This is an IELTS Energy Podcast Episode 1565, How Creativity Boosts Your IELTS Speaking Scores.
Welcome to the IELTS Energy Podcast from All Ears English downloaded more than 35 million times with examiner-trained IELTS whiz Aubrey Carter and Lindsay McMahon, the English adventurer.
If you are stuck with a low score, our insider method will help you get the score you need to unlock your dreams.
Get your estimated band score now with our two minute quiz at allearsenglish.com slash my score.
The topic of creativity may come up on IELTS.
Will you be ready?
Today, get five key phrases to talk about someone who is creative in your life and to score high on IELTS speaking.
Do you feel like you know English, but you're always using the same basic words?
You can't find the precise or professional phrase when it matters.
Maybe you only hear sounds when natives speak.
Without subtitles, you're lost.
Fast speech, similar sounds, accents, it all blends together.
And when you do speak, you hesitate.
You overthink every sentence.
You worry people don't understand you or that you don't sound natural.
It's not a confidence problem.
It's a clarity problem.
You can solve it by knowing your current level.
Our two-minute fluency quiz shows you your current English level for free.
So you stop guessing and start improving.
Go to allersenglish.com slash fluency score and find out what's really holding your English back.
One more time.
Go right now to allersenglish.com slash F-L-U-E-N-C-Y-S-C-O-R-E.
Hello, Lindsay.
How are you?
Feeling good today, Aubrey.
How are you doing?
Excellent.
I have a question for you to start us out here.
Okay.
Are you a creative person, would you say?
Oh, I struggle with this question so much because what is creativity, right?
I know that creativity is more than just being a good artist or painter.
It's so much different than that.
So I would say probably yes.
To some extent I can be creative, you know, in at least in like ideating.
I like to come up with ideas that are maybe not what someone would think of.
Absolutely.
I agree.
Any sort of thinking outside of the box is being creative.
OK, it doesn't have to be just are you a painter?
Yeah.
Musician.
Yeah, for sure.
So would you consider yourself a creative person as well, Aubrey?
In the same way, I also am not extremely creative with the arts right, but I am a creative writer yeah, and I am creative also with my ideating, right.
Just like you guys out there listening.
You have to be really creative sometimes with your IELTS speaking answers.
I do have a pretty quick wit and I'm able to be creative, like in conversations and things like that.
Right, love that.
Yeah, IELTS does ask you know, ask you to be a little bit more creative and able to pivot on a dime, as we say, right.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And you will often be asked on IELTS Speaking about hobbies and interests or, you know, other questions might specifically ask you about your creativity.
What are some of the questions, Lindsay, that you might be asked on IELTS Speaking about creativity?
Yeah.
So you might be asked, do you enjoy being creative?
Or what did you learn about creativity at school?
What else, Aubrey?
Two more.
Maybe does anyone in your family have a good imagination?
Or do you know someone who is creative, right?
Are people in your country generally very creative?
Could be a part three question.
Yes.
And you might just have to describe that someone on part two, and you could definitely talk about someone's creativity or lack thereof.
Or lack thereof.
I love that.
Guys, before we go any further into this episode, before we get into our vocabulary for the day, hit the follow button right now in the show.
If you're not following IELTS Energy, you're probably missing bonus episodes that come out sometimes or our regular episodes, and you don't want to miss them.
Make it part of your routine and part of your test prep.
Okay.
Absolutely.
So we are going to share five band nine phrases to use when describing someone's creativity.
And then stay to the end.
Lindsay is going to share a part two answer using some of these and some impressive features so you can see how to do this in a band nine answer.
Love it.
So, speaking of a creative person, something we could say, and you already said this Aubrey, at the very top, think outside of the box.
Yeah, this means to think in an original or unconventional way.
So this doesn't have to be about the arts.
Someone at work who's good at thinking outside the box might be really creative with coming up with new ideas.
So a lot of different people you could describe in this way.
Yeah, so for example, my sister is really good at thinking outside the box.
She's always been super original.
Yeah, that's fun.
So this is an amazing phrase.
If you are describing a person, and keep in mind, it doesn't have to be true.
Whoever you're describing, maybe they're not that great at thinking outside, or you can say they're not.
She's not very good at thinking outside of the box, but she has other qualities.
Right, exactly.
It's not like the examiner is going to go and verify whether that person is outside the box.
No, they don't care.
They don't know.
They're just going to be impressed by your vocabulary.
It's about your delivery, right?
So second thing we could say is bursting with ideas.
I'm always bursting with ideas for new projects.
And this is a blessing if you are right.
Yeah, this could be about anything, music, the arts, work, right?
You can be bursting with ideas about anything.
Yes, I love it.
What else, Aubrey?
So the next one is creative spark.
So this often we'll use to talk about someone's sort of natural creativity.
So, for example, I could say as a kid I didn't really have a creative spark, but now I pride myself on my original ideas, right.
So this would be quite negative to say that someone does not have a creative spark.
There are probably nicer ways.
We would say that you know.
Instead we'll say they do be like she really has a creative spark.
You're saying she's creative.
Love it.
Love it.
Or let your imagination run wild.
Right.
And I feel like now there's research coming out that says that people need to be a little bit bored in order to be creative.
Right.
Because you need that white space, that gray space kind of.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
My.
So my kids just went to this science camp and um, Once upon a time, when I was their age, we would have been running around imagining, because they were in the woods and it was this really cool area.
All the other kids had phones.
So they were just all on their phones.
And my poor kids were like, what do we do?
It was terrible.
I'm like, oh.
It could have been so amazing.
They could have had that opportunity to be kind of bored in the middle of the woods and be creative and have you know these fun play activities.
Nope.
Everyone's just on their phones.
Well, maybe there'll be a backlash.
Like there'll be, I think, in 2026, there'll be like more of a departure from that and trying to head towards creating spaces where not just kids but adults too.
Gosh, adults too.
Right, i know we're not the best examples for our kids, but if all these other parents are giving their 10 year olds a phone mine are the only ones without a phone i almost feel like i have to.
I'm still not going to, but i feel bad that my kids are the only ones without a phone.
Yeah, we need to.
All of us parents need to band together.
Don't give a kid a phone until i don't know 16 for sure.
Well, i know 25.
Didn't uh didn't, australia just ban social media for kids?
I think I did see that.
I don't know if it's 16 or 18 or what it is.
So that'll be an interesting experiment.
We're gonna have to wait a few years to get the data is the only problem.
Right.
I mean that creates a whole other conversation of like do we have to take away our freedoms in order to choose what's right for us?
I think that a government would have to do that.
I wish we could choose it on our own.
Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of like having the government make decisions like the nanny, right?
Either.
So it's a tough one, Aubrey.
But it is tough.
So here's an example for this phrase, let your imagination run wild.
I tried to write a novel, but I'm not good at letting my imagination run wild.
I feel like adults really get in their own way though, because they have an idea of what creativity looks like.
And then they're like, oh, I'm not this kind of person.
So I can't do this.
Totally.
This statement's true for me, though.
I tried to write a novel and I'm not very good at Coming up with some original, unique plot and like you'd have to be so creative to like have real characters developed and think of something that hasn't been done before.
That's tricky.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, that's true.
It's hard.
What would be another one, Aubrey?
The fifth one.
All right.
Our last phrase is put your own spin on something.
So, for example, my grandma is the best cook.
She always puts her own spin on recipes.
So this is instead of following it exactly, she's changing it up.
She's making it her own.
And we can do this for cooking the arts at work if we change anything to make it our own.
Or even different podcasts.
Like we have our own spin on English learning here, which is different from any other podcasters, that we were friends, our friends, our other podcaster friends that are also teaching ESL.
Right.
So any kind of creative work, you are indeed putting your own spin on it, whether you know it or not.
Exactly.
You guys are putting your own spin on your IELTS study, right?
Doing it a little bit in your own way, figuring out what works for you.
And these phrases are going to boost your vocabulary scores.
They're all I don't know that I've ever heard a student use any of these.
They're a little more rare and they're very flexible.
Whether you're talking about you know, a friend or yourself hobbies.
There are a lot of answers that you could sneak these into.
Yeah.
And we'll see that in the part two example here that I'll give in just a minute.
So here we go.
Quick break.
Do you want to know what score you would get if you used these strategies on the IELTS exam today?
We have created a free IELTS quiz that will tell you what you would likely score on IELTS.
You can take the quiz, get your predicted score and we'll also give you free IELTS materials appropriate for your level to help you improve your score.
Go to allersenglish.com slash my score for our free IELTS quiz.
That's allearsenglish.com slash M-Y-S-C-O-R-E.
All right, Aubrey, we're back from break.
So we'll go ahead with a part two and I'll give an answer.
That might not be.
This episode is about creativity and it might not be as obvious, but I'll tie it in.
I'll make it work.
Awesome.
Okay.
I'm excited to see how you do it.
I'm going to set my timer here.
Remember guys that you have two minutes for your IELTS part two answer.
And the instructions are confusing because they say you have one to two minutes for this.
And don't forget that you actually have to use the full two minutes or your fluency score goes down.
That's really misleading.
Yeah, it's tricky that the instructions say that.
It's confusing.
So be sure to speak for the full two minutes.
Speak until the examiner stops you.
They will be timing you.
Okay.
All right.
So, Lindsay, describe a person you admire.
All right.
This is a fantastic question.
When I think about all the people I admire, it really comes down to my dad.
So my dad grew up in a lower middle class family in Wilmington Delaware, where I think his dad was a mailman.
And I think his brother, I think he might have drilled the street.
He himself might have had summer jobs drilling the streets or doing very, very working class type jobs, but he decided at some point that he wanted to go to optometry school and become an optometrist.
And so what I like about my dad's creativity is more his ambition, right?
I admire him because he's an ambitious person and because he chose to build a business, to become an entrepreneur, to start a practice in optometry, in an area that he was truly fascinated by.
What I heard was that he took a psychology class Um, and they hit the part where they talked about the eye, like the way the eye interacts with neurology, and it became totally inspired.
All of a sudden he was bursting with ideas and that created kind of a, that erupted a creative spark in him.
That got him a chance to see this is what he wanted to do in his life.
So he started thinking outside of the box.
And when he started his practice, it was 1980 or 81.
He had just had me, his child.
And he used to tell me he would go into the alley and cry during his lunch hours because he didn't know how he was going to pay his mortgage back for the office.
And you know, he didn't share that with my mom and said he just cried to himself.
So what he had to do was think outside of the box by creating new ideas for his business, buying new equipment, creating new programs with his employees that truly made his practice the most successful in town over the course of 25 or 30 years.
He let his imagination run wild and didn't limit himself to like the traditional structures of what a business should look like.
And so what this resulted in was his staff loved working for him.
He was successful.
Oh, what an amazing answer.
Did it feel long?
No, I could have gone a little further, but I was just trying to make sure I was organized here and that I was tying in the vocabulary we came up with.
Because you wouldn't think like an optometry.
We're going to talk about creativity and optometry, but there was a lot of creativity right.
So I had to tie that in there.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
Awesome.
You can find a way to work those in.
And you did so well talking about how he had this creative spark after starting to learn about the eye.
And then he had to think outside the box of how to make this business work, right?
You used a lot of these phrases, band nine for vocabulary for sure.
And another note here, everyone out there listening, It's not just the idioms Lindsay was using.
There's so much vocab here like, for example, optometry or optometrist words like that, that you may, you for sure, know them in your first language.
But if you haven't had a chance to talk about an optometrist, you might not know that.
You have to remember that.
A lot of these industry specific words.
You need to know them in English so that you can be ready for a question like this.
That's a good point.
How can we make sure in our preparation Aubrey, that we get access to those words or we get exposure to those more niche based words?
We've done a lot of episodes about this.
I hope you guys are going back and listening to the archives.
Medical terminology clothing some of the specific language that you need for these specific questions.
Right.
And another thing that you can do, we're always talking about taking in lots of ideas.
Don't just listen to like pop culture podcasts.
Right.
Don't just watch the news.
Listen to, you know, watch tv shows and listen to podcasts on a variety of different topics so that you are learning medical terminology, legal terminology, crime terminology right, you need to be very eclectic in what you listen to and read 100.
I love it.
So it's all about again, the preparation.
The quality of your preparation equals the quality of your test day.
Right, absolutely Great job on that part to be ready with these high scoring phrases that are pretty flexible.
Practice using them for lots of different IELTS speaking questions so that you're ready.
You have it in your active vocabulary on test day.
Nice, all right, I love that.
And that kind of is the takeaway for today, right?
So we're not just gonna show up at the exam and these smart different, unique words, high-scoring words, they're not just gonna show up in our vocabulary.
We have to do something to make sure they show up on demand when we're asked this certain question, right?
It's all about the preparation.
Exactly, right?
So put in the work, make sure that you are ready with that high-scoring vocab.
All right.
Good stuff, Aubrey.
We'll see you next time.
You have a good rest of your day.
All right.
You too.
See you next time.
Okay.
Bye.
Thanks for listening to IELTS Energy.
Hit subscribe now, and don't forget to find your estimated band score at allearsenglishcom.
Slash my score.
Want to get started?
Head to CarMax.com for details and get pre-qualified today.
Want to drive?
CarMax.com.
