640. IELTS Speaking Success with Keith O’Hare

Talking to IELTS speaking coach Keith O’Hare about how to get your best score in the IELTS speaking test, plus some chat about the right approach to learning English.

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Introduction

Hello folks, welcome to the podcast. I hope you are fine whatever you’re doing at this moment, wherever you are in the world, and at whatever time of day you have chosen to listen to this new episode of my podcast for learners of English.

If you’re listening while watching on YouTube, don’t forget to like and subscribe to my channel so you don’t miss a new episode. Also, you could consider turning on the automatic subtitles as you will find they are about 95% correct.

And if you listen in any other way, I hope this podcast finds you in good form and happy to receive another episode.

Today I’m talking to Keith O’Hare who is an English teacher specialising in helping people prepare to take the IELTS test, specifically the speaking part.

Keith got in touch with me a while ago to invite me onto one of his videos. I mentioned it on the podcast recently. One of the things Keith likes to do is invite native speakers onto his YouTube channel to take an IELTS speaking exam and then give feedback on their performance at the end. This is great for learners of English because you can observe how a native speaker deals with all the tasks and you can pick up loads of nice bits of English in the process. It’s also a good way to get strategies for dealing with each part of the test.

So Keith had heard of my podcast and he wanted to record me doing an IELTS speaking test, so we did that in December. You can see me doing the test by watching the video which will be embedded on the page for this episode on my website and maybe in the show notes in your app.

We had a little chat afterwards about teaching English and I thought it might be interesting to invite him onto my podcast to talk about IELTS speaking tips, his teaching career, any good advice he has for learning English, and any stories of good and bad students he’s had over the years.

So this is mainly about IELTS with some general English chat as well. IELTS is a huge thing in the world of learning English. Anyone who plans to travel and use their English at work or just to get a visa or something will probably come across it. I know that a lot of my listeners are interested in IELTS, but even if you’re not – the kinds of speaking skills and strategies that will help in IELTS can also be applied to the learning of English in general, and certainly you will find in this conversation lots of stuff about the right approach to producing spoken English discourse in test conditions, and to learning English in general.

As we go through the episode I give Keith an IELTS speaking test himself, so we can see how he gets on.

Again, if you want to see me doing the IELTS speaking test in one of Keith’s videos, check the page for this episode on my website.

But now, without any further ado, let’s meet Keith O’Hare.

Ending

So there you go folks that was my conversation with Keith O’Hare from IELTSspeakingsuccess.com 

So what’s up?

I strongly expect that you understood nearly all of that, am I right?

I have a sneaking suspicion that this conversation was dead easy for all of you, right? 

I think it’s just because both Keith and I are English teachers and so we naturally speak clearly after nearly 50 combined years of English teaching between us, also because we’re used to presenting on a podcast or on YouTube so we are used to talking as if there’s an audience listening, and also because this wasn’t one of those conversations where my guest and I are struggling to say what we want to say about a topic without interrupting each other too much, which is usually what happens when I’m with my brother or my friends on the podcast.

So if this episode was easier to listen to than normal, it’s probably because there were fewer things getting in the way and you were able to focus only on the English being spoken.

And if it was at all easy to understand, I think that’s a great sign that your listening is improving all the time, especially with plenty of practice like you get on this podcast.

I also noticed plenty of nice chunks of vocabulary and other bits of pieces in English that I think were worth noticing and so I may do a premium episode about this at some point soon.

But right now all that remains to be said is that I will speak to you soon but until then, goodbye!