The Most Common Mistakes IELTS Speaking Students Make

- In this workshop, I am about to share

with you the five most common mistakes

IELTS Speaking students make

and how you can avoid them using my Speaking Success System.

Let's do it.

(upbeat music)

Hello, this is Keith from The Keith Speaking Academy

and the YouTube channel, English Speaking Success.

Great, welcome to this workshop or lesson.

The five most common mistakes that students make

in IELTS and the what to do instead.

Now, I'm quite excited.

Well actually, (laughs) no, I'm really excited

because I've just finished an upgrade

to my main online course,

IELTS Speaking Success; Get a Band 7+.

I've made it more effective,

more interactive, more interesting.

And it's a kind of a, in fact,

it is a gold version, if you like.

The original course still exists,

but this is the upgraded gold version.

Now, before I tell you more about that,

I wanted to host this workshop today

with you for free on YouTube

and show you the system that the course is based on.

Now, during today's workshop,

I'm going to show you my Speaking Success System:

four steps that students who are

at around a band 5 or 6 or 6.5 can use to succeed

in the IELTS speaking test.

Now, with this system, I've already helped,

well, tens of thousands of students across the world

succeed with the IELTS Speaking test.

On YouTube, well, I now have, wow, a million subscribers,

over a million subscribers who are learning

and studying with me successfully.

I think I know what it takes

to get a good score in IELTS Speaking.

And, you know, I love to motivate students

to continue studying, to carry on being,

well, being more and more fluent

and more confident in their use of English,

even after IELTS.

(air whooshes) Now, from all that experience,

here is one of the key things that I've learned.

With the right method and motivation, you can succeed too.

So many students struggle and they drop out and they fail

because they've been left to struggle on their own.

But now, you can do it differently.

So listen, in today's workshop,

I'm gonna show you the common mistakes

and how to avoid them.

I'll explain my four-step system.

I'll put it, or we will put it into practice together.

And also, I will make some PDF summaries

of this system available

that you can download in the descriptions below.

Sound good?

Ready?

Let's do it.

So, based on my teaching experience,

I've identified these five mistakes

that so many students are making,

and it's really preventing them

from succeeding in IELTS Speaking.

So I'll go through these one by one

so you can see if you're making the same mistakes, right?

Then I'll show you what you can do instead.

Don't worry if it seems like a lot.

By the end of this workshop,

I will give you a step-by-step process

to go through this, okay?

So let's look at the first mistake.

Mistake number one, writing and reading aloud your answers.

So, this is a very common study technique,

but for IELTS Speaking, it's a really bad one.

I think a lot of students have been told

that they should write out their answer

and then practice reading aloud.

No, no, no.

Don't, because, right?

Because you won't be able to do this in the test.

Oh sorry, just a minute, Mr. Examiner,

before I answer, let me just write down my answer.

No, and in real life you meet somebody in a shop

or at work and they ask you a question in English,

oh, just a minute.

No, you have to react quickly.

And this is the problem.

So many students can't react quickly in IELTS Speaking

because they've been practicing writing and reading aloud.

It really doesn't help you.

You need to learn speaking by speaking,

not by reading aloud.

You become a better speaker by practicing more speaking.

Also, when you read aloud,

it sounds so unnatural that it doesn't help you.

So this, right, is the first mistake.

So don't write out your answers.

Don't read aloud.

Just practice speaking out your answers from up here.

Hmm, okay, next one.

Mistake number two is memorizing answers.

Now, many training schools teach this.

And you see students calling out,

"Has anybody got the 2021 new questions?"

"Yes, here you are.

And look, here's all the answers

that you can practice as well."

"Oh, great."

No, because if you start memorizing all the answers,

what's going to happen?

When you go into the exam,

if you forget a word in your answer, oom, you freeze.

You're all tongue-tied.

If the question is slightly different and you realize,

oh, it's a different answer, you freeze.

Or worse, you give your memorized answer

but it doesn't match the question.

Boom, lowers your mark.

Memorize, the examiners are trained.

They know memorized speech (snaps fingers) just like that.

And you'll be marked down for it, okay?

So the key to IELTS Speaking is not memorizing answers.

Please don't do that.

It's about flexibility, it's developing flexibility.

And you do that by memorizing chunks.

Chunks are small phrases, two or three words, usually.

They may be chunks, maybe collocations,

phrasal verbs, idioms, grammatical chunks, lexical chunks.

There's many kinds, but memorizing and practicing chunks

gives you the flexibility you need to succeed

in IELTS Speaking.

Great, let's move on.

Mistake number three, using formal English.

Now, I was on Facebook the other day.

I know, (laughs) we're all wasting

too much time on Facebook.

But I saw a post from a student,

and the student said,

"Can I use wanna and gonna in IELTS Speaking?"

And other students answered saying, no, no, no,

of course not.

IELTS is a academic test.

You must use formal academic English.

And I thought, no.

IELTS Speaking is a test

of your natural, conversational English,

not formal, academic, written English, no.

So you need to be practicing

your natural, conversational English and using that.

So, for your IELTS Speaking, it's not directly helping

by reading newspapers, by reading novels,

by reading academic journals.

Because you don't really know

if that language is spoken language 'cause it's written.

I mean, to practice that for your reading skills, yes.

But for your speaking,

you should be practicing by listening:

listening to the news program, to the chat program,

watching the TV shows and the films.

Learn or help your IELTS Speaking through listening.

Why?

Because then you know it's spoken English.

If it's written, you're not sure.

So make sure you're learning

natural, spoken, conversational English.

Okay, great.

Okay, mistake number four is learning lists of vocabulary.

Now, to be perfectly honest, okay,

word lists are not really bad in themselves, okay?

Poor word lists.

But very often the words are not connected

and the context is lacking or is very weak.

What's much worse is when students are given, you know,

lists of vocabulary in alphabetical order.

All the A words, all the B words.

And they're just not connected.

It doesn't help.

And if there's no context and the words are not connected,

it's really hard to use them and to remember them,

and to use them in your speaking.

So a much better idea is to learn vocabulary by topic

and to use things like mind maps.

And I'm really excited 'cause I'm using mind maps

in my new course,

and they really help students connect vocabulary

around a topic and use it much more effectively.

What's more, in IELTS Speaking,

generating ideas is really important.

And these mind maps help you not only connect vocabulary,

but to connect ideas as well.

And so, being able to generate ideas and link your ideas,

that's so important and so useful for IELTS Speaking,

especially part three.

So be careful with the word lists,

focus on learning vocabulary by topic,

using such things like mind maps and other tricks

and ways of doing it.

Let's move on.

Mistake number five, no pain, no gain.

Now, (laughs) I think this probably comes

from a lot of teachers at school years ago

when you were growing up

and the way English was presented and practiced

was that it's just very hard work.

Oh, it's so difficult, oh, it's so hard.

Or you'll never really succeed unless you spend

hours and hours working very, very hard,

repeating all the words.

Like the idea of pouring this knowledge

or stuffing this knowledge into your head.

Oh, it's nonsense.

I mean, no wonder so many students drop out

and give up learning English.

Because the feeling is so negative

and it's gotta be hard work.

So many students actually believe learning English grammar

or vocabulary should be hard work and difficult.

Guys, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, right?

The minute that you make this change in your head

and say, English, it's not difficult.

It's easy, it's possible.

Maybe I have to spend some time studying it,

but it can be fun.

It can be enjoyable.

And the whole feeling becomes positive.

And then things change because we know from research

that as your feeling is positive and you're relaxed

and you're enjoying your learning,

that's when your learning takes off.

So the idea of no pain, no gain, it must be hard work,

I don't believe it, not at all.

It's about enjoying your English

and then making your learning much more powerful.

Okay, there you have it.

Five mistakes and what to do instead.

Now, moving on.

So, do you make some of these mistakes?

Listen, if you do, that's fine, don't worry.

At least now you know what the mistakes are

and some things you can do to change

so you can start learning English in a better way, okay?

There are some ideas there.

What I want to do now

is to make this really clear and simple.

A simple four-step system that you can follow.

And this is what I call the Speaking Success System.

So here it is, there are four steps.

Try, discover, practice, and build.

That's it.

Let me go through each one and just explain how they work.

So first of all, try.

Here, you take a question,

any question that you may be practicing in IELTS Speaking,

and you try to give an answer.

What I call a spontaneous answer.

So I mean, not prepared.

You get the question and you just speak out.

You may want to record yourself so you can listen back.

But what you will see is you will discover

any knowledge gaps you may have.

You will see what you can say and what you can't say

because maybe you're lacking fluency

or you're lacking the vocabulary or the grammar.

So this just helps you know where you are

at that moment, right?

Try.

Step number two is to discover.

And here, you want to watch or listen

to a proficient or native speaker giving an answer

to that same question.

And this is great for two reasons, right?

First of all, you're going to be listening

and discovering natural spoken English.

Remember we talked about not reading

kind of academic written English?

No, you're discovering natural spoken English.

Secondly, is you're listening to the language

and those chunks we talked about in context,

which is gonna make it so much easier to learn

and to practice using them later, okay?

So, as you're listening or watching,

you're also taking notes of those chunks.

And that leads us on to the next step.

Step number three is practice.

And here, you're going to practice

repeating the chunks, okay?

And using them in slightly different ways.

And there are lots of really interesting tricks

and ways to do that.

And I will share some of those with you

in the next workshop.

And then practice answering the same question from step one.

You're answering again, but starting to use

some of these new chunks and language.

And you will see already how your answer

is getting much better.

And this leads us on to step number four.

This is a step that most people

completely forget and ignore.

Step number four is build.

And this is about building flexibility.

And this is so important, right?

What you do in step four is you take the question,

or any question, and you practice giving different answers

to that same question.

Even if that question is the basic, where do you live?

Or where are you from, right?

You've got your answer.

And most students have a kind of memorized answer

that they stick with.

And therefore, they are chained and tied to that one answer.

And if they make a mistake, they panic, they get nervous.

But the secret is to practice lots of different answers

to that same question.

Because that builds up your flexibility.

It releases you from the chains of memorization.

It makes you sound natural,

but you're also building up the flexibility

and the confidence by improving the level of your English,

not just focusing on exam technique.

So that step of building flexibility

by giving different answers to the same question

is so important.

But it's what most people forget because they don't know.

But now you do.

(air whooshes) So those are the four steps.

Try, discover, practice, build.

That is the Speaking Success System.

Everyone who uses it can succeed in IELTS Speaking,

including you.

Now you can go and succeed.

Don't take my word for it.

Have a look at what some of the students

who are studying with me say.

So, you might understand how the system works in theory,

but maybe you need some more examples, right?

So I'm running a free webinar, a free training for you

where I will go into the system in depth,

giving you very specific examples for you to follow.

All you need to do is click on the link below

in the description below the video or the message box.

And you can register for the webinar.

It's totally free. (laughs)

Of course it's free, right?

And listen, even if you never ever ever buy

my online course, that's fine.

I think the value you get from the webinar in itself

will significantly help you on your journey

preparing for IELTS Speaking.

Helping you to become that confident English speaker

and getting the score you need in your IELTS Speaking test.

Finally, if you would like to review

the Speaking Success System from today's workshop,

you can, again, just below, down below,

click on the link and you can download a free PDF

giving you a summary and explanation

of the Speaking Success System.

And at the same time, you can register

for the webinar, if you like.

I strongly recommend it.

Listen, thank you so much for watching this video today.

I do appreciate it.

And I'm already looking forward

to seeing you in that webinar.

Take care, my friend, bye-bye.

(upbeat music)