Shadowing Practice: How Anyone Can Jump from IELTS Band 6 to 7.5 in 1 Month - Learn English Speaking with Video

Chamilla got banned nines in reading and listening, but after nine failed attempts in IELTS writing, he was still stuck at BAN 6.

Here's how he got the writing score he needed, and you can too.

So one day, I got this email.

Chris, I'm fed up.

I want to give up.

Nothing is working.

And he wasn't failing because he had bad English.

He'd passed tough university exams and he was earning a master's degree in computer science.

And that is not actually the most remarkable part of his story

because he tried going to different countries to see if that improved his score.

He tried doing it at both IDP and the British Council to see if that would improve his score.

And he even heard that in some test centres, there were non-native examiners, and they would give him a higher score.

Every single time, every tactic he used, he got 6 or 6.5.

And then after trying all of that, he started going online and researching how to improve IELTS writing

and they told him to use complex vocabulary and complicated sentence structures.

Everything the internet told him still led to a band six.

Any of this sounding familiar?

So after a year of wasted time and thousands of dollars down the drain,

his Canadian immigration dream was put on hold and his master's degree seemed just like a dream.

But he came up with a new plan.

This is what he told me.

I believe like I will be lucky next time.

This exam might be a habitat or the next time I'll be getting.

So I asked him, have you always hoped you'll be lucky and to get a good score? Of course.

So how is using hope as a strategy working out for you?

This is really, really important for anyone listening to understand.

And this is what I told him.

Hoping that you'll be lucky next time.

Never ever works.

It's the easiest way to to waste money and time.

Hope is not a strategy.

Luck is not a strategy.

But he told me I've tried everything else.

And I understand this frustration when you've tried everything and you feel

that there's no other choice but to hope for the best, hope that you get lucky.

But the important thing to remember is someone like me can look at your writing

and tell you within seconds exactly why you're stuck exactly why you got six

or 6.5 and exactly what to do to improve.

That is a strategy.

So think of your writing score as a glass of water.

I'm not an artist, I'm an IELTS teacher, but imagine this is band nine,

this is band seven, this is band five.

So most of you, your level is here.

You filled up the glass of water to about here.

And imagine you have a pipe where we are bringing water into the glass

and you're pouring lots of water here and hoping that it flows down here.

Well, the problem is, is that most of you have a blockage in your pipe.

And it doesn't matter how much water you pour in until you fix the blockage, you're not going to get anything in here.

So you can pour in lots of fancy vocabulary, you can pour in complex structures and templates and memorized answers.

Until you understand what is blocking you, you will never be able to fill up your cup.

So let's look at some of the specific blockages that Chimila had and you'll be able to learn from them too.

So if we have a look here,

the burgeoning proliferation of technological advancements necessitates a a paradigmatic shift in pedagogical methodologies.

Now, a native English speaker finds it difficult to even say this.

What do you think an examiner is going through trying to read this and understand it?

And when he was writing it, he didn't write it perfectly like this.

Because he was trying to use all this complex vocabulary, he was making multiple spelling mistakes,

multiple grammar mistakes, and he was writing about stuff that was completely unrelated to the actual question

because he was just focused on using as many big words that he had memorized as possible.

So after our course, we got him to transform this sentence to this sentence.

New technology means we need to change how we teach.

So which one is clearer to you?

Which one is easier for you to read and understand?

Do you need to even think about this one?

No. Do you need to think about this one?

Well, I do.

I don't know about you.

Remember, the IELTS writing test isn't a how many big words did you memorize the night before the test test.

It is a test of how clearly can you communicate in English.

And the beauty about this system is he didn't need to learn anything new.

It was a mindset change.

And just changing his mindset, just changing his approach, his idea of what good writing looks like,

instantly improved the clarity of his communication and the clarity of his writing.

And that improved his score massively just by making the decision, I'm going to stop showing off and I'm going to start communicating clearly in English.

The second major problem he had was one of his teachers taught him

that the more discourse markers or linking words that he used, the higher his score was going to be.

So if you have a look at one of his paragraphs that when he started working with us, he sent us, you can see that there's far more emphasis on just throwing these in,

whether they're accurate or spell correctly, or whether they actually lead to him writing a clear paragraph,

it doesn't really matter, because all he was taught is more discourse markers, more linking words, the higher your score.

This led to mistakes, and it led to this paragraph not meaning anything in particular.

This makes the examiner's job far more difficult to under, because the examiner is just sitting there thinking, can I understand what this person is trying to say?

Is this clear?

Do you understand it.

Now compare that with after he'd finished the course, what was he actually doing?

Read this paragraph and think about how many linking words or discourse markers are actually in here.

Well there's only one, for instance.

When do we use for instance?

We use it when we are telling the reader here's an example.

We could use for example instead.

So when he was writing this paragraph he was focusing on clearly answering the question and clearly communicating with the examiner.

He only used a discourse marker, or some people call them linking words, whenever he absolutely had to,

and he made sure that it was appropriate and accurate.

Because if you look at the difference between band nine students and say band six and band five students, band six and band five students, if you look at their essays,

they have far more discourse markers or linking words in there compared to band nine students.

Don't believe me?

Let's take randomly one of these books from Cambridge,

go to one of the reading tests and pick one paragraph and try to find discourse markers within the paragraph.

Just focusing on this one paragraph, do you notice any?

And if you go and look at the official marking criteria for coherence and cohesion for band nine,

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it says cohesion is used in such a way that it rarely attracts any attention.

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You don't notice the discourse markers in good writing.

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Do that with any English textbook you can find.

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Take it off the shelf, read a paragraph.

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Do you notice any discourse markers?

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Now, there might be one or two in a whole page maybe, but compare that with what is taught to most IELTS students, which is add them in as much as you can.

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Add them in in the middle of sentences, at the beginning of sentences.

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I didn't know we should not use that much.

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Just a couple of words should be enough for one essay.

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It makes your writing worse, not better.

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So right there, we had unblocked two big blockages.

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Number one, we reduced the number of vocabulary errors and grammar errors,

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and we made his writing much more clearer by stopping all of this fancy vocabulary.

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And then blockage number two, we removed most of the discourse markers and only included them

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when we absolutely had to and made sure that they were appropriate and accurate.

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But he still had one major blocker that was nothing to do with English or the English language, nothing to do with vocabulary or grammar.

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And this was his biggest blocker.

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His essays looked all patched together like Frankenstein's monster because he was using one tip from here,

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one strategy from here, multiple different templates.

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His essays were just a mess because he was desperate and he was looking at, you know, five or six different gurus all at the same time.

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And this led to confusion, to overthinking, and he spent more time thinking about which tip,

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which method to use, than he did just focusing on answering the question.

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The truth?

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There are many good teachers out there.

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There are many bad teachers out there.

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Like any industry, there are good people and there are bad people.

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Pick one good person, doesn't have to be me, there are many out there.

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Pick one good technique and follow it.

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Because all these different teachers, even if they're good, they have different approaches.

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They have different methods.

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If you are following multiple different methods all at the same time, you are going to be confused and your writing is a reflection of your thinking.

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If your brain is confused, your essay will be confused.

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So once we fixed those three big blocks and the water started to flow into his glass, we found one last blocker.

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So he was getting a band seven for task achievement.

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He was getting a band seven for vocabulary by simplifying it.

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And he was getting a band seven for coherence and cohesion by using discourse markers appropriately and accurately.

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But he was still getting a band six for grammar.

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So grammar mistakes are a real problem because 25% of your score is for grammar, but grammar mistakes don't just affect your grammar score.

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It can also affect your coherence and cohesion score because coherence means clear.

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Is it easy to understand?

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If you've lots of grammatical errors, your essay is more difficult to understand.

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It can sometimes even affect your task achievement because again, is it clear to the examiner that you've answered the question?

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If the examiner can't understand what you're trying to say because you've so many grammatical errors, then everything kind of drops down.

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So be very, very careful with that.

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And if you have a problem with that, you need to understand what your grammar errors are and to fix them.

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But we had some good news for him.

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We showed him one of his essays and it was full of red marks, just red X's and underlines everywhere.

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I think it was about 10 or 12 different grammatical errors.

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And we said to him, how many errors can you find?

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And he was just like, lots.

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I said, really?

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I only see one.

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So he looked again, like, no, there's red everywhere.

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It looks like someone bled over the paper.

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No, there's just one.

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Look at each mistake.

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Think about what each mistake is.

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Every single one of those errors was one area of grammar, articles.

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So there's usually for most people, just one area or two or three at the most, but most people, one or two.

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For him, it was articles.

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For you, it might be tenses and prepositions.

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For another student, it might be subject-verb agreement.

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Normally, it is not that you need to learn everything about grammar.

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We don't teach people the entire grammar book.

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What we do is we look at the essay and we identify, okay, what are the most common mistakes that that student is making?

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So instead of having to learn the full grammar book, you just fix that area, you turn that weakness into a strength,

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and that massively improves not only your grammar score, but also all areas of your essay.

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Now many of you are thinking, yeah, that's great, Chris, but you're really expensive.

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I can't hire you to tell me exactly what mistakes that I'm making.

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Well, for me to do that personally for you is only $10.

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Normally we charge $147 for me to give you feedback one-on-one on your essay

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and develop a full personalized study plan but for today we're doing that for just $10.

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If you want a full writing report including all your grammar mistakes, your full band scores, exactly what to expect and a step-by-step study plan it is just $10 for today.

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If you want that go to the description.

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Click on the link.

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We can't guarantee we can help everybody because I only have a certain number of hours in the day to work.

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But if it's available, it is only $10.

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Click on that and get your full report and study plan.

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But there's something really important you need to understand and it happened to Chimila.

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So he finished the VIP course and he had submitted his first essay and he was expecting to immediately improve his score.

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He was expecting at least a 6.5.

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But when he got the result?

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5.5.

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So he paid for an expensive course, he did it all, and his score went down, not up.

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And he said, I don't feel like submitting a second essay.

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I thought it was not going to work out.

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I have to expect I will not score band 7.

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And he actually gave up.

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He just quit the course, and he didn't do anything for a month.

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Then one night after dinner, he was having a walk with his father, and his father asked, How's your IELTS prep going?

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It's not.

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I tried everything, even this expensive course.

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It's not working.

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His father was quiet.

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Before you started, you told me you trusted this teacher.

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You said you believed in his method.

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I know, but listen son, trust your guru.

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Forget about everything else.

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Get back on it.

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And after that conversation with his father, he decided to go all in and completely commit to our methods.

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You see, even after completing the course, he still had all of these bad habits.

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Remember, he had been doing this for years.

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When he decided to completely commit to what we were teaching him, he dropped all the complex words, he stopped chasing every online method,

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and he just focused on one simple approach that we were teaching him.

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He wrote one essay every single day,

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twice a week, he got feedback one-on-one from our teachers and he fixed only what was actually holding him back.

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Every single day, he looked at his essays, looked at his feedback and thought, what are the things blocking my progress?

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What are my errors?

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And he focused on turning those weaknesses into strengths.

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And if you do that enough times, it becomes inevitable that your score will improve.

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So on his 10th test day, imagine doing 10 IELTS tests.

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He used simple, clear English, no frills.

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He proofread everything at the end three times.

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And when the results came, he saw 7.5 in writing,

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from band 5.5 to 7.5 in just 30 days of committed study.

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The only change?

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His mindset.

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He stopped trying to impress, and he chose to be clear.

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Jamila is now pursuing his master's degree in computer science in Australia, and he is thinking of maybe even moving to Canada one day.

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He never has to think about IELTS ever again, and his nines in reading and listening, they were always there.

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But his band 7.5 in writing, it was there too.

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All he had to do was just change his mindset and focus on the right things.

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That's what actually mattered.

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All he had to do was that, ignore the rest, and he was able to get the score that he needed.

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For more help with IELTS writing, click on this video next, and it's going to help you with your IELTS writing score.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: How Anyone Can Jump from IELTS Band 6 to 7.5 in 1 Month - Learn English Speaking with Video

Why practice speaking with this video?

Grammar & Expressions in Context

Common Pronunciation Traps

What is the Shadowing Technique?