In this article, Mindset for IELTS co-author Greg Archer shares strategies for higher-level IELTS Speaking success.
There are vast differences between spoken and written language. The former is remarkable in its elasticity, in the way it forgives the speaker for their false starts, their repetition, their digressions and asides, and their apparent inability to construct a spoken turn that features one sophisticated, complex sentence after another. Even the most linguistically capable in this world faff and flounder as they speak. So why shouldn’t we help our learners not just to acknowledge this fact, but embrace it, and thereby gain more confidence in their output?
Part 2, Back at You
Speaking Part 2 is generally the stage of the test that makes candidates feel at their most wobbly, and undeniably requires practice. Most teachers have at some point recommended that their students record themselves doing a Part 2 of their choice and then listen back to it, but have you ever recorded yourself doing a Long Turn? I would heartily recommend doing so. Here are two reasons why:
1. You can transcribe what you say – including every ‘umm’, ‘errr’ and pause – and show it to your students to ease their worries. See? Even the teacher makes mistakes. And look at all that repetition!
2. Listening back and taking notes will provide you with your own little corpus of fillers and compensation strategies to pass on to your class. Only when I recorded myself doing a few Part 2s did I realise how often I would say things like, ‘going back to what I said before’ or ‘So, anyway…’.
Mixing It Up
Yes, higher-level English speakers can competently use phrases such as ‘Having said that’ or ‘With this in mind’, but they also come out with stuff like, ‘The thing is’ and ‘I mean’ with impunity. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Despite most of my previous students convincing themselves that such phrases are ‘lower-level’, and therefore to be studiously avoided, their judicious use will not negatively affect a candidate’s scores in the Speaking test. Quite the opposite, I would argue.
Coping with Lethological Hiccups
We all forget words from time to time, even in our L1. As I get older, I increasingly find myself searching for a word that has temporarily fallen out of my ageing ears, and I mutter phrases like, ‘it’ll come back to me in a minute’, or ‘I know this word, why can’t I remember it?’, before thudding on to the point I wanted to make regardless.
Sometimes, in the test room, candidates forget a word, or a phrase. I’ve known numerous teachers who prepare their learners for this eventuality by telling them not to panic, but to try and describe the word they are looking for instead. I find this odd. Would anybody do this in an everyday conversation outside of the test room? I suspect not. So instead of coaching them to say something forced, like:
“I can’t think of the word. It describes the feeling when you have forgotten to wear any socks or shoes. It ends in ‘-ion’”
This seems more natural to me:
“Hang on, my mind’s gone blank – I know the word I’m looking for (it’s ‘xyz’ in my language) –never mind, it’ll come back to me in a minute”
Similarly…
Coping with Idea Anxiety
Otherwise known as ‘drying up’, ‘going blank’ or ‘having nothing to say’. And it happens all the time in the test room, particularly with younger candidates who often have no opinion one way or another on the question being posed. That’s fine – nobody is an authority on everything.
But.
The one thing you need your learners to understand is that they absolutely do not want to leave the examiner trying to decide whether the candidate is struggling to find ideas or to access language. If an examiner believes it’s the latter, this can affect your students’ score (for Fluency and Coherence).
As their teacher, again, think: “what would I say in this position?”
I’d probably come up with a couple of phrases such as:
“This is really not my area, to be honest”, or “I’ve avoided even thinking about this since school”, but there are, clearly, many more. You know your students, why not donate to them some natural-sounding phrases from a proficient English speaker?
Listen to Greg discuss these strategies and more in his webinar:
Take a look at other useful IELTS resources.