IE 1595: Have You Been Given Bad IELTS Advice?

This is an IELTS Energy Podcast, episode 1595. Have you been given bad IELTS advice? Welcome to the IELTS Energy Podcast from All Ears English. Downloaded more than 35 million times with examiner-trained IELTS whiz Aubrey Carter and Michelle Kaplan, the New York radio girl.

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Have you ever gotten IELTS advice and weren't sure if you could trust it? Today, learn the top five most common things teachers have told IELTS students that are incorrect.

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Hello, Michelle. How are you? Hi, Aubrey. I'm doing well. I'm excited to be here. How are you? Excellent. Have you ever received bad advice, Michelle?

I think we all have at one time or another. Yeah, I think we all have. I can't think of a very specific piece of. You probably wouldn't want to call them out.

You're like, well, once my mom told me. Right, right, right. Yeah. I'm not going to tell anyone. Right. You know, I don't want to say it. Yeah. But of course, I think it happens to everybody and you have to just try and be easier, just your best judgment as much as possible.

Definitely. Well, you listeners out there, you may have been given bad advice from an IELTS teacher or just an English teacher who didn't really know IELTS.

And students often share with us advice that a teacher has given them asking if it's true, right? So especially if they're not familiar with IELTS, English teachers will give incorrect exam because each language exam is so different, is very specific. Mm-hmm. And even IELTS teachers might not be keeping up to date about changes to the exam.

So in today's episode, we're going to tell you the most common myths that students are hearing from teachers to make sure that if you have heard this advice, you know that is not correct.

Yes, exactly. And guys, make sure you hit the follow button wherever you're listening to the IELTS Energy podcast so you never miss anything from us. Absolutely. And you guys will still be hearing Lindsay's voice, but this is fun just to have Michelle on our team.

She's one of the co-hosts of All Ears English. If you're not following that podcast, definitely check it out. Hit follow. So much great vocabulary strategies over there as well that can help you on the IELTS exam.

Excellent. All right. So about advice, what's the first one? Yeah. So the first thing we've heard teachers tell students is to use difficult, complex words, even if they're not positive about their meaning or maybe using them for the first time on test day, which is not when you should be taking risks.

Yeah. This is incorrect, right? Misusing complex vocabulary is worse for your score than using simple vocabulary. So you don't want to take risks on test day.

You want to make sure that you understand the meaning of vocabulary in context, especially where in English words can mean something different depending on the context.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the examiners, they look for precise, natural usage, not just big words, right? You know, on this show, you know, we're trying to teach you many different vocabulary words, but we want you to know the meaning, how they're used. And we're not just doing it because they're

big words exactly you do need less common impressive vocabulary but you must use it correctly you must use it in the right context so be sure when you're learning new vocabulary to add it to your vocabulary notebook with the sentence you learned it in make sure you understand the context add it with new sentences that relate to you personally that you could use in ielts answers make sure that you understand how to use it correctly this is what we see maybe more than anything else from students on both writing and speaking that they're kind of just pulling a word and hoping they're using it right.

And often it's not, it's not used correctly in the context of what they're saying. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I mean, and what about the high-level academic words? Yeah, this is interesting because you actually should not use formal academic vocabulary for the entire speaking test, right?

Part three, yes, you need that more formal topic-specific vocabulary. You're talking about issues that affect society as a whole. But for speaking part one and two, you should be using categorical casual slang, natural idioms and expressions, because the examiner is asking you the kind of questions a friend would ask you.

And if you are very formal with your vocabulary, it's actually going to pull down your score. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay. So that's really helpful, guys. So don't listen to that piece of advice.

What's the second piece of advice that's not so great? Yeah. So bad advice number two is to read entire passages on the IELTS reading exam. This may sound counterintuitive.

You might be surprised to hear this. But the truth is there is not time to read every passage word for word. It's really not just a reading comprehension exam. It's testing your ability to find specific information in a text more than anything.

Right. So you really need a mix of skimming and scanning for keywords. And, you know, once you find the keywords, you're reading carefully and looking for answers, not necessarily reading every word. That's not going to be great.

This is actually why native English speakers who take the IELTS exam or many language exams end up getting a low score because they're just reading entire passages and then answering the questions. They're not using strategies and they run out of time. They just don't have time, right? So this is very important that you use strategies when answering those reading questions instead of just reading the entire passage and then moving to the questions.

That's the worst thing you can do. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right. What's the third bad advice? Number three. So teachers have told many students that you must have a British or an American accent to get a high score.

Is that true, Michelle? No, your accent does not matter. You could even have a heavy accent in your first language. But what does matter, Aubrey? Yeah.

What matters is that you are clearly understood. If you are correctly pronouncing phonemes and enunciating clearly, you can have your beautiful accent, even if it's very heavy. What matters is that the examiner can understand you. So rather than focusing on eliminating your accent or imitating an American or a British accent, your focus should be on clear enunciation, accurate phonemes, correct word stress.

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All right, let's move on to our fourth piece of bad advice. The most common bad advice we've heard from teachers is that you should memorize speaking answers. Why do you think this is a bad idea, Michelle? Yeah, well, so there's no way to know which questions you're going to get.

So if you're memorizing just entire answers, I mean, it's going to sound robotic. People can tell when you're just reciting something that you worked on. I mean, as a teacher, I've heard it a million times. You know, you really can tell.

But instead, you should practice using chunks that are flexible. So there are things that you can... It's not necessarily memorizing them, but you become so comfortable with them. And you're learning chunks that can be added to many different answers.

Right, Aubrey? Yeah. Exactly. Idioms, slang, linking phrases, these chunks that could be used no matter what you're asked, or at least really flexibly for lots of different answers.

And you made a good point here, Michelle. That wasn't something I had thought about as much. There is a chance you'll get an answer that's closely related enough to what you memorized that you could say what you memorized. But that is going to affect your pronunciation.

It's going to sound memorized. It is going to pull down your scores. But even more likely than that, you are not going to be asked a question that's anywhere related to what you've memorized. And then it's all just wasted effort.

You're asked totally different questions. You can't use any parts of any of those answers. What a waste of time. So instead, you're learning chunks. that are flexible, right?

A chunk of an idiom, a high scoring linking phrase that you can plug into lots of different answers. As you use personalized details, you're answering naturally, but with these chunks that you have taken the time to learn to improve your scores.

Right, exactly. Really good point, Aubrey. And now let's do the last one. Bad advice number five. Yes, this is about the writing exam. A teacher may have told you, write as much as possible.

The more words, the better. This is terrible advice. Why, Michelle? Why should we not just write the longest essay we can in the time we have? Well, because you only have an hour, you only have one hour to write both essays.

So you really must limit how much you write. And, you know, if you write too much, it can lead to poor organization, repetition, grammar mistakes. What else, Aubrey? Well, it also leaves you less time for planning and proofreading.

If you're planning on writing the longest essay you can, you might skip brainstorming or not do a very thorough job at it. You might end up with no time to proofread because you've spent all this time writing. And that would be devastating when you have way more words than you need to accomplish the task. There are going to be more mistakes.

Punctuation, grammar, vocabulary mistakes that if you spent a few minutes proofreading, you could catch a lot of those, change them. If it's the written writing exam, just cross it out, write it correctly above. You can change it on the computer delivered exam as well. You need that time to plan, to proofread.

You should not just be spending the whole time writing as much as you can. Yeah. So really what you should do is aim for about 150 words for task one and 250 words for task two, but don't count the words.

Just to go and be counting words, it's not going to help either. So there's no minimum or maximum word count. So instead, just write the amount you need in order to accomplish the task with details and examples for every new idea. And don't just add words for the sake of adding words or thinking, oh, that's going to really impress them because that's actually more likely to lead you to problems.

And if you're trying to write as much as you can, you're likely to include new ideas. lots of new ideas. Oh, I can think of five reasons that I have this opinion, five ideas. The problem is each of those new ideas has to be supported with details and examples.

So you need to stick to one good idea and support it. Instead of having lots of ideas that are unsupported, that will still end up being a very low task response score. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

Well, I'm so glad we went over these. You know, we talk a lot about good advice, but bad advice can be really harmful. So we gave you five pieces today. And yeah, guys, head on over.

Is this from All Ears English? Oh, it's actually here on IELTS Energy. I was going to recommend an All Ears English podcast, but IELTS Energy 1594 scroll up was avoid this four letter word on IELTS. So to find out which four-letter word you should avoid on IELTS and how to do it, if you missed that episode, scroll up and check it out.

All right. Awesome, Aubrey. Well, this was really great. Guys, you know, write these down. It's just really important to I think for me, like one of the biggest things was just don't try and just put as much out there and hope it works.

Right. And think, oh, the more I do, the more I see the longer writing sample, it's going to look so much more impressive. That No, exactly. You have to be strategic in how you're spending the time you have to study in what you do on test day.

This is so important. And these are just the top five most common things we've heard from students, bad advice teachers have given. There's a lot of bad advice out there. So remember, don't always trust what you read in forums.

You guys can trust what you're hearing from us on the podcast. If you sign up for our course, you can ask questions and get answers right away. That's hugely helpful. So to do that, go to allearsenglish.com slash keys, K-E-Y-S, to get into Three Keys IELTS, become a part of our very supportive community with bonus live speaking events so you can practice for IELTS speaking and answers to your IELTS questions that you know you can trust.

Yeah. Amazing. All right. Well, this was really fun and very enlightening. So thanks for sharing all of this information with us today. Awesome. Thanks for joining me, Michelle.

I'll see you next time. Sure. All right. Bye. Thanks for listening to IELTS Energy. Hit subscribe now and don't forget to find your estimated band score at allearsenglish.com slash myscore.

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