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Hello everybody, this is Matt here, The IELTS Teacher. Today I want to show you what one
of my IELTS lessons looks like. You can actually see this for yourself by going to my website
theieltsteacher.com, and clicking on free demo at the top of the page here - Book Your
Free Demo Lesson - but I understand that some people are a bit hesitant to sign up to these
things, so I'm also putting out this video so you can see what an average lesson with
me looks like. If you've seen my site, you'll have seen that I teach IELTS by skill. What
I mean by that, is that I teach my lessons in a way that's designed to focus on one of
the four IELTS skill components individually. So there is a Listening Lesson, a Reading
Lesson, a Writing Lesson, and a Speaking Lesson. Sixty minutes of each. There#s naturally some
overlap between the skills, but the aim is to focus on improving your band score in the
component that you're struggling with. If you're desperately trying to improve your
Speaking score, you wouldn't focus on your Listening, and that's the case here. If you're
struggling with everything, that's absolutely fine, just get a lesson in each skill. So
today I'm going to show you a Speaking Lesson. As you can see, on my screen there is a window
open. This bit of software here is called Screenhero. Screenhero is a totally free screen-sharing
application, and it's a really cool bit of software as you're about to see. When using
Screenhero, you will be able to see my screen, on yours, in real-time, and we'll each have
our own mouse cursor to use on my screen. This is absolutely perfect for collaborative,
interactive and fun IELTS lessons. Unfortunately Screenhero is only available for Windows 7
and 8, and Mac OS X 10.6+ currently. If you don't have these operating systems, don't
worry, there's another screen-sharing option, I'll come to that later in the video. So let's
get started. As you can see, I am Joe (for today, I am Joe). Joe is an example student,
a rather lonely example student; he only has me as a friend, although it's a pretty good
friend to have ;). We are currently sharing screens. I can show you that by going here.
So this is my screen here. This is The IELTS Teacher's screen. You can see I have a cursor
here; here is Joe's cursor, and here is my cursor. So we each have a cursor, which is
pretty fantastic. What we have here is the beginning of a Speaking Lesson on Occupations;
very common topic in the IELTS exam. What I'm going to do is go through this lesson
very quickly, because I don't have much time on my recording feature, and I appreciate
people are busy and just want to get a gist for the lessons. So immediately, we have a
nice, colourful slide to start us off. I like us to warm up just by speaking, not thinking
too much just speaking about the topic which we're going to be studying. So I have some
questions written down below for Joe. I can also focus on a particular occupation and
ask him questions about just one of the occupations. I can do that by picking up this magic pen
here, and saying "just tell me about this guy here". And then Joe would tell me about
the builder. He would tell - What does he do? Where does he work? What are the benefits?
What are the challenges? Etc. And then what I would do is start him off by throwing Joe
right into an exam situation. I would test his abilities in the exam. So I'm going to
ask him questions typical for Speaking Part 1. For example: Do you work or are you a student?
(Notice these questions are invisible, just like in the exam when you don't know what
the examiner's going to ask you). What's the most interesting part of being a 'chef'? (Imagine
that Joe is a chef). What's the most difficult part of being a chef? Would you say it's a
good occupation? And what kind of work would you like to do in the future? Joe would give
me his answers and the whole time I would be writing down in my notebook his grammar
usage, his vocabulary usage, his pronunciation, and afterwards I would tell him what I thought
and what we need to work on. Here, we're starting at the main page here. I get the content for
my lessons from high-quality IELTS coursebooks, like IELTS Advantage, Vocabulary for IELTS
Advanced from Cambridge English, Grammar for IELTS, IELTS Trainer; these are all great
books, and I also use my own stuff as well. Here might be part of a coursebook. So I would
get Joe to read out everything on the page, as this is a Speaking Lesson, and we're looking
at grammar. So, choice of grammar shows how we feel about occupation. The present simple
we use to talk about long-term. For example, "I work for a company that makes engine parts".
For continuous, that's for temporary feelings about jobs. "I'm working for a company that
makes car engine parts." This guy's not staying long, while this guy's staying a long time.
And if you're a student, it's common to use the present continuous. Then we choose the
best sentence from each pair. So highlighted we have "I study Physics a the local university",
but this isn't correct, because we know it should be present continuous, so we can pick
up the eraser and rub this out for Joe. And then Joe, I could give Joe a highlighter.
And then Joe can move over (using Joe's mouse now) and he can choose the correct answer
which is "I'm studying": present continuous. And it levels out the highlighter automatically.
We go through the answers; if Joe gets them all right, I'll give him a tick. Move on in
a similar vein. Vocabulary, prepositions, again Joe would highlight these. He would
say everything as well; he would say "I work for a marketing company". I also like to throw
in some tips now and again to help my students think about the IELTS exam, some helpful tips
for the IELTS exam. Coming down to the bottom here we have a gap-filling exercise, but the
beauty of this thing is that you don't need to write everything in like you would in a
Writing Lesson. Let's not waste time, let's move stuff! So we have here "Doctors often
have to ........". Well, if we don't know what the answer is, we can look at the preceeding
word/s. We have 'have to' which is a modal verb, and modal verbs are always followed
by a verb in the infinitive. Which of these is that? 'Work'. 'Work' is a verb in the infinitive
and we can move 'work long hours' into the gap here. And we can go through the rest in
the same way. Again, Joe would be saying all the answers. Next up, giving plenty of detail
in description. Joe would read everything here to talk about giving detail in description.
Instead of saying you work in a restaurant, you say 'I'm working as a waiter in a pizza
restaurant in the main square of this town. You may have seen it, it's called Pappagallo.'
The examiner's going to be much more impressed with an answer like that. So then I'd ask
Joe to take a couple of minute and make notes about his job. Joe needs a pen and paper,
as do you, in the lesson. I know it's online, but pen and paper is useful wherever you go.
So Joe would be making notes. I would ask him after the two minutes were up to tell
about his notes, to tell me about his job. And I would have my pen and paper, and I'd
be writing notes myself. And after Joe had finished, I'd be writing up my notes in this
box here. So I might say 'You used present simple when you should have used present continuous.'
Just as an example. You won't be able to write notes in part 1 of the exam, like you can
in Part 2, but doing it now will help you to organize your ideas when the test comes.
As I said, there's some overlap with other skills. Here, a listening skill session; we'd
be listening to a recording but this recording would be of a very high scoring IELTS candidate.
It's extremely important to listen to other high-scoring Speaking IELTS candidates so
we can learn from them, learn why they've got a good score. Here we would write our
answers to certain questions using no more than two words. So you can listen to these
audios during the lesson. I won't play it now, but here you would answer these questions
using no more than two words and here the answer would be 'business studies'. So we
could just go into the text function. This is a little bit tricky, and it takes a little
time to master. And we would go down, and look at how the candidate's answer was very
different from our own. How was it different? How could we improve the answer further? Etc.
etc. Pronunciation; coming towards the end of the lesson we'd look at pronunciation,
sentence stress. Pronunciation is worth 25% of your band score so it's incredibly important
that you get good at it. Here: stressing words in a sentence which are most important. Again
Joe would read everything out, I'd be taking notes on his pronunciation, and then he would
practice the pronunciation himself as I would ask him questions. And lastly, we'd give him
some homework: a detailed description of your occupation. Homework is incredibly important!
A lot of people don't like it, but if you're going to get a high score in IELTS you muse
be committed, and commitment means homework in every lesson. You have to take your IELTS
preparation seriously. Great lesson today, thank you for your hard work. I'm sure Joe
would put in a lot of hard work and it's important to give him some encouragement. And I would
ask Joe for any feedback as well. I would ask him if he enjoyed the lesson today. It's
very important to me that he enjoys his lesson. Okay, one last feature I want to show you
is the transparency feature. Also I want to show you the full screen feature as well.
This is how we would usually have the lessons, it would come in like this: easy to see. Just
quickly I want to show you the transparency feature. Here you can see my desktop screen.
The great thing about this is that if we were reading a news article, maybe in a Reading
Lesson, like up here, we could add shapes like an arrow, and I could pick this up, rotate
it, and point it at the paragraph I wanted you to read. I can even be a little bit nice
and fill it in red for you. Or I can highlight parts that I want you to talk to me about.
For example I could say "Tell me what 'brevity' means". But this is just one of the many features
of this whiteboard. I'm going to bring this to a close now. One last thing I want to say
is that we also use Word in my lessons. I want to show you Word here just to show you
a Topics List. I want you to enjoy your lessons and enjoy your study, because that gives you
a better chance of doing well in the IELTS exam. Here is a Topics List, I would want
you to tell me what you enjoy studying, and we would look at these topics. These are all
topics which can come up in the IELTS exam so they are important. You would tell me what
topic you wanted to look at in the next lesson, and I would design a lesson based on your
topic of choice and your skill of choice. Okay, I think that's everything. I hope you
enjoyed the video. If you have any questions please send me an email at matt@theieltsteacher.com
and please like my Facebook page. This video is sort of a thank you to my 5,000 fans on
the Facebook page. I appreciate every one of you, and I hope you stick around. And to
everybody, I hope to see you soon. Thanks very much.