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Shadowing practice: E2 IELTS Academic | Writing Task 1 with Jay | Essential Vocabulary

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  1. Hello everybody, my name is Jay.0:00
  2. I'm one of the expert IELTS teachers here at E2 Language.0:01
  3. In this live class, I'm going to talk to you about some essential vocabulary that you need for IELTS Academic Writing Task 1.0:05
  4. Because imagine on test day, you look down at your paper and you see something like this.0:13
  5. What vocabulary are you going to use to describe all of these different trends?0:18
  6. Right?0:25
  7. That's what I want to show you in this live class.0:26
  8. But before we do that, let's talk about how you're actually scored in the IELTS test.0:28
  9. Because vocabulary is critical.0:33
  10. Okay, so you're scored on four things in your IELTS test.0:36
  11. The IELTS examiners look at these four things, right?0:40
  12. And one of them is called lexical resource, which put simply means vocabulary, right?0:44
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  1. So let's go through how you're scored specifically.0:52
  2. So if you get an IELTS 5 out of 9 for vocabulary, it means you have a limited range.0:54
  3. IELTS 6 has an adequate range, so slightly better.1:03
  4. IELTS 7 has a sufficient range.1:08
  5. IELTS 8 has a wide range.1:11
  6. And IELTS 9 has a wide range of natural and sophisticated vocabulary.1:14
  7. So these examiners are looking at the words you're using in your writing and deciding what level you are according to the range, right?1:20
  8. So I want to show you a number of different words for describing trends.1:30
  9. Okay, trends are the changes that happen over time in a graph.1:36
  10. So again, let's say you're looking at this one.1:40
  11. How are you going to describe this blue line?1:43
  12. You're going to say it went up.1:46
  13. It's probably not that sophisticated.1:48
  14. And we're going to need to have a range of different vocabulary that mean the same thing as went up.1:51
  15. Maybe you're going to talk about the refined sugar and it went down.1:57
  16. You also need vocabulary to talk about lines or trends that stay the same and also lines and trends that go up and down.2:02
  17. So let's have a look at went up first.2:12
  18. I'm going to teach you a range of different words that you can use on test day.2:14
  19. Now your score, you can think about the words like this, verbs and nouns.2:19
  20. And let's say you have the same word like increased, right?2:25
  21. Let's say you're looking at this word increased.2:29
  22. Okay, there's the verb and you can see it's in the past tense.2:33
  23. And let's say you also use the noun and increase of, here's the noun here.2:37
  24. That would actually be counted as variety because you've used different word forms.2:42
  25. Okay, so that's just something to keep in mind.2:49
  26. So you need to know the verb form of the word and you need to know the noun form of the word.2:51
  27. So for went up, increased is a good one, but you don't want to use that too many times.2:56
  28. You could say grew, escalated or rose.3:02
  29. You don't want to use silly words like shot up, rocketed or boomed because they're not academic.3:09
  30. And if you want to use the noun form here, you can say an increase of or the growth was or the escalation or a rise of.3:16
  31. You don't want to use nouns such as mushroom, snowball or proliferation.3:26
  32. They're just not academic enough.3:31
  33. Fine, what about went down?3:34
  34. Let's look at some different words for went down.3:37
  35. Decreased is a good one.3:39
  36. Declined, fell, diminished.3:42
  37. These are nice verbs to use in the past tense.3:46
  38. Or the equivalent noun form would be a decrease of, a decline of or a fall of.3:50
  39. You don't want to use verbs like shrink, plummeted or died down because they're not academic enough.3:58
  40. And you also don't want to use really complicated words like depletion because it's just not precise or certainly not a slash, either a verb or a noun.4:05
  41. Cool.4:15
  42. What about if the lines stay the same?4:16
  43. Right?4:18
  44. What's some good language, some good vocabulary for this?4:19
  45. Well, we could say they stabilized, they plateaued, they remained steady.4:23
  46. And here we have the verb form with the noun remained steady or remained stable.4:31
  47. And if you're comparing, say you've got that line down the bottom, let's go back and look at it.4:37
  48. See this one here, relatively relative to the other lines that remained relatively stable.4:43
  49. That's a really nice phrase there.4:50
  50. If all the other lines are moving, but there's one line that's staying the same, it remained relatively stable.4:53
  51. You could use the noun stability, but it might be difficult, but a plateau would probably be a better word there.5:00
  52. Okay, last one.5:06
  53. What do we say about lines that are going up and down?5:07
  54. What's some good language, good vocabulary that we can use in our writing task one?5:11
  55. Well, fluctuated is a nice one.5:15
  56. And you can also use the noun form and talk about fluctuations.5:18
  57. You can say the number or amount or whatever it is, varied or differed.5:22
  58. And perhaps you can talk about the differences as a noun.5:28
  59. Okay, these are both plural nouns, fluctuations with an S on the end and differences with an S on the end.5:32
  60. Cool.5:40
  61. Okay, now we've got those key nouns and verbs.5:41
  62. That's a good starting point, but now we want to get precise.5:45
  63. And the way that we get precise and the way that we talk about intensity or how much something grew or declined is we use adverbs.5:48
  64. We use adverbs of intensity.5:58
  65. Okay, so we're going to talk about the intensity of the trends.6:01
  66. So let's say you've got this verb decreased.6:04
  67. Well, maybe it decreased dramatically.6:07
  68. Maybe it decreased sharply, substantially, considerably, markedly or just slightly.6:09
  69. These are critical adverbs that you want to keep in mind for your writing task one.6:15
  70. Same as increased sharply escalated considerably fluctuated.6:20
  71. Well, actually just be careful because fluctuated dramatically is okay.6:25
  72. You can't really fluctuate sharply though.6:30
  73. You can fluctuate substantially or considerably or markedly or even fluctuate slightly.6:33
  74. That's fine.6:39
  75. Just be careful.6:40
  76. Some of these combinations work and some do not.6:40
  77. What about rows markedly and fell sharply?6:44
  78. That's a good collocation there.6:46
  79. Fell sharply.6:48
  80. All right, it's quiz time.6:50
  81. I want you to do a little quiz.6:52
  82. This will take you two minutes.6:53
  83. Please do it.6:55
  84. You're going to have two minutes to choose a verb and an adjective from down here to complete the sentence.6:55
  85. In order to complete the sentence though, you'll actually have to understand the graph.7:04
  86. Let's just go through it briefly.7:09
  87. So the first one is to do with refined sugar.7:11
  88. That's this red line here.7:13
  89. The next one is the total amount of sugar.7:16
  90. That's the blue line here.7:20
  91. C, corn, sweetener, dextrose and edible syrups.7:23
  92. That refers to these lines here.7:27
  93. What are they doing?7:30
  94. And the final one D, refined sugar consumption from 1985.7:32
  95. Where are we?7:38
  96. Here.7:39
  97. From 1985 down to 2010.7:40
  98. What happened to that?7:45
  99. So please fill in two words each using words from here.7:46
  100. Put your answers into the chat below.7:50
  101. By the way, I should say if you're not yet a subscriber to our IELTS channel, click the subscribe button.7:52
  102. Every time we produce and post a video, you'll be notified on your phone.7:58
  103. All right, good luck.8:02
  104. You have two minutes.8:04
  105. All right.10:08
  106. How did you go?10:10
  107. Hopefully by using the correct verb, there were a few different answer options.10:11
  108. But you should have been able to look at that graph, see the line, see what it was doing, pick an appropriate adverb, put them together to describe what you're10:16
  109. seeing precisely.10:27
  110. This is ultimately what you are graded on in this section of the test.10:28
  111. Cool.10:34
  112. Let me show you my answers.10:34
  113. I wrote refined sugar decreased significantly.10:37
  114. You can see the significant decrease here until around 1986.10:40
  115. You could have used declined.10:45
  116. You could have used declined sharply.10:47
  117. That would also be correct or decreased sharply.10:50
  118. That would also be correct.10:53
  119. B, the total amount of sugar consumption rose sharply to 1984.10:55
  120. Also, you could have said that it's, well, let's have a look, declined rose.11:02
  121. Oh, got two rows.11:08
  122. Uh -oh.11:10
  123. I think I might have screwed this up.11:10
  124. I'm sorry.11:12
  125. That's okay.11:12
  126. Let's keep going.11:13
  127. C, corn sweetener, dextrose and edible syrups remained relatively stable is a nice way to say that.11:14
  128. And D, from 1985 to 2010.11:23
  129. So we're talking about this line here, refined sugar from here to here.11:27
  130. What happened to it?11:32
  131. Well, it declined slightly, didn't it?11:33
  132. It declined slightly or decreased slightly.11:37
  133. Or perhaps you could even say something like decreased marginally is also a nice adverb to use.11:41
  134. Anyway, what I wanted to show you here, I'm sorry about my little mistake there, was that there are some key verbs that you should memorize.11:46
  135. And on test day, you don't want to repeat the same word again and again and again.11:54
  136. So really, you just need four synonyms for decrease, decline, fell, etc.11:58
  137. You need a handful of adverbs and you'll be fine on test day because that's all you'll need to talk about.12:04
  138. Okay, but there were those four things.12:10
  139. There was the increase, the decrease, the stabilization and the fluctuation.12:12
  140. They are the four things that you need to remember.12:16
  141. Handful of vocabulary.12:20
  142. You can do it.12:21
  143. You can do it.12:22
  144. Cool.12:23
  145. Guys, if you need any help with your IELTS academic or whatever test you're taking, actually, check out etoolanguage .com.12:24
  146. You can sign up for free.12:31
  147. And if you haven't yet subscribed to our YouTube channel, do click that button now.12:33
  148. And yeah, thanks for watching.12:37
  149. See you soon.12:40

An Australian Teacher's IELTS Vocabulary Lecture, Built for English Listening Practice

Jay opens with "Hello everybody, my name is Jay." and lays out what the class covers: the vocabulary IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 asks for, at a B1 level and a brisk 170 words per minute. That pace makes this genuine english listening practice, fast enough to test your ear, clear enough in his Australian delivery to follow once you already know the topic.

This is not a scene or a back and forth conversation. It is one teacher talking straight to camera for 161 lines, so every line carries one idea: how IELTS examiners score vocabulary, and the words test takers reach for when a line on a graph moves. That density is what makes a short excerpt worth repeating rather than a full video worth watching once.

The Language in Jay's Class: Lexical Resource, Scored Ranges, and "Went Up"

Three lines carry the whole lesson, and each rewards a close listen before you try to say it back.

  • "Okay, so you're scored on four things in your IELTS test." Stress lands on "four" and "IELTS test", the two facts the sentence exists to deliver. Shadow this line to hear where an Australian speaker puts sentence stress inside a plain announcement.
  • "IELTS 9 has a wide range of natural and sophisticated vocabulary." Three adjectives stacked back to back, wide, natural, sophisticated, with barely a breath between them, a natural way to pile up description without sounding like a list.
  • "You're going to say it went up." The contracted "you're" and the flat, ordinary delivery of "went up" show exactly the plain vocabulary Jay is about to replace, useful if you want to speak english fluently about data instead of reaching for the first verb that comes to mind.

How to Work Through This IELTS B1 Clip, Line by Line

Treat this clip as english speaking practice, not only listening, and work it in this order.

  • Play lines 1 to 3 once straight through, no pausing, just to feel the 170 words per minute pace before you touch any single line.
  • Take "Hello everybody, my name is Jay." on its own and repeat it five times until the rhythm needs no thought, then move on.
  • Shadow "Okay, so you're scored on four things in your IELTS test." aloud, matching the stress on "four" and "IELTS" exactly as Jay places it.
  • Loop "You're going to say it went up." and once the rhythm sits, swap in a different verb, since building that range is the entire point of the lecture.
  • Close on "IELTS 9 has a wide range of natural and sophisticated vocabulary." at full pace, no pause between the three adjectives, to check your accent has kept up with his.
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