[0:00]Let's start off by talking about high school. Who was your favorite teacher in high school? Um, I think my favorite teacher in high school was Ms. Malika. She was my second grade teacher. And I think she eventually, like at the later stages, she became my eighth grade teacher as well. So I was very familiar with her and she remembered me. Um, so we had good memories together. What was your favorite subject in high school? Uh, my favorite subject would be, I think, was English because I liked reading stories and novels and it just kept me engaged. Wherein like with the other subjects, you had to, um, it was more technical, but I enjoyed the reading bits and I still do enjoy reading, so I'd say English. Do you ever miss being in high school? Um, I do actually, because, um, I started working very early. I did not get to experience the university or college. So, um, the memories that I have or the friends I have is from high school and I do think about times where we could just go back and have a reunion and like have that moment again. Now, let's talk about transportation. Do you take public transportation or private transportation? Um, I do not like public transportation. Um, I moved to Dubai a few years ago and I got my driving license just because I hated going in metros or busses. Um, so I got my driving license and I enjoy driving. Is it easy to catch public transportation in your country? Um, in my country, yes, it's quite easy and convenient, I would say. The streets are very busy, the traffic is crazy. Um, so it's easy, easier for people to get to work with public transportation. Yeah. Is driving a private car popular in your country? Um, I would say in countryside, it's quite popular, as there's not as much modes of transport as in the big cities. So in the countryside, it's quite popular, wherein in the big cities, people prefer taking public transportation. It's faster, it's convenient. Now let's talk about the internet. How often do you use the internet? I think every day. We are all so addicted to the internet, so yeah. What are your favorite websites to visit? Um, I think it's Instagram. I think Instagram is the one website I use every single day whenever I'm bored, um, just to see what my friends are up to. That's yeah, Instagram. Do you think that you ever use the internet too much? Um, I'd say when I'm having a bad day, I would just stay home and scroll on Instagram and just try to escape reality in a way. But on the other days, when I'm out, I do not use Instagram or any social media websites that much. Now, let's talk about your free time. What do you normally like to do in your free time? A lot of things actually. It just, I think I'm someone who likes variety in everyday life. So, just going out, checking out new place or trying different activity, seeing my friends. I try to keep busy on my days off. Are you very active in your free time? I like to think I am active. Yes. Um, if I have nothing to do, I just go to the gym or to the pool, read a book, but I try to do something on my free time. Something, yeah. What do you normally like to do on the weekend? Um, like I mentioned earlier, I like to see my friends, um, try different restaurants, cafe or an activity. Just last weekend I went to try this ice bath. Um, you just jump into a bucket of ice. Uh, so just yeah, try different things. Describe a day when you thought the weather was perfect. Where were you? Um, I was in Dubai a couple of months ago, um, just when the summer was about to end. Um, there was this day when I was just standing in my balcony. It was a bit cloudy that day. Um, and then like few minutes later, I saw the lightning and the thunderstorm and it just got darker. Um, and then we, I was standing in my balcony and I saw the lightning and I have the whole view of Dubai skyline. I could see the Burj Khalifa, the Dubai frame and I saw the lightning on top of, like right on top of Burj Khalifa, which was beautiful. I recorded it and I posted it on Instagram. Then I saw a lot of people were posting the same stories but from different places. A friend of mine came over. We had a glass of wine on the balcony and then it started to rain. Um, like heavily, rained heavily, so thunderstorm rain and it's just not very common to see that in Dubai. That's why I thought the weather was perfect because it's always hot and sunny and humid. And as soon as like the season starts to change, um, I think they do something called cloud seeding where, um, then they make it rain, apparently. Um, so it was very beautiful to see the rain. We had a nice day, nice evening in the balcony having glass of wine. Uh, looking at the beautiful weather. The traffic was very crazy by the way. The roads were flooded. Um, and I think like a lot of, we ordered some food by the way, um, and it took us two hours to get the food, the deliveries. That's the end of the two minutes. Thank you. And that's the end of part two. We're going to move on to part three now. So we've been talking about a perfect day and we're going to continue to talk about the weather. Um, what type of weather do people in your country dislike the most? To thank you for watching this video. I want to give you a free course that has helped thousands of students improve their IELTS 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. Um, I think my country, India, it's quite hot and humid, especially some parts of India. I suppose people hate the summer because it can get really intense. Uh, but where I grew up, it's not very hot. Some parts, especially the north, it's not very hot. Actually, throughout the year, um, the temperature, I'd say, would go up to 22 degrees, but wherein like down from Delhi onwards, it gets really hot and humid. It's just because a lot of people use public transportation and it's not easy to use public transportation or walk around because when it's just so hot. So I suppose they would hate the hot climate more than the cold. Yeah. What jobs can be affected by different weather conditions? Um, a lot of jobs are related to transport, I feel would be affected. driving, let's say, taxis or busses. Even the flights, pilots or cabin crew, um, when the weather is not right, the flights might be delayed and then if it's raining, the taxis would not be able to drive because of the water or the floods. I think a lot of transport-related jobs and even food for that matter, like the deliveries, um, all the delivery companies, they would have an impact of in a way. Now, let's talk about weather forecasts. What's the best way to get accurate information about the weather? Well, I personally use Google Maps, sorry, Google weather reports. Um, I'm not very sure about this one because it depends from person to person. For me, I think Google weather reports are quite accurate, but I do not have a clear answer to that. Is it easy to predict the weather in your country? Um, I suppose it is, yeah. Uh, because like I said earlier, some parts of India, the weather like the temperature doesn't go over a certain degrees, but wherein some parts are really hot and humid throughout the year.
[9:24]So I think it's quite easy to predict, but when it comes to rain or monsoon season, it's very hard. Like last, this year, sorry, a few months ago in the north of India, it was raining heavily and the rain did not stop for, I'd say, two weeks. So that was not predictable. That's the end of the speaking test. Well done. Thank you. I'd like to give you some feedback on your performance because I think that you're capable of getting one of the very highest bands. But there are some things that you just need to be aware of. So what I'll do is I'll divide the feedback up into Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and then give you feedback on fluency, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, talk about the technical parts and what band scores you would expect. To thank you for making it this far in the video, I want to give you 10% off our VIP course. The IELTS VIP course is the most successful IELTS course in the world. That is a fact because we have more about seven, eight, and nine success stories than any other IELTS course in the entire world. We do that by simplifying the whole IELTS process, supporting you with some of the best IELTS 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 would become a VIP. If not, enjoy the rest of this free video. Part one was great, and you developed your answers enough. It was like talking to a friend or talking to a colleague. You could tell that you were a little bit nervous, but those nerves didn't really in Part 1 anyway, didn't really prevent you from doing well. You were answering the questions naturally, your nervousness didn't cause any problems with fluency. On test day, you might be even more nervous. So a lot of my advice to you will be about preventing nerves taking over. The way I always describe it is our brain is kind of like a computer and stress is like putting too much, opening too many programs on your computer. You might have a great MacBook Pro, but if you put it under stress, everything kind of slows down. And that's, I think, the same with you. You've got a MacBook Pro up there for speaking English, but you're putting a little bit too much pressure on yourself. The enemy is really yourself, if that makes sense. You're more than capable of doing well. And what I would always say is I know it's difficult because you're speaking to an examiner you've never met before, but imagine a friend, imagine someone you're close with and they're just asking you these questions. Imagine you're in a coffee shop in your local area having a coffee. Maybe if they ask you some of these questions, you're like, what? Why are you asking me that? But just that sort of of frame of mind, that attitude, that often does does help students. The other thing to know is like, I would not lie to you. I'm telling you that you are very, very good. You are more than capable, so you should have confidence in yourself. Part 2 was good also. There was a little bit of repetition halfway through. You were like, yeah, my friend came around, had a glass of wine. That would be a problem if you constantly did that. So if you said something like, there was lightning, my friend came around, we had a glass of wine, we put it on Instagram. Yeah, there was lightning that day, and my friend came around. You just repeated one little bit. The reason you did that, I think, I might be wrong, is you were trying to think of more things and you wanted to keep talking while, was that correct? Yeah, that's correct. Okay. So the examiner will recognize that and probably won't mark you down for that. They would only mark you down if you did that a lot. Because there's four bullet points. What a lot of students do is they will talk about the bullet points, the four or maybe some other things for a minute, and then they'll just go back and they'll rehash them. They'll just repeat them. You didn't do that, but again, on test day, if you get nervous, it's kind of like a defensive thing to do, is look at the bullet points again. Oh, I'm just going to talk about those things. So a good tip is to, um, add maybe three or four bullet points, common things like how you felt, past, present, future, examples, stories, things related to that topic. And then when you start to think, oh, I'm running out of things to say, just look down, talk about that, and then talk about that. Just give yourself enough ammunition to use. Part 3, you did very well. In Part 3, the examiner will ask you more difficult questions. The worst thing you can do is when you get a difficult question is just a lot of people just laugh and go, I don't know. You didn't do that. Even though you did get one question that you didn't know a huge amount about, you did very well because you attempted an answer. If you attempt an answer, what you're saying to the examiner is, I don't know about this topic specifically, but there's nothing wrong with my English. Remember, it's an English test. It's not a knowledge test. Now, Band 9 is the top mark. I think you could be capable of getting a Band 9, but let's see whether you would actually get a Band 9. The first thing is pronunciation. The examiner will be thinking about two things. Clarity, can they understand all the words that you're saying? Then higher-level pronunciation features. We'll talk about clarity first. You're from India, and there's nothing wrong with having an Indian accent, a Vietnamese accent, an Irish accent. There's nothing wrong with any of those things. But a lot of the Indian students that we work with are worried about their accent being too strong. I don't think that there's a problem with having a strong accent in any accent, but I think what they're saying is that their accent causes problems for the listener with certain words. That is not an issue for you at all. There's not a single word that I couldn't understand. You still have your Indian accent, and that's a great thing. You should be very proud of it. There aren't extra marks for sounding British or sounding American. I'm sure that you know lots of Indian celebrities that have an Indian accent but speak English very, very clearly. Priyanka Chopra, for example, she speaks with an Indian accent, but you can understand every word. That's the same with you. You're doing very, very well there. One thing about being nervous and being stressed is that people can sometimes speak inside their mouth and speak at the back of their throat because it's it's just a it's a subconscious thing where we don't want to be criticized. We're afraid of saying something wrong, so we're going to speak inside our own mouth. I used to do it when I was a child. My little nine-year-old boy does it all the time. It's about confidence, you know, you didn't do that, but I could see that if you were really under pressure and you were like, let's say you had a visa deadline. And you must get this and everyone's expecting you. You could go into the test and speak inside your mouth. That could affect clarity and could drop your score a little bit. It didn't happen this time. My best advice would be, imagine you're speaking to the examiner and they are sitting against that wall and pointing 10 feet away. We're about six feet away, double that. All right. Don't, and don't be afraid of like I'm speaking quite loud to you at the minute. Don't be afraid of, because you seem the type of person that, um, maybe thinks speaking loudly at someone is rude and some, I don't know, some different cultures. Is that the case in India? Or, um, yeah, it is, I think. I'm Irish, so we don't care how loudly we, you know, if you go to an Irish pub, you'll you'll you'll hear how how the volume that people speak. Up the volume a little bit. Again, pretend that they're 10 feet away instead of six feet away. You also use higher-level pronunciation features quite well. Intonation. So intonation is when our voice goes up and our voice goes down. If I come home late and my wife says, fine, that's not, that doesn't mean fine. You know. So we use intonation to convey meaning. So, fine. Fine. Same word, two completely different meanings. One, I'm in trouble, one, everything is actually fine. When people are nervous, they tend to have quite flat intonation. You didn't do that, but on test day, just be aware of that. A good tip is to, before the test, record yourself speaking and listen to your intonation. If I listen to you speak to your friends, your intonation would be more extreme, I think, because, hey, how's it going? You know, more. When people are in a test and they're nervous and they're formal, they tend to speak more like this and very, very formal. It is not a formal test. You might get an examiner who is very friendly. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes they had a, you know, everybody has a bad day, and their intonation might be quite flat and formal and robotic. People often mirror other people, especially when there's a power dynamic, like someone seems more powerful because they're an examiner. Some students go in and they have great intonation outside the test, and then they go into the test and their intonation, their speech patterns are a little bit rigid and formal and robotic. That wasn't the case, I don't think with you, a little bit maybe, but not not a big deal. Next is coherence and fluency. Coherence is, did you answer the question? If I asked you to talk about when the weather was perfect, did you actually mention a day when the weather was perfect? And you did all the questions, you actually answered them, and you developed them enough. Even some of the questions in Part 3 that you had difficulty with, you developed them enough and that was absolutely fine. I have no problems with that at all. Your fluency, the only time when you had an issue with fluency was in the middle of Part 2 when you were reformulating things and you were repeating things to try and think of other things. That is fine because you only did it once in Part 2. It's not like they focus on, oh, you paused one time or you repeated something one time. They will listen to the whole thing and base the score on the whole thing, um, and you you did an excellent job overall. You did pause at some times in Part 3 when you were trying to think, but that had nothing to do with your language ability. Some people pause, um, when they're trying to think of the correct, what's the correct adjective, or what's the correct verb to use and what's the tense to use? You didn't do that. It was only really about ideas. And again, that's related to stress and nervousness because people think that the examiner wants the best idea or the correct idea. Remember, it's a speaking test. There are no extra marks for great ideas. You could be the leading expert in the world on on weather and weather forecasting, or you could know nothing about it. It doesn't matter. All that matters is your pronunciation, your fluency, your grammar, and your vocabulary. Just do what you did. And if you get an unusual topic or a topic you're not comfortable with, do what you did, which is attempt it, but explain like, I don't really know much about this. And again, just don't put too much pressure on yourself, thinking, I need to give the world's greatest answer. You don't. For grammar, um, so there's two things that the examiner will think about. One is the range of your grammar. Do you have enough grammar? So if I ask you about the past, do you know how to use past simple, present perfect? If I ask you about things to do in the future, do you have future structures? Do you know how to use comparatives and all and superlatives and all of these different little grammar structures? Everything that I threw at you, you were able to cope with that. So I don't think there's any problem with your range of grammar at all. The second thing that the examiner will think about is your accuracy. Overall, your accuracy is very good.
[22:34]There's no systematic errors. What a systematic error is? Every time you use that part of grammar, such as articles or prepositions, every time or nearly every time you use it, you make a mistake. That means that that system, that part of the grammar, you don't know how to use that yet. You don't have that, but you do have little slips every now and again, and those are not a huge problem. For example, you have these errors. Most of the time you use prepositions correctly, but sometimes you have little slips. Most of the time you use articles, you use them correctly, but sometimes you make little slips, but they're quite rare, and they don't stop me understanding what you're saying. So if you said to me, my friend and I went to a cinema instead of, my friend and I went to the cinema, that doesn't stop me understanding that you and your friend went to a cinema. So for grammar, you would get a very high score, but on test day, if you're nervous and that MacBook Pro starts having too much pressure on it, just like a computer, we make more mistakes when we're nervous and when we're stressed out. So there's nothing wrong with your grammar. Again, the biggest enemy is really yourself. The more pressure you put on yourself, the more mistakes that you will make. Vocabulary. So there's two things that the examiner will think about, accuracy. Are you using words accurately to describe things? Nouns, verb, adjectives? Are those actually accurate? The words that you're using? You've no problem with accuracy at all. Then the second thing is range. When I ask you about weather, do you have enough weather vocabulary to do that? When I ask you about when we were talking about high school and education, do you have enough vocabulary? You do, but I think that you play it safe a little bit. The weather was nice. Are there other ways that you could describe the weather? That is not inaccurate. There's nothing wrong with that. But in a speaking test, you are capable of showing off your vocabulary more. Now, for the vast majority of people, I would say the opposite. Especially people from India tend to show off and add in these crazy, big, long, amazing words, and they think that will boost their score. You have the opposite problem, which I think that which is quite rare. You're capable of using more vocabulary, but you play it quite safe. And it all depends on what score you want. If you want the absolute top score, you don't have to every sentence be throwing in a big, complicated word, but you just have to every now and again, throw in something a little bit more advanced, and that would really, really help you. Am I correct in that you are capable of doing that? Or. Yeah. - You are. Yeah. Up to you what you want to do, but that would be my advice. So for pronunciation, if you were nervous and you were speaking inside your mouth, you would get on test day, you would probably get a Band 8, but I think that you are capable of a Band 9. I think today you were a Band 9, which is the top score.
[26:06]What it says for grammar is that even a Band 9 student can make slips. I think that today you probably would get a Band 9 on test day if you're nervous and you make them a wee bit more regularly, you would get a Band 8. Vocabulary, I think today you were a Band 8 because all of your stuff is accurate, but you're playing it too safe. Today you would get a very high score, but in our next test, I'll be expecting an even higher score, because I think you can do way better than you're currently showing. What do you think about that? Any questions or anything? No? Okay, I think we're done.
