speaking test separately so part one part two and part three are very very different different types of questions different types of answers and the examiners are thinking about different things when they are assessing you so what you should not do is just take some part one questions a part two question some part three questions and then try and answer them all in the same way band seven eight and nine students don't do that keep watching this video but at the end of the video I'll give you some links so that you can understand the differences between the different parts it's very very important number two band eight and nine students understand the marking criteria it is far more important that you use these questions to understand the marking criteria then just to go through all of these questions use the questions to test yourself to practice to think about your performance and think about how are you doing in relation to the marking criteria that's the only thing that matters because that's the only thing that the examiners are thinking about on test day and we'll show you how to do that when we give you the VIP technique at the end number three get your speaking checked at least once by a real IELTS professional now I'm not saying that because I want you to buy our services we're normally completely sold out I'm saying this because it is so easy to spot if you're a real IELTS professional an ex examiner it's so easy to spot little things that the student is doing that will lead to failure and it's so easy to fix these things now many of you don't want to spend any money on this but it is a lot lot cheaper than failing your test and the difference between failing your test and doing a mock speaking test with a real professional is the real test costs a lot more and you get no feedback if you do a mock speaking test with a real professional it's much much cheaper and they are going to give you real actionable feedback you're going to know what's going on what your weaknesses are what your score is and how to improve your score but please be careful most people calling themselves ex examiners are not really ex examiners and your local IELTS teacher who has very little experience and has never been an examiner probably will not give you very good feedback it is better to find a source that you trust that you know that they're real ex examiners and they really know what they're talking about in general the more expensive ones are going to be more reliable the cheaper ones are going to be unreliable we do provide that service but we're normally sold out if you want more information get in touch with us but before you say oh my god he's only making this video to try and make money from us I'm going to show you how you can get real feedback accurate feedback for free at home at zero cost this is the same technique we give our VIP students it is extremely effective but you're going to need a few things so we're going to go through it step by step step two it should bring you to this page on our website IELTS speaking in 2023 this page has a lot of information on it what you're going to do is you're going to scroll down and you're going to keep scrolling you're going to keep scrolling you're going to keep scrolling until you get to IELTS speaking topics now let's go back to the video and I'll show you how to click on the article you need in step three first of all you're going to need practice questions real practice questions we're going to show you how to access those at the end of the video so you've got those the next thing is you're going to need either a phone or a laptop you're going to need some kind of electronic device that will record your voice most laptops most phones will be able to do this please don't ask should you use a laptop or should you use a phone it doesn't matter just pick something that you have that you can use to record your voice the next thing you need to do is download some kind of recording app or program to your phone or to your laptop now all you have to do is go into your app store or google I'm not going to name specific apps because they change all the time and it's so easy for you to just find this yourself the next thing you want to do is sign up for a service that automatically transcribes your voice so let me give you some examples but again these change over time do your own research so on an apple phone in the notes function you can just press the transcribe button and it will transcribe what you say there's also a service that you can use on your computer called otter.ai they have a free version of that software that will record your voice and transcribe it but as I said before do your own research find a tool and you'll be able to get this done but you do need one to record your voice so you can listen back and one to transcribe it there might be some apps out there that do both if there are put it in the comments let people know what you find and help each other okay so that's all the tech setup done next what you're going to do is you're going to pick one part of the test either part one part two or part three don't do a full test just pick one part and focus on one thing at a time so for part one you're going to use about nine questions part two you're only going to use one question and for part three you're going to pick three or four questions make sure that you don't study these questions we want to recreate the real test as much as possible don't look at easy questions and try and prepare answers all right just pick questions from the list don't look at them don't study them just pick them look at each question and answer it as if an examiner is asking you that question so read each question and answer it as if you are in the real test if you mess up don't worry about it this is just practice next i want you to download the official marking criteria i'll put a link below but if you just google speaking marking criteria it should come up on google as well what you're going to do is you're going to listen back and you're going to think about your performance you're going to read the marking criteria and think about which band you should get based on your own performance if you don't understand the marking criteria you don't understand the bands i'll put a link at the end of the video that will show you in more detail what the bands mean as you're listening back think about your biggest weaknesses so if you were you couldn't really answer the questions fluency is an issue if you can't understand anything that you say pronunciation is probably an issue or if you're making lots of vocabulary mistakes or grammar mistakes that's your biggest issue the great thing about this technique is when you're in the real test you're unaware of the mistakes that you are making but when you're listening back and just focusing on your mistakes and focusing on your performance you'll be able to pick out things that you were completely unaware of and you'll be able to fix those things and that takes us on to our next point you're going to look at the transcription whatever service you used that will write out your answers and you're going to analyze that in more detail so the first thing you're going to analyze is did you actually answer the question look at the question look at the transcription did you actually answer the question and did you develop your answer enough you can also analyze your fluency if there are lots of ums and as and pauses in the transcription if you're jumping around a lot then fluency might be an issue for you if the transcription cannot understand most of the words like the words are completely different then that is a pronunciation issue you can also analyze your vocabulary did you repeat too many words are you trying to use words that you don't really understand did you struggle with that topic because of a limited vocabulary and then with grammar what you can do is you can put that transcript into something like Grammarly for example or there are lots of other options and it will highlight all of the grammar mistakes that you made and you'll be able to identify your key grammar mistakes for example if you are using the wrong article before every nine you need to work on articles so this technique is not actually about improving your speaking yet this technique is to give you feedback as I said before feedback doesn't improve your speaking instantly but what you do after does so for example if you look at the transcript and you messed up every article being aware of that is just the first step you're not going to magically improve your speaking by just being aware of that but you will magically improve if you work on those things and some of you watching right now might be thinking well that's a lot of work yes it is but it's a lot less work than going and watching a bunch of tips and tricks videos believing that they're going to help you and then failing the test over and over again and not knowing why that is a lot of work this is actually a lot less stressful because you will be in control and you can do it all for free at home at your own pace again we're here to give you things that are actually going to improve your score not tips and tricks that make you happy so step three you should be here i'll speaking topics you're going to scroll down and you will see a link i'll speaking topics the ultimate guide click on that and it will give you access to all of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of questions that you will need for your speaking practice so now you know where to find all of those practice questions and you know how to practice at home and practice intelligently and strategically and constantly improve while you're practicing your speaking but what is really helpful for students is to understand the difference between the three different parts of the speaking test because each part is asking completely different questions and requires a different strategy so what we've done is we've created a speaking challenge a full speaking course for you and it covers strategies for part one part two and part three and it also shows you how to improve your speaking skills as well not only that we also give you the opportunity to send us your speaking and we will give you free feedback on it so without further ado enjoy the speaking challenge welcome to our speaking challenge over the next three lessons what we intend to do is help you improve your speaking ability to a band seven eight or even nine so let's get going what are we going to do in this challenge so there are three videos and we're going to make it really really simple what we're going to do in video one is focus on part one of the speaking test video two part two of the speaking test and video three part three of the speaking test the examiner is going to be judging your whole performance the totality of your performance so you can't just focus on one part you need to become proficient and be aware of all of the things that you need to do in each part and the thing about IELTS is each part is different they're testing different things different types of questions so we're going to look at each of these individually and then at the end of each video we're going to set you a challenge so there's no point in sitting looking at a video you could look at every single video that's related to IELTS in the world there are thousands and thousands of videos online and on youtube and they're just really the first step you need to do these things so we're going to set you a challenge at the end of these videos to get you to do the things that you have learned in the video and then you're going to improve but not only that we're going to get you to send us your challenges send us your tasks and then we'll give you feedback and you'll be able to improve even more our mission at IELTS Advantage is to help people improve their IELTS scores and we will do everything we can in this short three day or three video challenge to help you improve your speaking scores but if you need anything else if you need help with writing, reading, listening always feel free to just hit reply to any of our emails we respond to every single email that you send us and we'll help you out as much as we can if you have any questions or need help with preparation or anything okay so part one what are we going to do in this lesson we're going to look at what part one is it's really really important that you understand the types of questions being asked what the examiners are going to be thinking about what not to worry about all right in the speaking test it's really important that you only focus on the things that actually matter because if you go into the speaking test and you're worried about all the things that don't matter then that's going to affect your performance it's going to definitely affect your fluency but it could also affect your grammar your vocabulary even your pronunciation so we just want you worrying about the things that you actually need to worry about well look at common mistakes if you can avoid these common mistakes then you're going to do much much better and then we're also going to look at a real student who got a band eight in her her speaking test and show you some good answers and answers that could be improved to really demonstrate what needs to be done and finally we're going to give you that challenge okay so what is part one the most important thing to remember about part one is it is about you they're not going to be asking you questions about general knowledge or abstract ideas they're just going to be asking you questions like your hometown whether you study whether what your job is your likes and dislikes what you do in your free time so the best way to think about this is imagine you started a new job or started a new English class and you met a person for the first time just small talk every day chit chat just getting to know someone and that is all they're going to ask you about now they might throw in a few more unusual questions like I've asked people about their favorite hat or their favorite color and you may have been like what does that got to do with anything they will throw a few strange topics at you to test your ability but I wouldn't worry about that remember that every answer is you talking about you so the important thing is you can't get it wrong it's impossible to get any part one questions wrong because they are asking about you and you know more about you than anybody else this part will last about four to five minutes and they start off with quite easy questions like tell me about your your weekend or what you do in your free time or what your job is or where do you live your neighborhood and these are quite easy questions because they don't want to immediately start with really difficult questions because they want you to warm up and ease into this now that doesn't mean that these questions are not important remember you're being judged on all of your answers in total and so don't think that you can you know ignore these questions or not practice them they are very very important and but it will only last about four to five minutes and the examiner will ask you a range of questions so they definitely will ask you about either your hometown or your job or your studies or your home and then they might ask you a few other questions but remember they're just about you okay so do not worry so think about your brain as a computer so a computer has a cpu it has memory it has ram and what happens when you open up too many tabs or too many programs at the same time your computer slows down it doesn't perform very well your brain is exactly the same if you're going into the test and you're worrying about 20 different things and you're thinking about 20 different things at the same time then your brain is going to slow down your brain powers your mouth which is going to produce the sound produce the words produce the sentences if your brain is not working optimally because there are too many things going on you're not going to perform very well i have worked with students who should have got a band eight should have got a band nine but because their teacher was teaching them lots of things to worry about that they didn't actually have to worry about they only got about 6.5 because they were really it was suffering when it came to their fluency their pronunciation their grammar their vocabulary so here are things not to worry about this might sound really silly you don't have to worry about your clothes i've seen so many um articles online talking about what clothes you should wear what shoes you should wear it doesn't matter they're judging your speaking not your shoes um shoes greetings and the most popular speaking video related to aisles on youtube is how to greet the examiner it has millions and millions of views and it doesn't matter you are not being judged on whether you shake their their hand or what you say to them the the actual test that does not start until the questions begin okay so don't worry about greeting the examiner it doesn't matter what you say to them they don't care they it's like talking to someone at mcdonald's all right all they want to do is serve you and move on to the next person don't worry about the examiner don't worry if the examiner is not friendly it is not their job to be your friend it is not their job to make you happy it is their job to listen to you and to give you an accurate band score some examiners will be friendly some examiners will be very professional not too friendly but not angry with you or not they don't look upset some examiners will look upset or they will look angry it doesn't mean they are angry with you or they are upset with you they maybe just had a long day they are human beings or maybe they're just focusing on your pronunciation your fluency your grammar your vocabulary so often students will students that we work with on our VIP course we work with them very very closely and they would email us after their speaking test and they would say oh god chris i failed my examiner looked very angry it's like don't worry about that it doesn't that doesn't mean anything related to your actual score so talk to the examiner no matter whether they look happy or sad as if you're talking to a friend or a family member just put yourself in that sort of frame of mind hand gestures i use hand gestures all the time some people don't use hand gestures at all it doesn't matter you are not being judged on whether you use your hands or not and so don't worry about that at all eye contact it doesn't matter if you stare at the examiner all the time or you look at your feet it doesn't matter it's the words that come out of your mouth now the examiner is a human being you're a human being so just talk to them like they are a normal human being how would you use eye contact normally how would you use hand gestures normally how would you use body language normally you don't get a score for body language eye contact or hand gestures and any teacher that tells you that you do please just show them the official marking criteria and ask them where it says anything related to these it's nonsense but just use these as you would normally use them so these are things that you do not need to worry about but imagine going into the test and this happens a lot thinking about what body language should i use or my eye contact my hand gestures i hope that the examiner is happy to see me i hope that i greeted them the right way did i say that thing that that girl on youtube told me to say and hire my clothes and my shoes i hope that they are respecting the examiner none of that matters if you're thinking about that you're not going to do very well the only four things that you need to think about are pronunciation fluency and coherence grammar and vocabulary why do you need to only worry about these things because these are the only four things that the examiners are thinking about that's the only thing they are thinking about pronunciation fluency and coherence vocabulary and grammar so if you are totally focused on these things you're going to do really really well if you're focused on any of these things you're wasting your time so most of the things that we will be talking about in this challenge will be related to these four things this is how we teach people we don't look at tips and tricks and hacks and things that don't work we just teach you to give the examiners exactly what they're looking for okay so common mistakes these are things that you need to avoid and if you avoid these in part one you're going to improve your score so this is the most frustrating part not too short not too long i'm sure you're thinking oh like that's really horrible advice not too short not too long why don't you just tell me an exact number of words or an exact number of sentences some teachers will do that but i think that's quite bad advice and because we don't want you to go into the test thinking i need to use three sentences or i need to use four sentences because you're making it more difficult to speak naturally and you should be speaking as naturally as possible now you don't want to give a very short answer because you're not giving the examiner enough to really go on here's an example of a really really short answer oh i'm a student on what subject i'm studying msc marketing so as you can see rashmi didn't give a very long answer and that wasn't incorrect the grammar was fine the vocabulary was fine or pronunciation was fine but you're not giving the examiner enough to judge your performance on like if they said to me what what's your job and i say teacher that's correct i am a teacher but it is not giving the examiner enough to really judge you on for part one you don't want your answer to be too long either why is that well it's the examiner's job to ask you a range of different questions they're going to ask you between like nine and 12 questions so if and they only have like four five minutes to do that and they've got a queue of people outside waiting to come in and do the test and they have to get through all of those people so if your every answer is like two or three minutes long they're going to keep stopping you and stopping you and stopping you and the problem with that is you're going to feel like you've done something wrong you're going to feel a little bit stressed out by that and then that can affect the rest of your performance so again not too short not too long what does that mean don't think about number of sentences just answer the question and then give some extra detail for them to understand your your answer so instead of saying i'm a teacher if they asked me what my job was i would say i'm a teacher and i specialize in teaching IELTS to students online and i do that from my office here in northern Ireland so as you can see I just elaborated a little bit I added a little bit more detail you could add detail you could add an explanation you could add an example just a little bit more to go on don't think of number of sentences just think of answer the question and add a little bit more to help the examiner understand what you're talking about robotic delivery what do I mean by robotic delivery so think about how you speak naturally think about talking to one of your best friends how do you speak to them you imagine they say hey what did you do last weekend I went to the cinema I saw this great movie it was amazing very relaxed very natural delivery you wouldn't say imagine your friend said what did you do last weekend you wouldn't say I went to this cinema I watched a movie it was good you would never do that your would be like are you a robot what what happened to you what this happens all the time and I think it's because students respect the test and maybe respect the examiner and the formality of the situation a little bit and they speak to the examiner like a robot in a very slow robotic way that is not how you would speak to a normal person so why would you speak to an examiner like that so again imagine you were speaking to a friend a colleague a family member how would you talk to them that is going to help you improve your fluency but also it can freeze up your brain and you're you're more relaxed and you can avoid grammar mistakes avoid vocabulary mistakes and your pronunciation will be much smoother as well you'll be easier to understand memorized answers it's very very tempting for part one to try and anticipate some common topics and think okay they're going to ask me about my hometown they're going to ask me about my job they're going to maybe ask me about my home or my hobbies and to write out a very detailed answer with lots of idioms and lots of phrasal verbs and you know some amazing vocabulary and amazing grammar don't do that it is tempting to do that I know why you want to do that but the examiners are trained to spot that they know that you were doing that so if you give like often it will happen where you will ask a student to talk about their hometown and they give this amazing answer where they're talking about the architecture and the history of their town and famous people that used to live there and their favorite place there and it's it's all amazing and the examiners are trained to ignore that answer because they know it's a memorized answer and what they'll do is they will then ask you a more difficult question related to that topic so if they they said tell me about your hometown and you give a memorized answer they'll say things like is it a good place to bring up children and or they'll say what are the transportation links like to the rest of the country from your hometown and it'll be like I wasn't expecting that they're not judging you on your memorized answer they'll judge you on your I wasn't expecting that because that is your real ability it is not a memorization test it is a speaking test so next trying to impress the examiner this doesn't relate just to part one this relates to every single part the examiners are not stupid they are trained professionals who have been trained to spot when you are trying to impress them or trying to show off examples of this are memorizing fancy vocabulary memorizing fancy idioms memorizing fancy grammar memorizing anything in general and trying to regurgitate in the test they're not judging you on what the fancy things that you have memorized they're judging you on your ability to actually speak why do we do the IELTS test we do the IELTS test to test when we move to an English speaking country when we move to Canada or move to Australia or move to America or move to the UK and we meet someone can we talk to them in your job can you talk to them and when you meet them socially can you speak to people normally not trying to impress people with things that you have memorized they're judging you on your ability to naturally speak at your natural level and they are they know how to do that so memorizing things and trying to show off is a complete waste of time they're not judging you on that they're judging you on your ability to talk naturally so part one best practices these are things that you need to focus on these are things that you need to be aware of that you need to practice that you need feedback on and if you do all of these things you will really really improve and you will perform to the best of your ability okay so next one part one best practices natural all right we've already talked about this you're not in a memorization contest just speak to the examiner like they're a friend they're a colleague and speak as naturally as possible give reasons or give explanations or give examples or give extra detail that is going to help you develop your answer so instead of saying what do you do at the weekend I went to the cinema which which cinema did you go to why did you go there which movie did you see what did you think of that movie what was the character like who did you go with you don't have to answer all of those questions but those are just some examples that you could use to help you develop your answer by giving reasons by giving extra detail so you're not being judged just on fluency you're also being judged on coherence so what does coherence mean well for the purposes of the speaking test coherence means did you actually answer the question so if they asked you about what did you do last weekend tell them what you did last weekend not what you're going to do next weekend or what you had for dinner last night like you need to actually answer the question that might sound really obvious and really straightforward and Chris why are you telling us that you would not believe the number of students who memorize a bunch of answers and then try and fit their answer that they have memorized to suit the question don't do that just answer the question that they've asked how do you do that literally answer the question and then develop your answer you'll always answer the question if you follow that if already talked about this develop your answer by giving explanations giving examples giving extra detail and talk about things specifically all right when they ask you about a specific thing don't talk generally about that topic actually answer the question that they're talking about so if they ask you for example but your hometown is it a good place to bring up children don't talk about you know oh the architecture from 1789 and the history and the founding father that's not what they asked you all right they asked you the specific question answer the specific question and the questions in part one are not difficult so that should be pretty easy to do but people don't do that because they prepare memorized answers give examples and that is going to help you be as fluent as possible and you will become fluent if you practice and you are not worried about all of these things that you don't have to worry about we'll also talk a lot more about fluency in lessons two and three and grammar don't try and use every single tense in the known language and every single grammar structure use the grammar and the tenses that is that are appropriate to use in the circumstances so if they ask you what did you do last weekend you're going to use mostly past simple if they say how has your hometown changed in the last 20 years probably going to be using a mixture of present perfect and past simple if they're asking you how do you think your hometown will change in the future you're going to use will or it is going to if they ask you where's the best place to go to eat in your hometown you're going to use comparatives and superlatives so you shouldn't go in thinking i'm going to use the past progressive find like you don't go in thinking i'm going to use all of these different tenses and all of these different grammar structures just use the grammar that's appropriate to use in those circumstances don't overthink it and don't try and think i need to avoid every single grammar mistake possible even people who get a band nine make small grammar mistakes everybody does it native english speakers do it i probably have done it in this video when you are talking your brain is working so hard that you will make small little grammar mistakes but what you want to avoid is overthinking grammar and that is going to affect your fluency because if you think i don't want what is the correct grammar and is it is or are and first of the agreement and which 10 you're going to really overthink it and you won't actually answer the question the more you think about grammar the lower your fluency is going to be the less you think about grammar the higher your fluency is going to be and you'll probably make the exact same number of grammar mistakes avoid as many mistakes as you can but don't overthink so a really easy way to answer part one questions is answer the question give an explanation and give an example you don't have to answer every single question like that and in fact i would encourage you not to answer a hundred percent of questions like that because some of them you won't be able to think of an example or some of them won't need an explanation but if you practice using that most of your answers you will be able to answer them in that way so for example if someone asked me about my degree i studied law why did you study law so what did you study i studied law at university because i wanted to be a lawyer so that's my explanation and then i would give an example so when i left i became a lawyer and i worked in the city of london as a commercial lawyer for about three years and then decided to become an aisles teacher which is a true story okay so that's how you answer a question but you don't have to stick to that but it'll help you if you practice that way okay now i want you to listen to a student who got a band eight and listen to some of her answers some of them are really really good answers some of them could do with a little bit of improvement but i just want you to listen to them and think about her answers and how she has answered these questions so now let's talk about travel and do you like to travel yes i do and what do you hope to do with that degree after you finish oh i hope to work as a data scientist in the future yeah and where would you like to travel to in the future oh there are still a lot of places in india that i haven't seen so i might go there as well and i like i really like bali so bali and greece yes is traveling abroad very popular in your country oh yes it is it is quite popular so people mostly go travel during the summer but it's always summer in india so yeah i think movies have a huge role to play in it because they show all these destinations where there's snow covered mountains and all and that's very fascinating for us because we don't really get at least not where i come from so hopefully you are able to see rashmi and her performance and some things that she could have improved and some things she did really really well but hopefully by understanding this whole lesson and seeing what rashmi did and rashmi went on to get a band eight which is amazing in her speaking test and to show you exactly what you need to do but watching this video is just the first step the second step is completing the challenge so let's jump into my computer and we will show you exactly what to do for your challenge okay guys now comes the fun part where you are going to record your speaking and then send it to us so your task and this is really really really important if you don't do this then it is a complete waste of time and you're not going to improve and you're going to miss out on the chance to get better and get feedback on your work okay so it is a really really simple four-step process that you are going to follow in order to record your voice and send it to us and so the first step step one download a free voice recorder app for your phone so if you are an apple person if you have an apple phone go to the app store if you have an android phone go to the google play store and on both of those stores you're going to find hundreds and hundreds of free voice recorder apps that just make it really really simple for you to hit a button and it automatically record your voice don't ask me which one to choose there are too many to choose from just pick the one that you want to choose it's not that difficult so step two in the four-step process answer these questions and record your voice so you should have a phone you should have a app on your phone that record your voice you're going to look at these questions and don't pre-prepare the questions don't research the questions just pretend that you are in the actual exam and you are reading the questions just like the same way that the examiner would be asking you those questions so look at the question answer it second question answer third question answer it that's all you have to do all right so i'm going to show you the questions for part one okay so here are six questions look at each of them and then all you have to do is just hit record on your recording app and that's all you have to do step three send it to us via email so this is super simple to do you can do this on your phone or you can do this on your desktop so you will have my email address because i will have emailed you multiple times so all you have to do is this so imagine you are on gmail and you could be on yahoo hotmail whatever and just click the email that i sent you and click reply and then attach the audio file to your email and just hit send if you have any problems whatsoever then my email address is chris at ialtadvantage.com all right this is my email address chris at ialtadvantage.com but you will have received it many many many times before okay so now that you have sent us your recording what i want you to do is just wait have a look at your email inbox and we will send you your feedback video right to your inbox and then it's really really important that you look at this feedback that we send to you so that you can really learn what to do and really really improve and welcome to speaking lesson two so let's have a look at what we're going to do in this challenge so think about it as three steps step one we're going to look at part one that was the video before this today we're going to look at part two and then step three the next video the next lesson we're going to look at part three as i already said it's really important that you watch all three of these and do the tasks do the challenges for all three of them so that you can give your best performance on test day okay so part two of the speaking test what are we going to look at in this lesson we're going to look at what the goal is what is your overall mission what your overall goal is and if you focus on that it's going to completely change the way that you think about your performance in part two of course we're going to look at common problems and how to avoid those common problems common strategies you'll find a lot of strategies online on youtube maybe your teacher has taught you a few strategies and if you're watching this video those strategies probably don't work for you and i have a much much better strategy that actually does work and has repeatedly week after week after week for years and years and years got scores of a band seven eight and nine for my students and i'm going to share this with you today so what is the goal so the goal is to speak fluently and coherently for up to two minutes about the topic let's look at that again speak fluently and coherently for up to two minutes about the topic so for two minutes you have to speak fluently fluently doesn't mean now no pauses or no hesitations whatsoever it means speaking without unnatural pauses and hesitations coherently so stick to the topic and talk about the topic and only the topic for two minutes and that might sound quite easy but as you know it is quite difficult to talk about one thing in a foreign language that you are not a hundred percent sure about fluently for two minutes so it's a big challenge but it's not a challenge that you can't overcome in this lesson we'll show you how to overcome that but you should focus on the end goal focus on this and nothing else and you'll do really really well the examiner should be able to understand what i'm saying okay and kind of a sub goal should be always the examiner should be able to understand what i'm saying for pronunciation grammar and vocabulary pronunciation if you want a seven or above the examiner should be able to understand a hundred percent of what you're saying if they cannot understand a hundred percent of what you're saying you're going to get a six or a five hopefully none of you will get a four for pronunciation and grammar and vocabulary use grammar and vocabulary as tools to help you communicate clearly with the examiner the examiner is not looking for your ability to show off how amazing your grammar is or show off how amazing your vocabulary is or show how amazing your pronunciation is what they're looking for is are you able to use these things to help you clearly communicate with them so can the examiner understand what you're saying you're not using grammar vocabulary and pronunciation as tricks you're using them as tools to help you with that and we'll talk more about that and what that actually means later okay so let's look at common problems for part two and there's really only one common problem there are some problems that are related to that but there really is only one thing unable to speak fluently and coherently for two minutes that is the goal if you can't complete the goal you're not going to do very well there so we need to think about why people struggle to speak fluently and coherently for two minutes so one thing would be a lack of development they're not developing their ideas they're not talking at length about the points and why is this so they're not developing the points because they're looking at the bullet points so there's normally four bullet points and they'll talk about the first one for about five seconds then the next one for about ten seconds and then the next one for about six seconds and then the next one for about ten seconds again and they look at their watch and they've only been talking for 30 seconds they've still 90 seconds to go and they're what do I do there so you need to be able to take points related to the main topic and fully develop them and if you do that you'll have no problem speaking for the two minutes and that's where our strategy comes in we'll show you exactly what to do it's a little bit more complicated than just develop each point but don't worry we'll cover that in this lesson then what happens a lot is people will run into things to say and then they'll go back to their previous points and they'll just start repeating themselves that is not fluent that is not coherent so that's a big problem you want to avoid repeating the same idea so they'll say things like the topic could be talk about your favorite book and they'll say the favorite book is the bible I really like the bible because it's about god and then they'll run into things to say and they'll say and yeah it's it's about god and I really like it and that's why I like it and yeah it's a really good book I enjoy it so just repeating the same thing over and over and over again rather than speaking fluently and coherently lack of knowledge so many people believe that they're going to get a topic that they know nothing about or some of the bullet points will be on things that they're not sure about and so they they see that thing and they just freeze or they see the general topic and they they're just oh I'm not an expert in this thing I don't know how to talk about that so I do think that the bullet point issue not being able to talk about certain bullet points is a real problem and that's what we're going to address in the strategy the problem that most people fear is they're going to see the topic and they know nothing about that topic I don't think that's a real fear because where does this come from it comes from students looking at fake questions most websites most places are that produce questions are not they don't really know what they're doing and everybody thinks that they are an aisles expert these days you've got a huge number of people creating their own questions and because they don't know what they're doing they assume that all questions are really difficult and therefore they give people really difficult topics if you look at the real questions that you get on the real test they are about normal everyday things that 90% of the world could actually talk about that's how they design them believe me I have talked to many people who actually write the questions for Cambridge and what they do is they think how could we come up with a topic that most people will be able to talk about not how can we think of a topic that will trick lots of people they are trying to make your job easy for you trying to give you the best opportunity to do your best work and to be able to speak to the best of your ability so if you think what if what if I get a topic I know nothing about it's like saying I don't want to go on holiday because I don't want to get on a plane because what if the plane crashes is it possible yes is it likely no it is highly unlikely is it possible that you will get a cue card and speaking part two that you know nothing about possible highly highly highly unlikely always remember they are testing your speaking ability not your knowledge of a topic and the topics are a normal everyday things look at the official question and that those fears will go away okay so we're going to teach you now how to speak fluently for two minutes so what happens when you get the cue card so you get the cue card and this is the main topic okay this is the thing that you need to talk about for up to two minutes so for this one describe something you own which is very important to you so the goal is to speak fluently and coherently about something you own which is very important to you for two minutes in a way that the examiner can clearly understand what you're saying these are the bullet points so this is bullet point number one this is bullet point number two this is bullet point number three and this is bullet point number four these are important but not as important as you think and we'll talk about that in a second okay so before we get into my strategy I want to talk about two common strategies that are very widely taught you'll see them a lot on the internet and we have a team of examiners and working for us that help our VIP students and we see these every single day students come in and they're like I'm going to use this strategy and this technique is like okay go and use it and they mess it up and so let's talk about those two very very quickly so that you understand why they don't work so that you can avoid them um so common strategy number one is talk about each bullet point in order all right so common strategy number one is you look at this bullet point and you talk about it you look at this bullet point and you talk about it then you look at this bullet point and then you talk about it and then you look at this bullet point and you talk about it the big problem with that strategy is you're going to run out of things to talk about very very quickly Also, there might be one of the bullet points, let's say what you use it for, and you don't know what to say. So you're going to be like, you talk about this one, then you talk about this one, and then this one, you don't know what to say, so you get in trouble. So you're going to run into things to say, and it's also a very unnatural way of talking to someone. Remember, the goal is to talk to the examiner as if they're a friend or a colleague. You don't normally talk to a friend by saying, hmm, let me look at a bullet point, and then let me look at another bullet point. It's not going to help you speak fluently and coherently. It is kind of the worst thing that you can do. I've also seen teachers tell people, speak about this one for 30 seconds, and then this one for 30 seconds, and then this one for 30 seconds, and then this one. I couldn't do that, all right, and I do this every day for a living. That's impossible. You're actually making it more difficult if you do that. The second popular strategy, which you will see a lot, it's been around for years and years and years. I first saw this nearly 10 years ago in a book, which is to talk about the past, then talk about the present, and then talk about the future. So what you would do is you would look at these, and then you would think about something about the past, and talk about this, and then talk about the present, and then talk about the future. Not so good. All right, why is it not so good? It's very, very rigid. It is not giving you enough freedom. So there are lots and lots and lots of other things that you can talk about that have nothing to do with the past, nothing to do with the present, and nothing to do with the future. And the best performances from students, especially band seven, eight, and nine, come from people who don't really think, hmm, I'm going to talk about this, and then I'm going to talk about this, and they just talk naturally. So it's far too rigid. It might work for people who need a band five or a band six, but not for a band seven, eight, or nine. And you will soon run out of ideas. You'll talk about the past first, okay, and then the present, and then the future. Okay, what do I talk about next? So again, you can't speak for up to two minutes. It's also a very, very unnatural way. Again, imagine talking to a friend and they ask you, what did you get up to at the weekend? Okay, let me think about the past. You just would never do that. Okay, let's look at the strategy in a little bit more detail. I'm going to take you through it step by step. So if it looks a little strange or it's different from what you have experienced before or have been taught before, don't worry. Okay, number one, establish main topic. You're going to have to talk about the main topic. It's really, really important. You have to stick to that for two minutes, so establish what it is. So number one, what is the main topic? Take time to understand what it is. Because if you don't understand what it is and you just start talking, you're going to go off on a tangent and you're not going to actually stick to what the actual topic is. Number two, think about each bullet point, all right? So look at the different bullet points. And what you're trying to do here is establish which ones you actually want to talk about. All right, so describe something you own which is very important to you, where you got it from, okay, no problem, I can talk about that. How long you have had it, yeah, no problem. What you use it for, yeah, no problem. Explain why it is important to you. I can't really think why it's important to me, okay? So here we go. We're going to delete that, okay? So we've understood the main topic and we've thought about the bullet points and we've deleted the ones that we don't want to talk about and we've thought about these ones that we do want to talk about. The next one, add any others that will help. So we're going to add more things in that will help us think about the topic and talk about the topic. So let's think about some things that we could add in here. We could add in our opinion. We could add in, we could introduce the topic. We could describe it. We could talk about the past. We could talk about the future. And there are many, many, many other things that you could talk about. And then just describe something you own which is very important to you, related to that. Who got it for you? How often do you use it? So you could quickly think about these things and then, again, just delete the ones that you want to leave out. So maybe I can't really think about this one. It'd be easy to introduce it and easy to describe it. Past, no, future. Yeah, who got it for me? How often? You had no problem. So now you've gone from four bullet points to four, five, six, seven, eight. All right, would it be easy for you to fully develop each one of these and talk for the two minutes? No problem whatsoever. Add any others that will help. Think about what you want to say. All right, so don't spend the whole minute just thinking about bullet points. Actually compose yourself and think about what you want to say. Now, you might be thinking, Chris, there's no way that I can do this in one minute. That's where practice comes in. You cannot use this strategy and immediately get better and immediately start to speak fluently for two minutes. Like anything, you need to practice it. But I guarantee, if you practice this, it'll become second nature and you will just be able to do it so quickly on exam day. Number five, speak naturally with or speak naturally until the examiner stops you. The examiner will stop you when you get to the two minutes. Believe me, they've got stuff to do. They don't want you in the room any longer than you have to be there. Just keep talking and the examiner will stop you. So why is this strategy so effective? Because it gives you freedom. It gives you freedom to talk about whatever you want related to the main topic and you only talk about the things that you are comfortable talking about and you're never going to run out of things to say. Remember the biggest problem is people run out of things to say then they lose their fluency, they lose their coherence, they start repeating ideas, they start to panic. This gives you so much freedom and most of the people who we work with they don't even get to most of the bullet points but they're just there waiting for them in case they need to talk about them. Alright? So again, the most important thing you need to do here is practice this strategy. So in order to practice it, there's a few things you need to do. Get real practice questions. You will get them from Cambridge, you'll get them from the British Council or you'll get them from IDP. Those are the only three sources where you will get real, aisle-speaking questions. Everything else is fake. Alright, so get some real ones. Use the strategy and record yourself. Get your mobile phone. Everyone watching this will have a mobile phone. Everyone can record themselves, alright? So get a question, hit record on your mobile phone, answer the question for two minutes and record yourself and then listen and critique your own work. And think about fluency, think about coherence, think about grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary. I get my VIP students to do this all the time. Even though we do one-on-ones with them and we critique them, we get examiners to sit with them and tell them their scores. Even though we do provide that service, we get them to do this too because have you ever listened to yourself speaking? You're like, oh, I can't believe I sound like that. If you're speaking in a different language, you'll pick up so many little mistakes that you're making and if you do this and practice this enough, you will be able to produce an amazing part two response that will blow the examiner away because most people, they're going bullet point one, two, three, four, what do I say? You'll be able to just talk to them like they're talking to a friend or a colleague and they'll be really, really impressed with your answer if you practice this. But if you don't practice it, you won't get better. So before I set you your challenge, summary, start with the end goal in mind. All right, always focus on that end goal. Avoid common problems and strategies that don't work. Try a strategy that focuses on the end goal and practice and then critique yourself and do this challenge as well. But before that, I want to show you Rashmi again who got a band-aid and to show you the way that she used this strategy and the way that she was able to flexibly use it in order to improve her performance. All right? Okay, Rashmi, when you're ready. I don't think I have too many expensive things I'm not materialistic at all. So I don't tend to spend too much. But if education comes, then I think the most expensive thing I've ever bought is an education at Queens. I paid 25,000 pounds to be here. That does not include the plane ticket. But yes, till that would be the most expensive thing. Where I bought it? Well, I live in India. So I came here at Queens and I came here in the UK to study at Queens. Education has become really expensive but I think this is by far the most expensive ever. But it was worth it because I learnt a lot. They have really good infrastructure and the quality of the teaching staff is really good. I met the students from all over the world here. So the cultural exchange was really good. I learnt a lot not just from being in the classroom but from outside of the classroom as well and just talking to people on the streets or volunteering. It gave me a lot of experience which I don't think I could have gotten just being in a classroom. So I did pay for education here to study marketing and analytics but I came out learning a lot more than just that. Why I bought it? Because I really wanted to study analytics like I mentioned before but besides that, Queens is a really good brand and it has a really good image in India and I think all over the world. It's in the Russell's group. So an education at Queens is going, I knew that if I invested in it, it was going to pay off. So as you can see Rashmi used our strategy to talk fluently and coherently for two minutes with ease and before that she really struggled with that and she was running out of ideas. We gave her that strategy. She was able to practice it and she was able to do that and get a band aid. Okay, so your challenge is, let me jump into my computer again and show you what your challenge is and how to send it to us. Okay guys, now comes the fun part where you are going to record your speaking and then send it to us. So your task and this is really, really, really important. If you don't do this, then it is a complete waste of time and you're not going to improve and you're going to miss out on the chance to get better and get feedback on your work. Okay, so it is a really, really simple four step process that you are going to follow in order to record your voice and send it to us. So the first step, step one, download a free voice recorder app for your phone. So if you are an Apple person, if you have an Apple phone, go to the App Store. If you have an Android phone, go to the Google Play Store and in both of those stores, you're going to find hundreds and hundreds of free voice recorder apps that just make it really, really simple for you to hit a button and it automatically records your voice. Don't ask me which one to choose. There are too many to choose from. Just pick the one that you want to choose. It's not that difficult. So step two in the four step process, answer these questions and record your voice. So you should have a phone, you should have a app on your phone that records your voice. You're going to look at these questions and don't pre-prepare the questions, don't research the questions, just pretend that you are in the actual exam and you are reading the questions just like the same way that the examiner would be asking you those questions. So look at the question, answer it. Second question, answer it. Third question, answer it. That's all you have to do. Okay, so this is part two. So what you should do is look at this, plan out your answer for one minute and then speak into your phone, record your voice for up to two minutes. All right, so might be a good idea to get like a stopwatch on your phone or use your watch to give you a guide on how long you're speaking for. You don't have to speak for exactly two minutes but just try and speak for around two minutes and then stop yourself because you were looking at the phone. In the real exam, the examiner will be stopping you but try and replicate the exam as much as possible, okay? So look at this, prepare for one minute, speak up for up to two minutes. Step three, send it to us via email. So this is super simple to do. You can do this on your phone or you can do this on your desktop. So you will have my email address because I will have emailed you multiple times. So all you have to do is this.  Just click the email that I sent you, click reply and then attach the audio file to your email and just hit send. If you have any problems whatsoever, then my email address is chrisatisaltadvantage.com, all right? This is my email address chrisatisaltadvantage.com but you will have received it many, many, many times before. Next is this, okay? So now that you have sent us your recording, what I want you to do is just wait, have a look at your email inbox and we will send you your feedback video right to your inbox and then it's really, really important that you look at this feedback that we send to you so that you can really learn what to do and really, really improve. Welcome to lesson three. So as you know, this course is part of a three-part project. So if you have not watched video one or video two, just go back and watch them and complete the challenges before we do this one. Okay, so let's have a look at what we're gonna do today. So here's the agenda. We're gonna look at the difference between the question types because it's really important that you understand the type of questions that you're gonna be asked in part three and the differences between part one, part two, and part three but especially part one and part three because they're very, very different questions and if you're answering them in the same way, you're gonna be in trouble. Common problems, as always, so we can avoid them. Some solutions for these common problems so we can help avoid them on test day and then I'm gonna give you two different strategies that you can use to answer and practice, most importantly, practice question or part three questions and then we're gonna give you a couple of demos. I'm gonna demonstrate how I would answer some of these questions.  Okay, so I want you to have a look at these two questions. This is a typical part one question and this is a typical part three question. I just want you to have a look at these and think about what the main difference is between these two questions. So, oh, I've missed my question mark, I deleted it. So what did you do last weekend versus why do many people spend their free time shopping? So both of these are about your free time, your leisure time, or what you do at the weekend. The topic is the same but what's the difference in the type of question? So if we look at this one, this one is about you. It is asking about what did you do last weekend? So you're not talking generally about free time, you're not talking generally about what people do at the weekends.  Part three, very, very different. Same topic, but why do many people spend their free time shopping? So this is not about you, okay? This is not about you at all. You can talk about you, that's fine, but it is asking you an abstract question about the world in general. The best way to describe part three questions is they're kind of like a task two writing question, like an academic style question where they want you to really get into the topic and fully develop it. Not just say, I don't go shopping on the weekends. That wouldn't be a very good answer. Or if you say, I don't know, I don't go shopping.  It's not about you, it is about the abstract idea. Let's have a look at another example. Most common question in part one is, do you work or study? All right, so I work, here's my job, or I study, I'm at university and I study this thing. Let's have a look at part three. They would never ask that in part three. More young people are going to university. Do you think this is a good thing? Okay, so you could talk about when you were at university, but they're not really asking about you. They're asking you about this abstract idea of more and more young people are going to university these days. Do you think this is a positive thing or do you think this is a negative thing? Or why do some people think it's positive and why do some people think it's negative? And really getting into the detail of this. Don't worry if you don't understand how to answer this question right now. By the end of this lesson, you will understand a bit more. Okay, so let's have a look at some part three speaking problems and worries. Things that people really worry about and problems that we see every day. The biggest problem, the number one problem, let's put this in red, is a lack of development. The examiner is really listening out for and looking for your ability to fully develop your ideas. So for part one, what's your job? You just need to add a little bit more detail, maybe an explanation, maybe an example. But for part three, they want you to talk at length. They want you to talk and get really in depth on that idea and fully explain things. Give example, show different sides. I'm gonna show you how to do that in the strategy. But if you're just giving one or two sentence answers for part three, that's not good enough. Again, I'm not gonna tell you the number of sentences because it will differ from question to question. So you shouldn't go in thinking about number of sentences, but you should go in thinking, have I fully developed this answer? Doesn't mean that you need to talk for 30 minutes about one question, but we'll show you how to do this in a second. A worry that students have is I won't have any ideas. It is not an idea's test. So worrying about ideas is, I understand why students are worried about this because in order to develop your ideas, you need to have ideas in the first place, but it's not something you really need to worry about that much because the examiner is not judging you on your ideas, the examiner is judging you on your pronunciation, your grammar, your vocabulary and your fluency and coherence. So I wouldn't worry too much about these ideas. You're not being judged on them so much, but we'll talk about that more later in the lesson. Listing, so one thing students do a lot of is they will list every idea that comes into their head. So for example, why do more people go shopping at the weekend? People go shopping because they like shopping, they have more money, they want to buy new clothes, there are lots of restaurants and shopping centers, it's a safe place, they wanna spend time with their family. So all of those ideas are fine. Many, many students who worry about ideas have actually no problem thinking of ideas and they just list idea after idea after idea after idea. You're not gonna do that. What you're going to do is you're gonna take one of those ideas or maybe two of those ideas and fully develop them, fully explain them, give examples of them. So I think I listed like six or seven ideas there. What you should be doing is taking one of them. So for example, I said, people have more money, why do people have more money? Why are they spending it on clothes or what are they spending it on? Can you give me an example of this? So you're going really in depth on one or two ideas rather than listing lots of ideas. Again, many people worry about vocabulary that these topics are things that they don't really understand or they're difficult questions and they worry that their vocabulary is not good enough.  So what happens is what students try and do is they try and insert lots of high level words or lots of idioms or whatever you wanna call them, golden words, diamond words I've heard people call them and they're not really answering the question. If you just try and answer the question and fully develop it and use the vocabulary that you have, you will naturally use a wide range of vocabulary and then you will avoid mistakes because you're using vocabulary that you're comfortable using. But if you try and push yourself too much, then you're going to get in trouble because you're going to make lots of mistakes. Your fluency is going to suffer because you are having to think about the vocabulary very hard. So what my suggestion would be for vocabulary, use the vocabulary that you have. Before the test, try and improve it every single day. But during the test, just use the vocabulary that you have. You've no other choice. The other choice is try and use vocabulary you don't know how to use and then you're going to make lots of mistakes. This is another common thing where we see in part three is people just not attempting the answer at all or saying I don't know or saying that's an interesting question and then not saying anything or I've never thought about that before and then saying nothing. The questions will get more difficult and more difficult and more difficult because the examiner is testing you, is trying to stretch your linguistic ability. If you get difficult questions, that means that the examiner thinks that you're good. If you don't get any difficult questions in part three, they don't think you're good. There's no point in trying to test you too much. But what they're looking for is you to attempt the answer. If you don't attempt, then they can't give you any score for that answer whatsoever and you're going to drop down. But even if you know nothing about that topic or you don't really know anything about it, at least try and make an attempt because that is what the examiner is looking for. And if you are overthinking your ideas and you're trying to think of really impressive ideas and you're trying to think of really impressive vocabulary and you're thinking about it too much, overthinking is going to cause fluency problems. As people see these questions, they're like, oh, I've never thought of it that before. It's not a test of your knowledge. It's not a test of your IQ. It's a test of your speaking.  And people worry again about not enough knowledge. It's not a knowledge test. It is a speaking test. So always remember that. So let's look at just some solutions. Purpose, what is the purpose of the speaking test? Is it to show off your ideas? No, is it to show off how much grammar and vocabulary you've memorized? No, it is a speaking test. Can you clearly communicate with someone in an English-speaking country or non-English-speaking country if they are an English speaker? They are testing the purpose, which is a speaking test. So don't worry too much about ideas. Don't worry too much about trying to use fancy vocabulary and grammar. Just focus on speaking, all right? Don't overthink it. Just focus on clearly communicating naturally with the examiner. And you can practice doing that. It is about practice. Once you start to get in the habit of practicing this, the way that we're showing it to you, it becomes very, very natural. Solution number two, it is a discussion. I can't speak, I'm teaching speaking. It is a discussion of ideas, all right? It's not about you. It is a discussion of ideas. In the same way, kind of like an essay response, like an academic task to essay response. If you're watching this video, you know what academic writing task two is and how you kind of structure an answer and how you would put an answer on paper. That's what you're looking for. So for example, you would answer the question, explain, give example, show the other side, state another point. This discussion of ideas, and we'll show you more about this, but that's the best way to think about part three. And solution number three, accept that it will get harder. Attempt an answer and you're not being judged on one question. It is going to get harder and harder and harder and harder. And if it does, you should think, yes, this is great because the examiner has a range of questions for part three, easy ones, middle ones and hard ones. If they think that you're good, they will ask you more and more difficult questions. So if you get a difficult question, you say yes and attempt the answer at least, even if you have no idea. So if you have no idea, say, I really have never thought about that, I have no idea, but if I had to give an answer, this is what I would say and just attempt an answer. And you're not, if you get one question that you really, really struggle with, remember you are being judged on the totality all of your answers, not one answer. It's not like your band seven, band seven, band seven, band seven and then you get a difficult question and you drop down to a five. That's not how it works. Attempt the answer, try your best, leave it and move on to the next one and don't get really stressed out because often people get a question they don't understand and then they'll get a little bit stressed out and then it'll affect their fluency, their grammar and vocabulary. Just do your best, that's all you can do. Okay, so strategy one. Very, very simply answer the question, explain and then give an example, okay? So remember we asked you, we showed you these questions here, so question here was, why do many people spend their free time shopping? Okay, so answer the question, think of an idea, explain that and give an example. So many people like to spend time shopping, especially on the weekend because there's not only shops and many shopping centers, there's a variety of things, such as cinemas and restaurants. So the reason why people love this is they can go to just one place and they can go there with their family and there's so much choice that they can do a little bit of shopping and they can get something to eat and then they can bring their kids to the cinema or if they're on a date or something like that, then they can go and go to the cinema as well or the bowling alley, there's a lot of leisure activities as well. For example, in the city near where I live, there's a place called Victoria Square, it's all under one roof and they have designer shops, they have a great movie house, they have a range of restaurants such as like Wagamama and Burger King and Pizza Hut and we love to go there at the weekend just so that we can get a variety of different leisure activities. So we're not only doing shopping, we're doing all the other things in the shopping center and that's what most shopping centers are doing in the UK because they know that people want a variety of choices. So you can see what I did there. All I did was simply answer the question, then I explained it and then I give an example. All right, you can do that for pretty much any question. Don't go into the test though and think very rigidly, like I'm going to answer every single question in this way but it's a good way to think and a good way to practice your questions but allow yourself that flexibility. Strategy number two is, where is strategy number two? Here we go. Strategy number two is, it's three parts, part one, part two and part three. So some people think this, explain why they think it and give an example, others think this, explain why and give an example and I think this, all right. So let's have a look at the other question that we had for an example. More young people are going to university. Do you think this is a good thing? Okay, so some people would think this is a really, really positive development because it means that there are more poor people going into university and this reduces the gap between rich and poor which is very, very important for society, for equality. For example, in the UK in the last 20 years they have really pushed free university places for poor students and now more than 50% of students go to university. However, many people think that this is not a good thing, that this is actually a negative development because there are lots of young people who are not suited to academics. They are not academically inclined. They would be better at getting a job in the trades. So for example, many people who want to become carpenters or mechanics or even software engineers, for example, who don't need to go to university they can learn that in an apprenticeship and they'd be much happier doing that and if they are forced to go to university it is a huge waste of money. I think it should be based on the individual student if they want to study something that can only be covered in university like medicine or law they should go there. But if not, they should go into a trade and there's no need for them to get all that student debt. So you can see what I did there. What I did was some people think this so I didn't say what I think. Some people think this, others think this and then this is what I think. So that allowed me to talk and fully, fully develop my answers. So a demo. What I'm going to do now is show you a student who got a band nine, Rashmi and you'll be able to see how she fully developed her answers. So now I want to talk about money and society in general. Can money buy happiness? This seems like a philosophical question but for me personally I don't think so. Money is not everything. I do volunteer at a lot of places so I know that I do that because mostly I'm an introvert, I don't really talk much but when I'm volunteering with people I gain valuable experience and that's how I learn that money is not everything. To some people, yes, money can make them less miserable as long as you are not like homeless or desperate for food, putting food on the table. And as long as you have a shelter, a roof over your head and food on the table at night that's all you need for me personally. So it depends on people, what money means to them but to me I don't think it can buy happiness. Okay guys, so now it's your turn. So what we're going to do is I'm going to jump into my computer, share my screen with you and show you what your challenge is for today. Okay guys, now comes the fun part where you are going to record your speaking and then send it to us. So your task, and this is really, really, really important. If you don't do this, then it is a complete waste of time and you're not going to improve and you're going to miss out on the chance to get better and get feedback on your work. Okay, so it is a really, really simple four-step process that you are going to follow in order to record your voice and send it to us. So the first step, step one, download a free voice recorder app for your phone. So if you are an Apple person, if you have an Apple phone, go to the App Store. If you have an Android phone, go to the Google Play Store and in both of those stores you're going to find hundreds and hundreds of free voice recorder apps that just make it really, really simple for you to hit a button and it automatically records your voice Don't ask me which one to choose. There are too many to choose from. Just pick the one that you want to choose. It's not that difficult. So step two in the four-step process, answer these questions and record your voice. So you should have a phone. You should have an app on your phone that records your voice. You're going to look at these questions and don't pre-prepare the questions. Don't research the questions. Just pretend that you are in the actual exam and you are reading the questions just like the same way that the examiner would be asking you those questions. So look at the question, answer it. Second question, answer it. Third question, answer it. That's all you have to do. Okay guys, so now we're going to look at four part three questions. You should look at each question and attempt to answer each of these questions. Don't worry if one of the or two of the questions are like really difficult or you've never thought about that before. You need to attempt an answer. So get your phone, look at each question, hit record, record your voice and answer the questions. Step three, send it to us via email. So this is super simple to do. You can do this on your phone or you can do this on your desktop. So you will have my email address because I will have emailed you multiple times. So all you have to do is this.  Just click the email that I sent you. Click reply and then attach the audio file to your email and just hit send. If you have any problems whatsoever, then my email address is chrisatisaltadvantage.com. All right, this is my email addre