Vocabulary for IELTS & TOEFL Essay Success

Hi.

I'm Rebecca from www.engvid.com.

Do you want to get a higher score on your TOEFL, or IELTS, or TOEIC essay?

In the next five minutes I'm going to show you how to do this in a really easy way.

You just have to follow two easy steps.

Take your essay question and find the key words there, and then replace them with synonyms.

Now, that might seem very easy and obvious, but you'd really, really be surprised to know

that lots of students don't do that.

What they do instead is that throughout their essay they keep using the same words that

are used in the essay question.

And if you do that, what you're showing is that you don't have a very good vocabulary,

you don't have a rich vocabulary, you don't use...

You don't have many synonyms to express the same ideas and thoughts.

And what you need to do instead is to show off your vocabulary, and the way you can do

it is to take the question, find the key words and make sure that you can generate lots of

synonyms for those key words, because if you can do that then you'll use all those kind

of synonyms throughout your essay instead of repeating the same vocabulary.

Isn't it kind of a shame when you only have maybe 250 words on your IELTS essay or 300

to 350 on your TOEFL essay to keep using the same vocabulary?

Don't do that.

Learn to do something a little bit differently.

Let's see how to do it. Okay?

So I've got a sample question, here, from the TOEFL exam.

A part of the question.

This is...

This says: "Many students choose to attend university outside their home countries."

Okay?

And maybe after that they said: "Do you agree or disagree?" or something like that.

Okay? Doesn't matter.

So, what are the...?

How do you find the key words?

Key words are almost any of the important words.

For example: "many".

Right?

So if you're going to talk about this in your essay and you're going to give your opinion,

then you want to use different words.

So what could you use instead of "many"?

Well, try to make a list.

For example, I made my list: "myriad students", "countless", "an increasing number".

It could be another word, it could be an expression.

Anything that expresses the basic idea.

And sometimes when you're using a synonym you're expanding on the idea, and that's okay, too.

You're changing the idea a little bit, and that's all right.

That's fine.

So, that was one of the key words.

Second key word: "students".

If they said "students" in the essay question, don't use the word "students" every time in

your essay.

Use another word, like: "pupils", or "young people", or "scholars".

Okay?

Again, changing the meaning.

"Scholar" is not exactly students, but it's okay to use that word somewhere.

It also shows you have a lot of vocabulary, rich vocabulary.

Next: "choose to". Right?

Instead of saying: "...students choose to", what else could you say?

You could say: "they decide to", "they opt to", "they prefer".

All right?

So, what I'm suggesting that you do is take some of the essay questions. Right?

And when you're practicing before the exam, just from the essay questions see if you can

generate lots of synonyms for the words used in the essay question.

If you can do that, believe me, you're going to use those words in your essay writing.

Let's see how it continues.

"...to attend", "Many students choose to attend", what could you use instead of "attend"?

You could say: "to join", "to enroll in", "to apply to", "to pursue undergraduate studies"

or "pursue graduate studies".

All right?

Again, we're changing the meaning a little bit, but it's the same basic idea. Right?

Because in order to attend you need to enroll, you need to apply, etc.

"Many students choose to attend university", here's another key word.

Instead of saying "university" 15 times in your essay, you might want to say:

"academic centres", or "an academic program", or "institutes of higher learning", or an "educational institution",

or "school", "college", "academy".

Okay?

Instead of the word "university".

Don't keep using the same word.

Use the same idea, but not necessarily the same word.

Next.

Next part, key part: "...outside their home countries".

Instead of saying: "outside their home countries", say: "abroad", "overseas", "in a foreign country",

"away from their homeland".

Right?

Now, you don't have to write this sentence again, but what I'm asking you to do is to

take the question, find the key words, and see if you can come up with lots of vocabulary

for that.

In this case, what was the topic?

Education. Right?

So this way you'll be able to check whether you have lots of educational vocabulary.

Now, I also have some other lessons and videos all about how to generate more vocabulary

in certain fields.

You might want to check out some of those other videos.

They also have videos about how to use vocabulary besides "good" and "bad". Right?

So, do that.

All right.

Sorry, I just realized something here.

"Institutions" wrote it a little too often.

"Institutions", okay?

That was pointed out.

All right, we're going to do one more example and then we'll go from there.

Now let's look at another essay question.

Okay?

This one also comes from the TOEFL exam, but you can use questions from your IELTS exam

if you're going to be appearing for the IELTS.

No problem.

So, it says: "A person should never make an important decision alone."

So, what would be the key words here?

Okay?

So they would be: "person", let's say here: "should never", "important", "decision", and

"alone", so that's what we're going to try to find synonyms for.

"Person", instead of saying "person", you can say: "an individual".

Or sometimes when you have something like this what you can do is turn it into the plural.

Right?

That will also make it much easier for you to write throughout your essay.

Because when you say "a person", then you sometimes have to say: "himself", "herself", "oneself".

Instead of that, you can say: "people" and you just say "themselves" and you don't have

to give it a gender. Okay?

Next: "A person should never", so you could say instead of "never", you could say: "at no time".

Okay?

"...make an important", instead of "important", you could use words like: "critical", "crucial", "significant".

The point is not that I'm giving you these words.

The point is whether you can think of these words. Right?

These are some words that I thought about.

If you...

When you try this exercise cannot come up with even, let's say at least two words, maybe

three, ideally three, but at least two words for every key word in the essay question,

then you're probably going to have difficulty writing your essay with enough interesting

vocabulary, so it means you need to work on vocabulary.

Next: "decision", you could say: "life choice", "selection", "determination".

And at different points in your essay use a different term.

Right?

"Alone", instead of saying "alone", you could say: "by oneself", "on one's own", "by themselves".

All right?

If you said: "People.

People should never...

At no time should people make significant life choices by themselves."

Okay?

Of course, you don't have to write the question in your own words, but in fact throughout

your essay you are going to be arguing a particular point of view for which you will need these

kinds of vocabulary words.

Now, if you want more tips on doing well on your TOEFL exam or on your IELTS exam, if

you're doing TOEFL, check out our website: www.goodluckTOEFL.com;

if you're doing IELTS, check out www.goodluckIELTS.com.

And on both...

In both of these websites you'll find not only tips, but also vocabulary that you can

use on these tests and you'll also have lots of essay questions which you can use so that

you can do this exercise for yourself; and model essays where you'll see good vocabulary,

interesting, varied vocabulary, advanced vocabulary being used in actual sentences.

Okay?

So, also, if you want to do a quiz on this, go to our website at www.engvid.com.

And all the best with your essay.

You can do it.

Lots of ways to do it.

Check out some other videos also that talk about ways you can do well, but this is definitely

one way, by improving your vocabulary.

All the best to you.