IELTS is a skill. Like any other skill, you can prepare for IELTS in a smart way. It can be deconstructed and learnt very quickly if you only focus on the critical elements.

In this post, I am going to share with you tips and strategies that will help you get 8+ Band in IELTS Speaking.

In the Speaking Test, these tips ensure that when you enter the room, you are feeling super confident about yourself because you will have an exact roadmap to answer any question thrown your way. You will be enjoying yourself.

I got 8/9 band in Speaking Test, and the night before my test, I was at a friend’s costume-themed party with 20+ other people, enjoying till way past midnight. I remember walking into my Speaking Test with the music still banging in my head.

By the way, this post is from the full online video course, Ultimate Guide To Hacking IELTS, in which I share in-depth tips and strategies to prepare for IELTS. It is exclusively for Ultimate Academy subscribers.

You can access the course here:

Let’s now dive in:

Hacking IELTS Speaking: Tips To Prepare For IELTS The Smart Way

Hack # 1: Simple Wins Over Complex

If you are like most people, your biggest concern is walking in the interview and trying to impress the interviewer. This is the wrong mindset for IELTS!

IELTS Speaking test is different from job interviews because in job interviews, your intellect matters. Your ideas, facts, and opinions should be right.

In the Speaking Test, you can be totally lying, making up stories and saying things that are unpopular, and still score high. How you say it matters, not what you say.

You don’t have to impress the examiner with your knowledge and intelligence. You are just scored on your fluency of English.

And what’s the best way to be fluent? By being simple.

Don’t try to use difficult words to show your range of vocabulary, or try to construct complicated sentences. These will take a lot of your time in preparation and won’t contribute highly to your score.

Instead, if you can answer each question in simple words using short sentences, you will score very high.

Hack # 2: Fluency Doesn’t Mean Fast

Do me a favour and search ‘Obama Out‘ on YouTube. This is Barack Obama’s last speech at the White House dinner. This is a masterclass on speaking.

Is he speaking fast?

Not at all. Instead, he is speaking the slowest you might have ever heard anyone speak. And yet, he is the best public speaker in the world.

Fluency is all about first thinking, then speaking without hesitation.

This is a game-changer mindset.

Speaking Test demands a structure more than anything. You need not speak fast, but you should be clear and precise. Take your time to gather your thoughts and then choose the right words.

I’ve included a real-time demo of my interview in the video course to demonstrate this and all other hacks and strategies.

One more thing, your accent does not matter. Asians generally have this inferiority complex that our accent is not at par with the western accent. Well, that might be true when you are trying to score a date with a westerner 😉 But for IELTS, there are no superior or inferior accents.

Hack # 3: Tonality Is The Secret Key

The use of tonality is the number 1 difference between a good speaker and a great speaker. No one tells you this!

It will take a bit of practice, but would you have practiced if you weren’t even aware of it?

Tonality is the way we modify our emphasis on certain words to create a better mental visual in the listener’s mind.

Let’s take a sentence, “I live in a large house on the far end of the town”.

Emphasise LARGE and FAAAAAR, and you will change the entire image of this sentence.

In the normal way, the listener has to process the words to make sense of what you are saying. But by adding tonality, the listener’s mind will automatically create an image of your house and its location.

As a result, the listener’s mind will believe that you are a good speaker, and you are going to get a high score.

With these 3 hacks mastered, you will be able to increase your Speaking Test score by 1 Band at least.

We will go into detail of the structure to answer each type of question, more hacks, tips, live-demos, and exercises when we prepare for IELTS in the video course to make sure you get 8+ in your Speaking Test.

In the complete online video course, with 66 video lectures and assignments, I share with my students hacks, tips, strategy roadmaps, examples, and live-demos of implementing techniques to score 8+ Band in IELTS.