Vocabulary for IELTS & TOEFL Essay Success

Watch this lesson to get a better score on your IELTS or TOEFL essay. Learn how to generate key vocabulary from the essay question itself! Avoid the ONE BIG MISTAKE made by thousands of students. Learn the art of paraphrasing through synonyms and boost your essay score. It's easier than you think, and the results will pay off in higher grades.
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TRANSCRIPT

Hi. I'm Rebecca from www.engvid.com. Do you want to get a higher score on your TOEFL, or IELTS, or TOEIC essay? In the next five minutes I'm going to show you how to do this in a really easy way. You just have to follow two easy steps. Take your essay question and find the key words there, and then replace them with synonyms. Now, that might seem very easy and obvious, but you'd really, really be surprised to know that lots of students don't do that. What they do instead is that throughout their essay they keep using the same words that are used in the essay question. And if you do that, what you're showing is that you don't have a very good vocabulary, you don't have a rich vocabulary, you don't use... You don't have many synonyms to express the same ideas and thoughts. And what you need to do instead is to show off your vocabulary, and the way you can do it is to take the question, find the key words and make sure that you can generate lots of synonyms for those key words, because if you can do that then you'll use all those kind of synonyms throughout your essay instead of repeating the same vocabulary. Isn't it kind of a shame when you only have maybe 250 words on your IELTS essay or 300 to 350 on your TOEFL essay to keep using the same vocabulary? Don't do that. Learn to do something a little bit differently.

Let's see how to do it. Okay? So I've got a sample question, here, from the TOEFL exam. A part of the question. This is... This says: "Many students choose to attend university outside their home countries." Okay? And maybe after that they said: "Do you agree or disagree?" or something like that. Okay? Doesn't matter. So, what are the...? How do you find the key words? Key words are almost any of the important words. For example: "many". Right? So if you're going to talk about this in your essay and you're going to give your opinion, then you want to use different words. So what could you use instead of "many"? Well, try to make a list. For example, I made my list: "myriad students", "countless", "an increasing number". It could be another word, it could be an expression. Anything that expresses the basic idea. And sometimes when you're using a synonym you're expanding on the idea, and that's okay, too. You're changing the idea a little bit, and that's all right. That's fine. So, that was one of the key words.

Second key word: "students". If they said "students" in the essay question, don't use the word "students" every time in your essay. Use another word, like: "pupils", or "young people", or "scholars". Okay? Again, changing the meaning. "Scholar" is not exactly students, but it's okay to use that word somewhere. It also shows you have a lot of vocabulary, rich vocabulary.

Next: "choose to". Right? Instead of saying: "...students choose to", what else could you say? You could say: "they decide to", "they opt to", "they prefer". All right? So, what I'm suggesting that you do is take some of the essay questions. Right? And when you're practicing before the exam, just from the essay questions see if you can generate lots of synonyms for the words used in the essay question. If you can do that, believe me, you're going to use those words in your essay writing.

Let's see how it continues. "...to attend", "Many students choose to attend", what could you use instead of "attend"? You could say: "to join", "to enroll in", "to apply to", "to pursue undergraduate studies" or "pursue graduate studies". All right? Again, we're changing the meaning a little bit, but it's the same basic idea. Right? Because in order to attend you need to enroll, you need to apply, etc.

"Many students choose to attend university", here's another key word. Instead of saying "university" 15 times in your essay, you might want to say: "academic centres", or "an academic program", or "institutes of higher learning", or an "educational institution", or "school", "college", "academy". Okay? Instead of the word "university". Don't keep using the same word. Use the same idea, but not necessarily the same word.

Next. Next part, key part: "...outside their home countries". Instead of saying: "outside their home countries", say: "abroad", "overseas", "in a foreign country", "away from their homeland". Right?

Now, you don't have to write this sentence again, but what I'm asking you to do is to take the question, find the key words, and see if you can come up with lots of vocabulary for that.