here are some common mistakes so what we're going to do is talk about these very very briefly then I will pretend to be a student who is doing one of these common mistakes in the comments what I want you to tell me is which of these am I doing all right so robotic delivery So speaking like a robot memorized answers and giving a memorized answer instead of just a normal answer trying to impress the examiners so think about the things that people try and do to impress the examiners way too long and way too short okay so think about these it might be multiple ones um or it might just be one but let's start with the first question my favorite website is is Advantage because it helps me with my is scores so that's the first one uh what do you think would be the problem with that one which of these things do you think is the problem in the comments let me know pretty obvious it's too short but why is that a problem so I mean the grammar was fine the vocabulary was fine the fluency was fine pronunciation was fine why is that a problem well you're not really giving the examiner enough to go on if you give a really really really short answer to a question and they're going to be they might ask you follow-up questions like why or can you you know asking you to develop your answer a little bit more that might put you off it might be like oh am I am I doing something wrong it'll cause extra stress you want to be developing your answer a little bit more than that now for part one you don't have to develop it much more than that but just giving one a one sentence answer wouldn't really be enough my favorite kind of weather is cold weather because I do not like to be cold when I am cold I feel bad and I shiver because it is very cold I always like warm weather warm weather is nice that's why I like the summertime so in the comments what do you think about that one was it a memorized answer trying to impress examiner too long to short robotic delivery what do you think have a look again in the comments and D trans is robotic delivery yeah so I mean this is not really a student's fault it can be a couple of things number one it can be because you're really stressed out um it is a very stressful exam obviously you you know you might have a lot of pressure in terms of it might cost you your job it might lead to your family being you know upset with you you might have a Visa waiting for you it is a very very high stakes test what happens is people just you know kind of climb up and speak in a very very robotic way so that is a problem because you're not being as fluent as you could be also if you are so stressed out that you are speaking in that way then people tend to make in my experience more grammar and uh vocabulary mistakes because they're just not relaxed and speaking in a natural way so there's lots and lots of problems you can have there the other reason is a lot of people have been taught that the ielt speaking test is a formal academic test and you should speak in a formal academic way it's not it's a speaking test about how you would speak to a normal person in a normal situation one of the key pieces of advice is just speak to the examiner in the same way that you would speak to a friend or a colleague or a classmate or a teacher someone who you know when you're not speaking in a really really informal or formal way just in a in a normal way would be good so you could say that I'm a Real Fashion Easter and I wouldn't really dress down once in a blue moon because I am a Real Fashion a holic and fashion is my life I would die for fashion so when I'm in the mood I go to the shopping center with my bodies and we buy the play site and we spend lots of money buying new clothes so in the comments what would you say is the problem there to thank you for watching this video I want to give you a free course that has helped thousands of students improve their I speaking score what it's going to do is take you through every single part of the test and give you strategies for part one part two and part three and also allow you to practice at home for free and get feedback to sign up for that for free all you have to do is just click the link in the description thanks very much and let's get back to the video memorizing no Robin said trying to impress yeah so that person is trying to impress The Examiner and what they're doing is they're just thinking of as many big words and idioms and you know fancy vocabulary as they can they they are not answering the question they're not thinking about answering the question they're approaching the test as if it is a vocabulary test you can also try and impress examiner with fancy grammar structures and things like that but that person was principally thinking that the test wasn't a speaking test it was a vocabulary test and ignoring these things all right so when you're doing that when you're focusing just on vocabulary then you're not really focusing on being coherent and answering the question so there's a relationship between these two you should worry about these and you shouldn't worry about one more than the other if you are just focusing on grammar and being 100% accurate all the time then your fluency tends to go down all right because you you can't think of the perfect grammar every single sentence and hope to have really really good fluency same with your vocabulary if you're just focusing on vocabulary then your fluency and your coherence tend to be affected so there is a relationship between these two remember it's a speaking test and these are components of speaking it's not just a pronunciation test or just a vocabulary test or just a grammar test or just a fluid test so we've talked about robotic delivery we've talked about trying to impress The Examiner we've talked about being too short memorized answers this is when obviously you memorize an answer and this really trips people up because what you'll do is you'll memorize an answer for a common question like tell me about your home town or describe your home or one of these like what is your job do you what do you like to do in your free time so they'll memorize that answer and they'll give a a very very very very long answer to a question and I'm sure you've heard people do this what that means is two things normally that will affect your coherence because you're not really answering the question a really good example was I was working with a student and I I asked them is your hometown a good place to grow up and they told me about the architecture in their Hometown their transport system in their Hometown their what else did they talk about um education system like telling me everything about their Hometown and I said to them you just memorized an answer and you've about your hometown and you've given me that so that obviously affected their their coherence what will also happen when you memorize an answer is the examiner will not think oh my God this person is amazing The Examiner will think this person has memorized an answer I'm pretty sure let's ask them a more difficult question or a question on a different topic or a followup question and see how they cope with that they'll ask you a different question and what people who memorize answers normally do is like uh uh uh I don't know how to answer that because it's not a memor because I haven't memorized an answer so you're not fooling The Examiner they're trained in these things they know what you're doing they do it for for a job um could someone come into your job and try and trick you on something as silly as that hopefully not so why do you think the examiners would fall for that you've just demonstrated that you you can't speak English here's these common mistakes and let's look now at Best Practices to thank you for making it this far in the video I want to give you 10% off our VIP course I VIP course is the most successful I course in the world that is a fact because we have more band seven eight and nine success stories than any other I course in the entire world we do that by simplifying the whole I process process supporting you with some of the best is teachers in the world and being with you every step of the way until you get the score that you need all you have to do is just look down in the description just click that and you can sign up if you have any questions about the VIP course always feel free to get in touch with us we answer 100% of the questions that we get hope that you become a VIP if not enjoy the rest of this free video so I'm not going to give you the best practices what I'm going to do is I'm going to pretend that I am a student in the test all right and I'm going to answer them as best I can and then we're going to come up as a group in the comments you're going to tell me some of the things that you think I did right remember we're going to be basing everything on these pronunciation grammar vocabulary fluency and coherence and compare them also with the the bad examples that we showed you here I would have to say hands down my favorite food is steak so my wife cooks this for me every Friday normally I go for a workout and been lifting weights and running around and I'm really really hungry so what I get is steak with chips mushrooms and onions and I just feel fantastic after I have that and normally have a little glass of red wine to go along with that as well in the comments tell me some of the things that you think I did well and so how could we create some best practices by the way that wasn't a perfect answer or an answer that you should copy or an answer that you know that's the only way to answer that what's your favorite food there are a million ways that you could answer that that could get you a band nine the content wasn't important what we're trying to get are these best practices the things that you can learn from so that you can not copy that answer but model it and and learn from it so a lot of you are saying that the answer was too long a lot of people learn from teachers and from online resources is that you should use use a set number of sentences that like you should say three sentences or you should say a set number of words like it should be 50 words long that is not how you should think about it you should think about the answer as how can I answer this question naturally how if somebody ask me this question under normal circumstances how would I answer it don't be thinking of number of sentences or anything like that I love to watch us crime dram so there's a few of those that I've really become addicted to in the past uh principally Sopranos the wire and braking bad so these are all very very long series um and what I like about them is they're very episodic so that you can just go from episode to episode to episode um and it's try and watch like one or two a night but sometimes it goes a little bit over that because they are very very addictive from that what would you say are the good things that you could use to model as well someone said the idea generation was good I wouldn't really say idea generation for the speaking test so much because remember part one is about you you can't get it wrong so you're not thinking of an idea like making something up really what you're doing is just talking honestly about what you're like that was my favorite food that were those were the the my favorite TV programs and those are much much easier to talk talk about than to make something up like to generate ideas sometimes you'll have to do that um but most of the time it's better just to speak naturally a little pause for thinking yeah so fluency does not mean speaking without pausing ever you do need to think all right um it is better to think for a couple of seconds and then give your answer than to immediately begin talking and then get lost and you know start uh uh so I don't think it's you know mandatory for you to think at the beginning I don't think that that's a best practice um but I think the point I'm trying to make is fluency does not mean that you never pause you you it's a bad fluencies is when you're pausing at an unnatural rate examples grammar and fluent okay okay so I'll give one more example and then we can talk about what I did I used use too many apps I use hundreds of apps actually recently what I've been trying to do is to make my phone a lot healthier uh for I'm more to make me more productive so what I mean by that is in the past I had a lot of social media apps such as Facebook Instagram YouTube and that wasted a huge amount of time so I deleted all of those from my phone and now I use apps that can track my number of steps that I'm taking my sleep um General exercise calorie intake things like that um so that will help me improve in the future rather than just waste time with apps that don't really improve my life at all again what do you think about that one so all of them all of them have some some common themes all right and that's what you want to do you don't want to be copying the content or thinking this is exactly what he said or this is exactly what he did just think about the common themes amongst them so definitely a lot of you talked about that they were natural and and yes these are about me there are questions they're asking about me they're when you are in the test they're asking about you so just ask them naturally or answer them naturally that is going to help your fluency but I also think it helps your grammar your pronunciation and your vocabulary as well because you're not thinking too much um because it's just easier to talk about yourself and to talk naturally so a lot of you talked about the questions are developed I gave some explanations some examples again going back to this answering it naturally I don't think it is a good idea to answer part one questions in a very formulaic way what do I mean by that what a lot of people will do is suggest that you um like answer and then explanation and then example like that is a very very formulaic way of answering a question can that help you sure it can help you but do you answer questions in your native language in that way like imagine you're speaking to your brother your sister or your friend tonight and they asked you what's your favorite TV program or what's your favorite food you wouldn't think like my favorite food is steak explain you know and then okay it's my favorite food because blah blah blah blah blah example last week I you wouldn't really do that does that mean that you should never use explanations and examples no but just have them as like tools in your toolkit coherence so that's related to I developed the answer and I answered the specific question all right I'm a native English speaker so I don't want to say my grammar was great or my vocabulary was great because I was you know born speaking English I didn't try and focus on using really really impressive grammar impressive vocabulary what I did was just answer the questions naturally and by doing that the grammar and the vocabulary and the fluency just flowed from that if your grammar and your vocabulary and your fluency is good enough and you just answer the questions naturally these will take care of themselves but if you go into okay he asked me about my favorite food what's what are some big adjectives I can think of or what are are some idioms I can use then your fluency is going to suffer because you're thinking way too much and you're probably going to make lots of grammar and vocabulary mistakes because you'll be thinking about grammar and vocabulary that's beyond your level that you're not able to use yet so use the grammar and vocabulary that you are comfortable using to fluently develop your answer and then everything kind of looks after itself so hope you enjoyed this video if you need more help with not just your speaking preparation but your writing you're listening you're reading this is my email address we answer 100% of the emails that we receive so if you just need a little bit of help or you have a question or you want to work with us let us know via email and we will be back in touch with you or if you just want to continue on your journey with us here on YouTube this video should help you out