5 Simple Ways to improve your IELTS Speaking Score

- Here we go.

Five simple ways to improve your IELTS speaking score.

(calm music)

Hello, this is Keith from the Keith Speaking Academy, right?

Now, listen, when it comes to improving

your IELTS speaking score, many students are,

well, let's say barking up the wrong tree.

To bark up the wrong tree

means to do the wrong thing to reach your goal

and I think this is partly to do with misinformation.

Misinformation on the internet and in social media, right?

So today, let me break it down to you, right?

I'm gonna give you five simple things you can do

to improve your score.

Throughout the video, I'll also give you some links

and ideas to different resources that can really help you

but a word of warning, each step will take time and practice

to reach your goal, right?

So be patient but the great thing is you can be confident

that at least you are barking up the right tree.

I mean, that you are following a good study technique, okay?

Five things, let's jump into number one.

All right, number one,

practice speaking under timed exam conditions.

What I mean is get the clock or a stopwatch,

get some questions, press go

and start answering the questions

just like a real test, right?

For example, when it comes to part two,

you give yourself a minute to prepare

and two minutes to talk answering the questions.

Simple as that, right?

Ideally, get a fellow student to control the time

and ask you the questions like they're the examiner.

If not, you can also go to my website.

There's a link down below

where you can find some recorded practice tests

and I will ask you the questions

and you have to answer in real time.

So I give you about 20 seconds for a part one question,

maybe up to a minute for part three questions.

Why is this good?

It's great because it gives you a sense of the pressure

you'll be under and the timing for answering questions.

So many students have never done a mock test

or a practice test and in the real exam,

they are so surprised by how fast it goes,

the examiner cutting them off

because they've never practiced.

So my friend, practice speaking under timed exam conditions.

Number two is don't memorize full answers.

It's a big mistake but so many candidates do this.

They memorize their answer word by word,

sentence by sentence.

If you do that, you will probably be off topic,

the examiner will definitely know

and your score will go down, not up.

So what do you do instead?

Well, practice responding to what I call surprise questions

that you don't know are coming, okay?

Very, very simple way to do this is is get some questions,

write them down or type them down,

make a list of maybe 10 questions

and then choose one at random and give your answer.

Literally, you can be like, "okay,

okay, tell me about the place you live."

"Right, the place I live is"

and then you're giving your answer

rather than going through the prepared questions.

And a really good tip here

and I know you're not gonna like this

but this is a really powerful tip

is when you're giving your answer,

well, when you've got the question,

practice answering the same question twice

but each time, give a different answer

and this is really going to stop you memorizing your answer

and encouraging you to build your flexibility.

Remember, it's the students who build their flexibility

and develop their speaking skills

who get the bands seven, eight and nine.

If you're on memorized answers,

you're gonna struggle not only in the IELTS speaking test

but in real life conversations later.

That's it, don't memorize, be flexible.

Let's move on.

Right, number three, understand what complex structures are.

If you've ever read the band descriptors for IELTS speaking

and if you haven't, you should,

you'll see it says for a band seven

"uses a range of complex structures with some flexibility."

Notice that word flexibility again.

Complex structures and students say to me,

"well, what do they mean exactly, complex structures?"

Well, you probably need to follow a complete course

to get all the complex structures

but just to give you a flavor, let me tell you some.

Complex structures could include complex tenses.

So complex tenses can include for example the perfect tenses

like the present perfect simple,

present perfect continuous, past perfect.

For instance, right?

"Last month, I visited Dakar.

Before then, I had never been to Bangladesh."

I had never been to, okay, past perfect.

It could include third conditionals.

For instance, "if I had known it was so beautiful,

I would have gone years ago."

Third conditional.

You could have inversions.

So instead of saying "if I had known it was so beautiful,"

inversion, "had I known it was so beautiful.

I would have visited years ago."

In addition, well, in addition to tenses,

complex structures will also include complex clauses.

For instance, relative clauses.

Let's take an example.

"I visited a beautiful city

which is located in the south of the country," right?

Relative clause.

You could have cleft sentences which we use for emphasis.

Instead of saying, "my brother convinced me to go,"

I say, "it was my brother who convinced me to go."

Nice, right?

There are many, many but this just gives you an idea.

And then of course remember you want to be mixing

complex and simple sentences

and you're building them up like you're building a house

and you could then get something like this.

"Last month, I visited Bangladesh.

I went to a beautiful city

which is located in the south of the country.

Actually, it was a student of mine that convinced me to go.

I had never been to Bangladesh before that

and to be honest, had I known it was so beautiful,

I would have visited years ago."

Right, can you see that?

So you need to understand what complex sentences are,

study them, learn them and practice them, okay?

This is really key because in IELTS speaking,

the use of complex sentences is vital

for your grammatical score, right,

which is 25% of your total score.

Great.

If you want to find out more about complex structures,

check out this video up here

and you can learn a lot more about it.

Let's press on.

Number four, work on making your vocabulary

bigger and better.

Of course, your vocabulary, right,

it takes up 25% of your whole score

so you need to be using again both simple

and complex vocabulary.

It takes time to build up vocabulary

and I recommend the three step approach, right,

study, practice and review.

Again, check out this video I made recently

which will tell you about this method in more detail, right?

Now, when you're practicing on your own or with classmates,

push the boundaries.

I mean, try out new words.

Try new things that maybe you're not sure about

but in the test, only use the words

you're really confident with and comfortable with, okay?

If you try and use difficult words

you don't really understand yet in the test, you'll fail

because you're already very nervous,

you'll make mistakes, it won't sound natural

and remember, IELTS speaking is about sounding natural,

natural conversational English.

So when you're practicing with friends and students,

yes, push the boundaries, try out new things.

In the test, be safe, be conservative.

Use what you know, okay?

That's it.

If you want the complete guide to IELTS vocabulary,

what you should learn and how, go to my website.

You can check it out.

I have a guide for free like most things on my website.

Again, there's a link in the description.

You can go and get that after the video.

Let's move on.

And number five, make sure you are never stuck for ideas.

It's amazing, right, the number of students who come to me

and say, "Keith, I had my test yesterday

and in part three, they asked me this question.

I had no idea what to say.

Even in my own language,

I don't know what to say about that."

Right, it's challenging part three sometimes.

So how do you make sure you don't get stuck for ideas?

My advice is make sure that you read

and listen to a wide range of materials

on the most common IELTS topics.

You can get the top 20 or top 30 topics of IELTS

on any IELTS website

and on my website, go to the Free Live Lessons.

You'll see lots of topics there

and there, you've got information, materials, ideas,

vocabulary you can practice with.

I suggest you take a mixture

of both study materials and authentic materials.

So the study materials

are the kind of PDFs I have on my website.

Authentic materials are real sites, real sites,

things like TED Talks or podcasts or blog, not for students

but for regular Native English speaking people, right,

things that my dad would listen to for example

like the BBC Radio 4 program,

the Moral Maze, things like that.

Again, I have on my website, there's a link below,

there's a link to a PDF which is the top 10 IELTS topics

with reading and listening materials

taken from across the internet.

Fantastic things which I think will really help you

get ideas in English and in your mother tongue, right?

It's the ideas that count as well as the language.

So that's it.

So now you have five simple ways

to improve your IELTS speaking score.

Simple but not quick, right?

Remember, improving your IELTS speaking score,

it takes time and dedication.

You're building your knowledge of English

and activating it through practice and review

but now at least, well, you can be patient

and you can be confident

that you're barking up the right tree, right?

You've got a good solid study technique here

which is gonna help you,

help you to become that confident speaker of English

and so ace your IELTS speaking test.

I hope you've enjoyed the video.

Thank you so much for watching.

If you have, please do remember to like the video

and subscribe.

There are lots of links down below

including the final one which will give you this PDF.

It's a summary of what I've talked about today.

Lots of food for thought, right?

Thank you so much

and listen, I'll see you in the next video.

Take care now.

Bye bye.

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