Shadowing Practice: IELTS Speaking Topic - Home and Accommodation - Learn English Speaking with Video

Hello my friends, it's Keith from the Keith Speaking Academy.

Haha, new name, new look.

But I'm still here to help you speak better English and prepare for the IELTS Speaking Test.

So today we're going to be looking at the topic of homes.

Not Sherlock homes, but homes as in houses, flats, apartments, accommodation.

We'll be looking at how you can speak confidently and fluently on this topic.

Let's do it.

So as I mentioned, I'm still here to help you prepare for the IELTS Speaking Test.

All of my material now is moving to the new website www.keithspeakingacademy.com.

Check me out there.

First of all, though, what is the difference between home and house?

In some languages, it's the same word.

Well, very simply, a house is a building.

It's a physical place where you live.

A home is much more than that, right?

It's a place often you associate with family, with feelings, with emotion, a sense of belonging.

So the house is just the building.

The home is where you...

It's the house and everything else around it, the emotion and feeling.

Great.

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Great.

With that, let's get into the lesson.

So I wonder, what kind of accommodation do you live in?

Many people live in a house or some kind of a house, right?

So we can have a detached house, which is a house that is just on its own.

Some people live in a semi-detached house, often called a townhouse in American English, like this.

Some people may live in a terraced house, a bit like this, where the houses are all joined together in a row, very common in a lot of areas of England.

Some people live in a house that only has one floor.

My dad actually lives in a house like this and it's called a bungalow.

Looks a bit like this.

Now you may live in a flat or an apartment, in which case the building you live in could be a block of flats or an apartment block.

Sometimes when it's quite luxurious or more expensive, it's called a condominium.

And just generally, you could say a high-rise building, especially if there's like, you know, 15, 20, 30 floors.

Some of these big high-rise buildings.

And then inside, you've got your flat or your apartment.

To be honest, these words are used very much the same with the same meaning.

We can talk about, for example, a two bedroom flat or a three bedroom flat.

Right?

So we could say, you know, if somebody says, what kind of accommodation do you live in?

Well, I live in a three bedroom flat on the sixth floor of a seven story building.

That's actually where I live.

Notice when we say a seven-story building, seven-story is like an adjective, so it doesn't take an S, right?

We don't say seven-stories building.

No, a seven-story building.

I live in a 20-story building.

I live in a nine-story building.

And then you can say the floor, I live on the second floor, the third floor, the fourth floor, and so on.

Right.

Excellent.

If you're a student, it may be that you live in rented accommodation or a rented house, or you rent a room in a house or a flat.

Right.

Very often, students may be in a studio or in England, we call it a bedsit.

which is really it's one room where you have the bed, the kitchen and everything together except the bathroom

which will be the toilet will be kind of separate normally or attached to that room.

Generally speaking you can say as a student I live in student accommodation or more colloquially I live in student digs.

Digs just means accommodation probably a student hat, hat, hat, a student hat, no, a student house or a student flat.

Rented house, rented flat.

Great.

Now that's all well and good.

But if people ask you, you know, do you like where you live?

You want to be thinking about collocations.

So adjectives that go together to describe where you live.

So speaking positively, you could say, I live in a really comfy flat on the seventh floor of a high-rise building.

A really comfy flat.

Comfy just means comfortable.

You could also say, I live in a spacious flat.

Spacious meaning with lots of space or room, right?

I live in a spacious flat.

Notice the stress on the key adjective word, right?

Repeat with me.

I live in a spacious flat.

We almost hesitate, right?

I live in a spacious flat.

It's like you're going up and hitting the word spacious or stressing the word, right?

Listen again.

I live in a spacious flat.

Try another one.

I live in a comfy flat.

Or even, I live in a spacious and comfy flat.

Great.

Another nice word is cosy.

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A cosy flat.

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Cosy just means small and comfortable, right?

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This is a very cosy flat.

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In fact, if you want to be polite, right, you go to somebody's flat and it's really small, you can say, oh, it's really cosy flat.

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It means it's small but comfortable.

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However, if it's small and uncomfortable, we would say it's cramped, right?

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Cramped with that P.

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Try that one.

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It's a bit of a cramped flat.

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Notice we add the it's a bit of a to make it more natural.

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It's a bit of a cramped flat.

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It's a bit of a cramped flat.

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Now, you wouldn't say that to your friend, but you might say it about your own place, right?

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Well, it's a nice flat.

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I live on the sixth floor, but it's a bit of a cramped flat.

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Other negative things, of course, might be noisy, right?

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The neighbours are so noisy, right?

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It's a bit of a cramped flat.

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The neighbours are really noisy.

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I don't like it very much.

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It is funny sometimes.

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I notice with students when I ask them, do you like your house?

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Sometimes they say, yes, it has a kitchen.

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It has a lounge.

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It has a dining area.

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I have two bedrooms.

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And they start listing the rooms in the house.

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Now, that's nice to show that you know that vocabulary, but it's not really telling me what you like about the house.

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It would be much better to say, what I really like about my house is the living room.

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It's nice and spacious and really comfy.

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Right?

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Picking out one room

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and maybe saying what I really like is da da da da right try

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that with me what I really like is you notice the

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hmm what I really like is great what I really like is the lounge

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which is nice and comfy and really spacious right

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so focus on what you like

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if somebody asks you what you like don't give them a list of the rooms

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that will show you're a beginner student let's move on

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so there are some nice collocations we can use to describe different parts of the house, right?

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For example, if your bedroom has a bathroom attached to the bedroom, we call that an en-suite bathroom.

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Sometimes when you go to a hotel, you often have an en-suite bathroom.

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There are different bedrooms.

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And of course, the biggest bedroom normally for the parents, unless your children are controlling you is the master bedroom.

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That's the big one that may have a king size bed or a queen size bed.

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Now, that doesn't mean there's a bed for the woman and a bed for the man.

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It just means the size.

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The king size bed is the bigger one.

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Queen size bed is still pretty big, but maybe not as big.

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Moving into the kitchen, quite fashionable nowadays, especially in America and the UK, is to have an open plan kitchen, right?

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An open plan kitchen.

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When I was living in China, we didn't have an open plan kitchen because I think very often cooking in the kitchen,

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people like to fry and all the fumes come out and you want to close that door, right?

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Otherwise, all the fumes and the smoke is going to come into the living area or the dining area.

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Whereas I guess nowadays, especially in England, we tend to fry less.

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Many families fry less because of the move towards a healthier lifestyle and healthier eating.

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So this kind of open plan kitchen is great if you're not frying a lot.

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And it looks really good, right?

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You've got this, what we call the island in the middle.

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It's like a little table where you can prepare the food.

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And then you've got your stove to cook on or the oven if you're going to do, you know, roast chicken or something like that.

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So kitchens and that kind of kitchen, I would say it has a modern look.

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Right.

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So you may want to say what I like about my flat.

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Right.

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Is the kitchen.

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We have this wonderful, spacious, open plan kitchen.

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And it's got a really modern look.

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We've even got a little island in the middle for food preparation.

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It's great.

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You even have to say it's great at the end. So the kitchen.

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What about the living area?

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So maybe the living area, nice and spacious.

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Again, living areas might have comfy sofas with fluffy cushions.

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maybe you've got fluffy cushions it could be a colorful room

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or a room full of contrasting colors right and probably with a few decorations or ornaments on the bookshelves on the tables

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decorations could be you know pictures hanging on the wall it could be ornaments plants

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table lamps floor lamps all of

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that stuff you might even have a rug right on the floor often next to the coffee table

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or next to the sofa people have a rug on the floor especially

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if you've got a tiled floor

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which can be quite cold a rug makes it warmer in england many many houses have carpets on the floor.

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So from one wall to another wall, completely covering the floor, that is a carpet.

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Super fluffy, super warm, especially in the winter.

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And of course you could say a well-lit living room.

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If you've got lots of light coming through, you may have a French window.

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Those windows that open out like a door onto the garden, if you have a garden,

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or onto your balcony, if you're lucky enough to have a balcony where you can sit outside

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and have a cup of tea.

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Nice, eh?

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Moving on.

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Sometimes people may ask you about your accommodation.

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How long have you live there or have you always lived there

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and here well if you ask me

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that I would say actually I've been living here for about three years now

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and I used to live in another country country x

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and there we lived in a condominium we had quite a

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spacious flat I remember it was on the 20th floor of a really high-rise building.

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I remember it because I got a bit nervous standing on the balcony so high up.

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But now where we live, well, we're on the sixth floor and it's a smaller flat but really comfy.

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And what I like most about it is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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Or you may be honest and right and say, well, actually, where I live now, it's not as spacious as before.

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It's a nice comparison.

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Not as spacious as before.

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Not as as before.

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And if the truth be told, it's a little bit cramped.

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if the truth be told.

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It's a nice expression just to say you're being frank and you're telling the truth.

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Or it's like, to be honest, it's a little bit cramp.

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Or to tell you the truth, it's a little bit cramp.

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So all of these expressions mean to be honest or frankly speaking, right?

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To tell you the truth.

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If the truth be told, between you and me, it's a bit like a secret, right?

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Between you and me, it's a little bit cramped.

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Frankly speaking, it's a little bit cramped.

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So a nice expression you can use to introduce something that maybe is a bit negative about where you live.

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Other useful comparison language could be It's much bigger than where we are now

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There was far more room where we used to live It was just way more spacious where we were before

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it had a lot more mod cons than what we have now

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mod cons just means modern comforts

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so the mod cons of a flat are normally the air

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conditioning the tv the oven the stove the central heating the things the modern things

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that give you comfort in a flat, right?

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So typically we can say it has all the mod cons, right?

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You would expect a modern flat to have all the mod cons and to be fully furnished, probably.

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Brilliant.

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So this is how we can talk about homes and houses, flats and apartments.

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I hope this helps.

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What about you?

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What is your home like?

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Write down in the comments below.

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Tell me all about it.

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That's it for today.

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Do go and check out some of the other videos that can help you prepare for your IELTS speaking.

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Thank you very much for watching.

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If you want to follow me and find out more about the work I'm doing, go to www.keithspeakingacademy.com.

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I'll see you there.

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Do stay in touch.

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Take care.

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Bye-bye.

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: IELTS Speaking Topic - Home and Accommodation - Learn English Speaking with Video

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What is the Shadowing Technique?