Episode five, speaking part one.
Tip number two, get writing.
G'day, my name is Glenn Steering and I've been teaching English as a second language and English as a foreign language for nearly 10 years, both in Australia and overseas.
I've prepared exam students throughout that time and have taught communication skills at university level to students who have entered through the IELTS and English as a second language pathway.
Some of my students have scored extremely highly in their IELTS exams and, as a result, have been able to work for internationally renowned organizations such as the United Nations.
This podcast is a combination of the strategies, tips and tricks that I've learned over that time to make sure that you have the best chance possible to achieve your maximum score.
Are you ready?
Let's go.
Welcome back to IELTS in the Sun.
I'm Glenn, your host.
This is the first in-depth look at a particular IELTS task, the Speaking Part 1.
This is perhaps the most similar part of the exam for students and across years and, from that fact, the most predictable.
For that reason, it's the easiest part of the exam to prepare for and potentially the easiest place to gain marks.
For these reasons, It is towards the beginning of this series.
In this episode, I will be talking about the most common topics to get and how to prepare for them.
I will be giving you a model answer and we will be breaking down the grammatical elements of the model.
In the previous episode, I said that this is the opportune time to improve your grammar mark.
And in this episode, I will show you how to do it.
In later episodes I will talk about specific topics you might receive, but the focus of this episode is on what you need to know right now and what's applicable to your speaking mark as a whole.
Your listening task for this week is what are the most common topics to receive?
When you're invited into the room for your speaking exam, you'll be asked your name and how you are, both to check your identity and to set the tone of the conversation.
And that really is the key.
It's a conversation, not a job interview, so language can be relaxed, informal and natural as much as is possible and appropriate in an exam setting.
In fact, examples of connected speech and connections like i'm and contractions i've, gonna and wanna are expected and will help you with your mark in the speaking exam.
Once introductions are done, you'll get your first set of questions.
In all, you'll receive 12 questions over three specific topics.
Even though topics might be as diverse as your favorite color or the weather, you will always get questions about yourself, your life and your country.
You are pretty much guaranteed to get a set of questions about your home, your hometown or your home city, or your work or your study.
That's where my tip for this episode comes in.
Get writing.
It might seem strange to you that I recommend getting writing to help you with your speaking mark, but there is a good philosophical teaching reason for this.
When it comes to language learning, we group the different skills the speaking, the listening, the reading and the writing into two categories either the receptive skills or the passive skills.
These are listening and reading.
And we call them this, because you don't have to actually put in any effort to obtain the information.
You just receive them.
But writing and speaking are a little bit different.
They're active skills.
They are productive skills.
And what we find is that often students are better in one than in the other.
And so if we can use the strength of one particular skill that a student has, we can actually use that to improve their other productive skill.
So in this case, we want to be thinking about speaking.
So a lot of students might actually be stronger in the writing.
And in that case the writing will help their speaking.
Or if their speaking is stronger than their writing, then we can also use their speaking to help their writing.
And writing is the most difficult skill to improve.
So it is the one that we want to try and look at and develop as early as we possibly can.
And because speaking part one is really the only part of the exam where you can guarantee what you will have to answer.
You can prepare for it more thoroughly than the other sections of the exam.
I recommend writing between 150 and 300 words about your life, covering multiple aspects and getting it as grammatically correct as you can.
I don't want you to think of it as a script and it will become obvious if you have responses scripted.
I want you to think of it as a bank which you can draw upon when you are asked questions and to be aware of the correct grammatical structures and vocabulary necessary for this part of the exam.
Ideally, you want this checked by a teacher and you can use this exercise to improve your English overall.
But even word processes and other programs will correct your grammar and your word choice, doing this.
I know AI is all the rage at the moment and ChatGPT is very popular now, but it is definitely more, much more beneficial if you write it and correct it yourself, especially with guidance.
Now i know that if you are going to use chat, gpt or one of these, one of these other resources to or tools to help you, then whatever i say is not going to stop you from doing that.
If you are going to do that, what i would recommend that you do is write it first yourself, then maybe get something from ChatGPT and compare them.
And that way you will actually be able to see what the differences are.
It's not as good as having a teacher instruct you and correct you and explain why things aren't used like this, but i know i'm not going to be able to convince all of you in that, so that is uh, probably the the least worst option that you could do in this regard.
What I am going to do here is read something I wrote about myself, as if I was preparing for the exam.
What I want you to do is pay attention to the different grammatical structures and how they are used.
I will then go through them and you can see how many you identified correctly the first time.
You can then use this as a model or to give you ideas as to what you can say and how you can prepare particular answers for particular questions.
It's by no means comprehensive or perfect, but it doesn't have to be.
Where relevant, I'll point out some of the language and pronunciation items that cross over with the grammar.
Keep that in mind as well.
I'm Glenn and I'm 40 years old.
I live in Perth and grew up in Perth, but I've lived in Darwin in the north of Australia and in Bunbury in the southwest of Australia as well.
Perth is the wildflower capital of the world, and there are more species of flowering plants here than in the Amazon rainforest.
I also lived in Buenos Aires, in Argentina, for five years, where I learned most of my Spanish and different forms of dancing.
It took me a while to get used to the different accent there, but after a while it wasn't a problem.
I used to be extremely active and played sport for most of my life.
After I finished playing competitive sport, I took up dancing, which is why I moved to Argentina to learn tango.
Whilst I was in Argentina, and especially during COVID, I started dancing much more flamenco and was planning on living in Spain to study in a flamenco school.
I was applying for a visa to Spain, whilst back in Australia when I had a car accident that left me a paraplegic
I spent seven weeks in intensive care on a ventilator, learning how to breathe again, and nearly six months in hospital overall.
If I had known what would have happened, I probably would have gone on a holiday instead.
But this time in hospital, did make me think about what I want to do in life and how I can achieve it.
I would like to keep progressing my education, even though I already have a master's in science, but I'm going to keep studying and working towards becoming a literacy specialist.
Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to break down each part of what I just said and then give a little bit of an outline of what grammatical structure is being used here.
And you can change these to however you like, or you can think about any that I've missed, or whatever that might be appropriate for you to use as well.
I'm Glenn and I'm 40 years old.
A contraction of I am, form of be.
I live in Perth and grew up in Perth.
Simple present and simple past using the irregular verb to grow.
But I've lived in Darwin in the north of Australia and in Bunbury in the southwest of Australia as well.
Perfect tense, perfect present.
Perth is the wildflower capital of the world, and there are more species of flowering plants here than in the Amazon rainforest.
A comparison using more and then.
I also lived in Buenos Aires, in Argentina, for five years, where I learned most of my Spanish and different forms of dancing.
Dancing which is a gerund.
It took me a while to get used to the different accent there, but after a Used to meaning comfortable with.
I used to be extremely active and played sport for most of my life.
Used to, meaning an activity that is no longer ongoing.
Extremely, an adverbial.
After I finished playing competitive sport, I took up dancing, which is why I moved to Argentina to learn tango.
Whilst I was in Argentina, and especially during COVID, I started dancing much more flamenco and was planning on living in Spain to study in a flamenco school.
Various continuous forms and using much more.
I was applying for a visa to Spain, whilst back in Australia when I had a car accident that left me a paraplegic
Past continuous that was interrupted by an event.
I spent seven weeks in intensive care on a ventilator, learning how to breathe again, and nearly six months in hospital overall.
If I had known what would have happened, I probably would have gone on a holiday instead.
A conditional, a hypothetical past or third conditional, depending on how you want to think about that one.
But this time in hospital, did make me think about what I want to do in life and how I can achieve it.
Want to, in rapid speech or connected speech, down to wanna.
I would like to keep progressing my education.
Would, in terms of modality.
Even though I already have a master's in science, but I'm going to keep studying and working towards becoming a literacy specialist.
Gunner, again a form of connected or rapid speech from going to shortened to gunner, but also looking here at the future tense, although English doesn't really have a future tense.
So I hope this episode on the IELTS speaking part one has been useful for you.
What I would recommend that you do is you use these little frames that you have to expand some possible responses to the questions that you might get asked in the IELTS speaking.
In the following episodes we're going to be looking at the speaking parts two and three, and in this case we can't really prepare scripts or a bank of responses like we have here, but The strategy is still similar.
So if you want to look at the different potential questions that you can get in your IELTS speaking, then I would highly recommend you formulating your answers in written form, because it will help both your speaking and, in the longer term, your writing as well.
A reminder for this week that your listening task is...
What are the most common topics to receive in speaking part one?
So from me here, the host, Glenn Spearing, it's me saying hoo-roo.
Goodbye.
Have a good one.
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