Luyện nói tiếng Anh bằng Shadowing qua video: How Anyone Can Jump from IELTS Band 6 to 7.5 in 1 Month

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,

100

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

101

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

102

Do that with any English textbook you can find.

103

Take it off the shelf, read a paragraph.

104

Do you notice any discourse markers?

105

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.

106

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

107

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

108

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

109

It makes your writing worse, not better.

110

So right there, we had unblocked two big blockages.

111

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

112

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

113

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

114

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

115

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.

116

And this was his biggest blocker.

117

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

118

one strategy from here, multiple different templates.

119

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.

120

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

121

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

122

The truth?

123

There are many good teachers out there.

124

There are many bad teachers out there.

125

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

126

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

127

Pick one good technique and follow it.

128

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

129

They have different methods.

130

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.

131

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

132

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

133

So he was getting a band seven for task achievement.

134

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

135

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

136

But he was still getting a band six for grammar.

137

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.

138

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

139

Is it easy to understand?

140

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

141

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

142

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.

143

So be very, very careful with that.

144

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

145

But we had some good news for him.

146

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

147

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

148

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

149

And he was just like, lots.

150

I said, really?

151

I only see one.

152

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

153

It looks like someone bled over the paper.

154

No, there's just one.

155

Look at each mistake.

156

Think about what each mistake is.

157

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

158

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

159

For him, it was articles.

160

For you, it might be tenses and prepositions.

161

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

162

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

163

We don't teach people the entire grammar book.

164

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

165

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

166

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

167

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

168

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

169

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

170

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

171

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

172

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.

173

If you want that go to the description.

174

Click on the link.

175

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

176

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

177

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

178

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

179

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

180

He was expecting at least a 6.5.

181

But when he got the result?

182

5.5.

183

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

184

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

185

I thought it was not going to work out.

186

I have to expect I will not score band 7.

187

And he actually gave up.

188

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

189

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

190

It's not.

191

I tried everything, even this expensive course.

192

It's not working.

193

His father was quiet.

194

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

195

You said you believed in his method.

196

I know, but listen son, trust your guru.

197

Forget about everything else.

198

Get back on it.

199

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

200

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

201

Remember, he had been doing this for years.

202

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

203

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

204

He wrote one essay every single day,

205

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

206

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

207

What are my errors?

208

And he focused on turning those weaknesses into strengths.

209

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

210

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

211

He used simple, clear English, no frills.

212

He proofread everything at the end three times.

213

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

214

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

215

The only change?

216

His mindset.

217

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

218

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.

219

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

220

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

221

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

222

That's what actually mattered.

223

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

224

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

Phương Pháp Shadowing Là Gì?

Shadowing là kỹ thuật học ngôn ngữ có cơ sở khoa học, ban đầu được phát triển cho chương trình đào tạo phiên dịch viên chuyên nghiệp và được phổ biến rộng rãi bởi nhà đa ngôn ngữ học Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Nguyên lý cốt lõi đơn giản nhưng cực kỳ hiệu quả: bạn nghe tiếng Anh của người bản xứ và lặp lại to ngay lập tức — như một "cái bóng" (shadow) đuổi theo người nói với độ trễ chỉ 1–2 giây. Khác với luyện ngữ pháp hay học từ vựng bị động, Shadowing buộc não bộ và cơ miệng phải đồng thời xử lý và tái tạo ngôn ngữ thực tế. Các nghiên cứu khoa học xác nhận phương pháp này cải thiện đáng kể phát âm, ngữ điệu, nhịp điệu, nối âm, kỹ năng nghe và độ lưu loát khi nói — đặc biệt hiệu quả cho người luyện IELTS Speaking và muốn giao tiếp tiếng Anh tự nhiên như người bản ngữ.

Luyện nói tiếng Anh bằng Shadowing qua video: How Anyone Can Jump from IELTS Band 6 to 7.5 in 1 Month

Thông tin về bài học này

Từ vựng và cụm từ chính

Mẹo luyện tập

Phương Pháp Shadowing Là Gì?