12 years of IELTS experience in 20 minutes
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12 years of IELTS tutoring experience in 20 minutes. Hello there, my name is Ben Worthington and in this tutorial I'm going to give you like what I find every day when I'm looking at essays, correcting essays, when I'm working with my private students and it's sort of like a list of quick

quick, I hate the word tips, tips and tricks. I hate the word tips. It's like a whole list of practical ideas you need to adopt in order to accelerate your knowledge, your education and get past that 6.5. So first, my mind goes blank. Oh my word. I see this every day with students. Now,

Quick fix for this is getting into the habit of like going to BBC every morning, reading just the headlines to start off with. You can start small. I think it is the book Atomic Habits where he's talking about, look, if you want to start going to the gym and getting fit,

first establish the habit just drive to the gym you don't even have to get out and go in there but drive to the gym every Tuesday or every morning and then after a week when you're feeling it go to the gym walk up to the door and come back and just start building up the habit so in this case

you just start by opening up bbc.co.uk or bbc.com read the headlines that's it then the next day go click on an article read it the next day click on two articles and just slowly start building it up and getting into the habit but you want to be filling your brain with ideas related to the IELTS topics be it climate change youth crime renewables energy all of that and another great

pretty practical way is listen to those IELTS vocabulary topics the tutorials that I've been publishing about renewable energy about youth crime about all these weird and wonderful topics because then you're going to learn about that topic

but with a focus for IELTS so it's a little bit more specialized but listening to those tutorials isn't going to solve the issue you need to be listening and taking notes just writing down and another activity this is what we encourage students to do on our course we send them about 16

IELTS writing task to questions, usually recent questions, and we tell them, OK, come up with ideas for each of those. Come up with positions, what you're going to write about. And it's not just about coming up with ideas. It's reading the question and generating your position, usually two positions for each body paragraph.

and then from those positions you get your ideas and what we do is we send 16 questions out to the students they reply with their ideas we look at them okay good now you know how to generate your positions and your ideas now you can drop those into a framework which we give you on our course next one no vocabulary my vocabulary is poor

I get this every single day in an email from students. A solution for this, we recently did a tutorial about how to expand your vocabulary using prefixes and suffixes and all the rest of it. And that's just a quick way. Also just learning the formulas of how to transform it into a verb, how to transform it into an adverb. And this will quickly expand your vocabulary.

Another way would be to read. But I'm not one of those tutors who's going to say, oh, the way to get a band seven is practice, practice, practice. I just, I want to smash my head against a wall when I hear tutors saying that. However, however, reading and actively reading is definitely necessary. Getting to the habit, reading, actively reading, circulating,

put in a circle circling sorry circling certain words underlining them getting the definition extracting the whole sentence putting it into your vocabulary book you can do this while you're reading articles from the BBC or from CNBC or whatever now while you're doing this okay let me just zoom out we've started off very specific

Let's just zoom out a bit. Let's talk about your study environment. Now, are you studying with the radio on in the kitchen while everybody's cooking or your kid's coming up to you, there's people coming in and out, your roommates, or are you in the library with your headphones on and completely focused because it makes a huge difference. I mean, personally, I cannot study with music that has got lyrics in it.

my mind just starts following those lyrics I get distracted and I recently sent an eight-hour YouTube video and to a student they told me they were let's work they were preparing for IELTS while listening to the some music and I was like no no no no no I mean it's all of this needs to be tested though okay maybe you can if you can good for you personally I can't so I listen to the sound of rain my wife thinks it's because I'm British

Maybe it is, but it's just that white noise in the background gets me into the zone, gets me focusing. You can even go to YouTube and look for that high focus music and stuff. Problem with that is that sometimes there's adverts in there and you're getting back to those distractions. So think about your environment. How are you working? And then the second thing is, not the second thing. Yeah, it is the second thing related to your IELTS preparation is that, and I recently learned this.

A lot of students will sit down to prepare for IELTS. And so one technique that I share with my students is just to copy out IELTS Task 2 essays, pen and paper. Just copy it out. Get a feel for it. It's boring. It's boring as heck.

but it's necessary you know especially if you haven't got a tutor you just write out the essay you look at the sentence and you write it out next step is to look cover write you look at a sentence you cover it up and then you write it out

And this is the boring stuff. This is what you need to do. I'm not going to BS you, okay? But what a lot of students will do is they'll be like, oh, I need to prepare for IELTS. Sit down. Got no idea what I'm doing. Let's go to YouTube. And then they'll overload themselves with different tutorials. And they'll listen to tutor X, then tutor Y, and then tutor Z, and just get more confused in the process because every tutor's got their own way of doing it.

they'll get more confused and then really it's sort of like this is hash and i do the same this is why i totally sympathize with you i do this with projects i'm like i'm going to do this big project it get i get stuck into it it gets tough and then i get distracted and i go and do something that's slightly easier

And the same happens. I've seen it with students. Sit down for IELTS, start watching YouTube videos because it's easier and you still feel like you're working. You still feel like you're preparing. You're watching all these tutorials. But really, if you're honest with yourself, that's not really the most effective way.

The most effective way is literally just writing, getting feedback, or as I just mentioned, look, cover, write, and then put that essay through an AI essay checker like we've got at IELTS podcast. But the point I'm saying is that the progress will be coming from the boring, common sense tasks that you need to employ in order to move forwards.

I recently discovered a phrase it's like in English we have this phrase called the silver bullet you know everyone's looking for this silver bullet that will be the solution for everything

when really what we need are just lead bullets, the boring lead bullets and eventually by firing all these lead bullets we're going to discover the silver bullet, we're going to discover the strategy, the system that works for us, the tutor that works for us.

But you won't get there. You won't find that silver bullet. You won't find the one that works for you unless you're doing the boring stuff, which is like writing out essays, getting feedback, looking up definitions, learning how to expand your vocabulary, all of this. So...

it's boring advice and I do apologize but this is you know IELTS if it was fun everybody would do it and then you know if everyone's got it it's like a degree in modern society if everyone's got a degree then its value diminishes and IELTS is tough and you need tough preparation and it's not fun right I finished my little rant on that the next piece of advice would be

If you're in a situation and you cannot afford a tutor, you're a self-study student, then

there has honestly never been a better time for you when i started the only way that you could improve with your writing or even with your speaking was with the tutor to either review your essay to go over the essay with you like one-on-one next to you or somebody who's extremely proficient in english but usually those people are quite difficult to find however

Fast forward to today and we've got this insane opportunity with technology. You can even just copy paste your essay into a Google Doc and it'll give you feedback. If you want more detailed feedback, you can use specialist software. We've got it on our site. It's completely free and it reviews your essay, looks for those grammar errors, helps you with your vocabulary. And if you upgrade to the premium, you get even more detailed feedback, enabling you to move faster.

The second point is for the speaking. Again, back when I started, the only way you could improve was literally speaking to somebody and for a lot of self-study students, they either had a friend who's pretty proficient or they had a non-native English teacher because they're cheaper or it was the only tutor that they had in their town or in their city.

or they had, if they were lucky, a native English tutor. But even then, the chances that that tutor were qualified to teach

and had the experience and had the knowledge to help the student progress, then, and we're not even just talking about like academic writing skills. There's so much more with teaching, you know, a good tutor will motivate you, will inspire you, will send you homework, will bombard you with homework, will guilt you into studying every single morning. One piece of advice I gave to one student recently was like, look,

If you listen to music every day for your commute, that's all right. But is it really going to move the needle? No. And she's like, yeah, but just listening to English podcasts like yours, Ben. No, she didn't say that. It's boring. She didn't say that. But she said like...

But listening to these academic sources and news and stuff like that is boring and it's depressing. And I was like, no worries, I get it. Listen to something that's quite addictive, like an audio book, a storybook, where you're kind of like, okay, I'm at work now, I've got to press pause. But when work finishes, I can't wait to jump back into this audio book, be it Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, whatever floats your boat, whatever interests you.

And then the other tip I was going to share regarding like there's never been a better time is there's AI tools out there that you can speak to and you can have conversations with. We're releasing one soon. I know I've been saying this for quite a few months, but it is coming. In the meantime, though, my friend Fabian, he's got a great little web app called Gligglish, gligglish.com. And you can chat there. You can use it for free.

I don't think it gives you feedback, but it just helps you, especially build your conversational abilities, which helps with fluency. So that's gliglish.com. Now, a recent student said to me, it was just yesterday, actually, she said, wow, we were going through task two together. And she said, it's never been so simple before. It's always been overly complicated. And the point that I want to make is that

A lot of students will say, oh, IELTS is easy. But the real truth is it is a challenge, especially if you come from a different academic system, which uses, which relies on sort of like memorization and regurgitation. And now you come to IELTS and you've got to start like critically thinking and you've got to get opinions and ideas and things like this. Well,

A good tutor. I mean, this is what I do. I know I'm blowing my own trumpet, so to speak, but a good tutor. The best way to approach this and any problem is just to break it down into small components, master each tiny component, and then move on to the next step. And this is exactly what we've been doing recently. We break it down.

And this is what you need to do. You need to figure out where your weak spots are. And then you do this by breaking it down. So when you're writing an essay, which part is giving you the most pain? When you're doing an IELTS writing test, which part is making you this, sorry, a listening test or a reading test? In which sections are you losing points? And then another technique is you can, I mean, I'm giving you lots of techniques here, okay?

But probably the most important thing, which I should have said right at the beginning or right at the end, is this advice works for the majority of the students.

but not everything works for every single student. You need to work out how your brain functions. You need to work out what your weak points are and then just work on those. You know, if you've got amazing vocabulary, there's no point going out and reading every single day. Maybe you need to work on your grammar skills. So what I'm saying is that

you need to make your own plan and you need to figure out your own weak spots and then work on those specifically. And then even your own techniques, like some students, what they like to do is get a listening test, sit down with it for a few hours, get the transcript, reverse engineer, figure out how the questions are formed,

Other students like to skip straight to the answers, have a brief read of the answers, then go to the questions. And other students just like to skim the reading part first, then look at the questions, then go back in further detail, and so on and so forth. There's lots of different techniques out there, and you need to find the one that works for you.

just keep that in mind okay if one of the techniques I give you doesn't work for you you're not an idiot and I'm not a fraud you just need to figure out another technique that works for you try another one and just keep going and it is tough it is tough and you do need some perseverance and some persistence and almost like an obsession and this is why I used to say I hate IELTS because it kind of gets

gets students into such a frustrating like loop and it's like oh how do i pass how do i pass and then a lot of students might just focus on paragraph um five five body five paragraph essay model instead of the four paragraph essay model when really they need to be focusing on the language skills but ielts has become such a big part of their life they're completely focused on on

finding the right essay structure when really it's just about learning the English language in better detail to a higher level and then the essay structures start becoming a little bit easier so another piece of advice figure out what's costing you points is it the language skills you know is it grammar structures is it sentence structures is it the exam skills is it time management is it essay structure and then

Get organized. Make a list of these and then just tackle each one. So for Tuesday, you've assigned sentence structure and you're going online and you're going to practice your sentence structure. Maybe it's just with a Google Doc. Maybe with some more sophisticated tool like our AI essay checker. You need to find out what works for you and then keep on doing that. And once you've tackled that weak spot, you move on to the next.

It's not amazingly fun, but this is what's needed. I'm not going to BS you. Next one. Again, this essay, this tutorial is a little bit all over the place. So we're going back to the writing essays. And some students, as I said, they suffer from my mind goes blank. Other students suffer from like an explosion of ideas.

And this one is tough. And what I've noticed is that a student who suffers from an explosion of ideas

will probably speak in a slightly incoherent way as well because this is how their brain is wired this is how their brain thinks it's like oh this point this point this point you know not everybody can deliver sort of like a coherent sentence a coherent even like a coherent group of sentences and that's not even how we speak we don't even speak in sentences

so again you need to figure out what kind of like learner you are how your brain is wired and then if you are one of these students that does suffer from an explosion of ideas like the current student i have now what i've recommended to her seems a little bit wacky but i know how to solve this because i've had this exact same problem when i was at university i found it so difficult and what helped with for me

was working on my breathing, working on my meditation, and kind of ironically, working, putting my thoughts down on paper and then organizing them instead of just going straight into writing. And what I do find is that once you become a proficient writer, this

overspills, this spills into your spoken communication and this is where we start getting traction because we start gaining skills that are insanely valuable in other areas of our life so once I became a better writer in English

I almost immediately became a better speaker. You know, I wasn't asking redundant questions. I wasn't using words incorrectly. And it just makes you it just makes life so much easier when you can communicate clearly. Another point, if you're like I was saying before,

if you're a student who's overly accurate when they speak then you've probably got too much sorry you're probably not that fluent I have worked with a ton of Chinese students who suffer from this exact problem they're so worried about making a mistake and it really holds back the fluency because they're moving they're going back a few words correcting itself correcting it and it's not flowing and it's very difficult to understand even though it could be very correct grammar

So in this example, for this, what we work on is listening to songs. Obviously, songs are very, very flowing, helps with fluency, obviously. But another way is to get some set phrases.

okay get some set phrases such as well I've never really thought about that before to be honest I don't really know the answer to this but I guess we could say just set phrases like this and what you will find is that the more you use these phrases you can make them your own so you learn you get these set phrases you start using them when you're speaking maybe with Gliklish as I just mentioned before

and then once you get more comfortable with them, start experimenting. So, the previous phrase I gave, to be honest, I've never thought about that before.

you could start modifying it by saying honestly I've never really thought about that before and just start making simple small modifications so there's a lower chance of making a mistake and we can do this with the writing as well this essay will use examples from XYZ and XYZ to demonstrate points and proof arguments and then in the next essay you write you'll say

This essay will look at these issues in serious detail using arguments from ABC and XYZ to demonstrate points and make irrefutable arguments as to why this is beneficial, for example. But we just get the basics first and then we can start elaborating on them. And just to wrap this up because we're running out of time, I think the biggest takeaway we can get from this tutorial

is getting organized figuring out what we need to work on and figuring out how to solve this issue and when I say getting organized we've got a list of errors we've got a list of tasks we're going to do in order to solve those errors

And we do them. And we're not messing around listening to stupid tutors who are confusing us on YouTube. We're not messing around doing stuff that feels good. We want to be doing really, honestly, the boring stuff. Getting organized, setting it up a schedule, setting up a routine and working towards and breaking problems down into the smallest components, mastering it, and then moving on to the next one.

And a friend recently told me how he works. He's like, yeah, I've got a list of tasks I want to do that week and I assign them to the calendar and I do this every single month. It's like, that's a genius idea, you know? So you could say on Wednesday, I'm going to be working on past participles.

I'll find a tutorial and then I'm going to write out sentences and so on and so forth and plan it, assign it to Wednesday and then Wednesday comes, you know exactly what you're going to do. So anyway, that's it from me today. I'm wishing you a really successful exam. You can do this. You can do this. You've learned your own language. You're probably already proficient in English if you can understand me.

It's just a case of making those extra steps now, getting organized, moving forward, and taking action. So all the best. Oh, just one last thing. This tutorial, completely free. I don't ask you for any money for this. The only thing that I'm asking is that if you find it useful, please post it on Facebook, post it on your social media, share it with a friend, and I'd be extremely grateful. And also, as I say every single tutorial,

go to IELTSpodcast.com. You can sign up there. You can get more tutorials about how to pass the exam fast. You can get tutorials about how to use our AI essay checker. And you'll get notified as well when we're going to be launching the Speaking web app. It's going to put an end to redundant tutors. You'll be able to save a ton of money and we'll get more students passing IELTS. So have a beautiful day. Thank you very much and good luck with your next IELTS exam.

Thanks for listening to ieltspodcast.com.