How to Take Yyour CELPIP Speaking Skills from an 8 to 10

A couple of days ago, I had a great conversation with one of the members of the Celpip Success School and we were talking about how she could take her speaking skills from a level 8 up to her target score of 10.

After thinking about it for a while, I sent her some ideas which I want to also share with you today, as well as some extra thoughts that I know will help you if you're working hard to bump your speaking score from an 8 or from something below 10 all the way up to a 10 or above. So if that's you today, if you are struggling hard to bump your speaking skills higher, then this is the episode for you.

Well, hello there and welcome to the Speak English Fearlessly Podcast.

This is the podcast for motivated English learners who want to speak English fearlessly and learn practical tips and strategies to conquer the CELPIP exam.

I also love to feature encouraging interviews with regular people, people just like you, who are working towards becoming fluent in English so we can learn from their experiences together. Now, you might be wondering, who is this guy? Who am I? Well, my name is Aaron Nelson and I've been an English teacher for over 17 years.

I'm a certified Celpip trainer and I now help students prepare for the Celpip exam through online classes. Today, I'm doing something a little bit differently with how I'm recording this episode. In fact, it's not a little bit differently.

It's a lot different from how I normally do it.

Normally when I record my podcast episode, I have every single thing that I'm going to say, everything that I'm going to share with you, every idea, every sentence, I have it written out in front of me as a script so that I can read off of it as I go along.

I found over the two years or so that I've been doing this, that doing it this way, recording my script, like writing my script before I start recording, recording just saves me time. It helps me to stay organized, it helps me to feel safe. And today I've decided not to do that.

And there's a reason why today I am only reading off of bullet points. I'm only working off of bullet points. What I want to share with you is coming from bullet points. Okay?

I don't have everything written out, as I'm sure you're going to notice as we go along. And the reason why I've decided to do that to myself is because of what I'm going to share with you today.

Using my script, where I've written out every single idea word for Word that I'm going to share with you has kept me feeling safe. It keeps me feeling like I know what I'm going to say. I know how I need to say what I'm going to say.

I have it all right there in front of me, and it just helps me to get through the process of recording each episode faster.

At the beginning, I tried to do it like this with bullet points, and I just found myself getting into, like, making so many mistakes that I would get frustrated and I would almost walk away and not want to record. So I started scripting out everything I was going to say, but it's become sort of a comfort zone for me.

I have to say, as I was thinking about the advice I was giving my friend about how she could move her speaking skills from an 8 to a 10, one of the things that I was sharing with her about, or that I'm going to share with her and you right now is how important it is to step out of your comfort zone. So before I share it with you, I want to make sure that I'm practicing it myself. So this is me stepping out of my comfort zone. And yes, I'm nervous.

Yes, I'm scared. Yes, I'm probably going to make mistakes.

I might even leave a few in here for you to know that I am making mistakes as I go through this and I'm not editing out everything. But yeah, this is me stepping out of my comfort zone, away from my script. I'm using bullet points only and just going from there.

And for you, if you are working hard to take your speaking skills from an 8 or.

Or a 7 or a 6 or whatever your score is, if your aim is to go higher with your speaking skills, that's something that you also need to take into serious account. In order for you to get to a 10 or higher, you need to be taking way more risks with your English. And that could be coming from at work.

Like if you work with other native English speakers. And for example, if there are meetings that happen in English, ask yourself this.

When was the last time you volunteered to give a presentation in English?

Or when was the last time that you decided to raise your hand and express your opinion about something that was happening in your office or in your workplace? I don't know if you have meetings like that, but where I work, we have big, full team meetings. In the place where I am now, our team is super small.

There's only three of us. Well, four if we all get together. There's four of us who meet together on A weekly basis.

And one of the things that I need to be doing as a part of my role is I take notes about what is happening in the meeting. My. My role is to be the minute taker. Like the. The most. The. The important ideas that gets talked about. I'm writing it down as it's going along.

And one of the ways that I have been stepping out of my comfort zone, because typing, like listening and typing down things that are being talked about, that's easy for me. But if you've been a listener to this podcast for any length of time, you'll know that I'm kind of an introvert. I'm quiet.

Even amongst my small team of four people, I still feel a little bit shy. And so one of the things that I've been working to do in the. In these meetings are stepping out. Like, if.

If I'm not capturing the full idea of what they're talking about.

I've been practicing stopping everybody and asking them if they could rephrase or reword the things that they were just talking about or just asking for, like, clarification. What is it that you want me to record about this specific point?

Thankfully, it doesn't happen very often because I'm able to follow along with what they're talking about. But almost every meeting, at least once, I need to stop.

I need to kind of like hit pause on the conversation and ask for a little bit of clarification. And that's me stepping out of my comfort zone. My comfort zone is behind my computer.

I'm typing, I'm listening, and I don't have to interact very much. For me, that's comfortable.

But in order for me to grow, in order for me to develop my skills as a member of the team, I need to be getting good at stepping out like that. How I was just sharing with you. And I'm not sharing this to toot my own horn.

I don't know if you've heard that expression before, but it kind of means to, like, prop myself up, make myself look good. I'm not sharing that with you to do that to me.

I'm trying to share this with you to let you know that getting better at something for me, wanting to become a better team member, to do my job better as a note taker during our meetings, it's required me to do things that I don't necessarily feel comfortable with. And I've been doing that now for almost a year now that I think of it.

And now it's a little bit easier for me to pause what's going on or to politely interrupt what's happening in the. In the conversation, in the meeting, to ask for clarification about something.

But I still feel that hesitation inside of, oh, no, I didn't catch what they were talking about. I'm not entirely sure if I have the whole idea of what they want me to be taking notes about. I better stop them and ask.

That still is something where. That I hesitate a bit, where my quiet, more introverted self kind of wants to hide. You know what I mean?

If you're an introvert, I know you know what I'm talking about. You kind of are resisting taking that step. But here's the thing. Here's the first point that I want to make with you today.

And the reason why I'm forcing myself to use bullet points as I'm talking with you about this topic today is taking risks. Like I said a few moments ago, if you want your speaking skills to get stronger, you need to take more risks.

And one of those risks, as I was just, just sharing a moment ago, is how can you participate more in your workplace, especially if you are surrounded by people who are native English speakers in your workplace? I know how intimidating that can feel and how. What's the word I'm looking for?

How inviting it is just to be kind of invisible, you know, especially in meetings like the ones I was just sharing with you. And the other workplace where I was before this one, I was part of an even bigger team. And the members of that team came from multiple disciplines.

Like, we had nurses, we had doctors, we had social workers, we had our spiritual care team, which is me. And it was another coworker, and it was the directors of the building where we worked.

So there was a lot of, well, important people sitting around that table. That was a hard place for me to learn how to step out and participate.

That one took me a while to get good at sharing my thoughts when it was appropriate. And so that's my first offering for you today.

What risks are you willing to start taking in order to put yourself in situations where you need to use your English more?

And that's kind of like thinking about the habits that you need to embrace if you are wanting to see your score, your speaking score, go from an 8 to a 10 or above. There are certain things that you need to be doing on a regular basis, like a habit, like drinking coffee, for example.

That's one of my favorite habits. Every day I will begin my day with some coffee. The day just isn't complete. It Feels like if I don't have my cup of coffee with me.

And it's a habit for me, it's something that's included in the things that I do each day.

And you need to think about the things that we're talking about here in this episode and in all the episodes, actually, that talk about improving your speaking skills. You need to be thinking about these as habits, like, how can I make this a part of my regular day, day to day with English?

And what I want you to avoid doing, like the opposite that I want you to, or the thing that I want you to distance yourself from is thinking about how I can get a hack, how I can find an easy fix to get my score from an 8 to a 10.

Because, you know, as I was working on this episode, I was doing some research on it, and it's quite amazing, actually, how many, like, message boards on Reddit and on Facebook are filled with people who are looking for easy fixes. And I get it. All of us want something quick.

All of us want the easiest possible solution in order for us to get what we want and trying to develop our language skills. It's no different. We all want easy, fast answers.

When I was working and when I am working on my Spanish, because I still am, but I can remember also looking for those quick and easy fixes or of how I could become fluent in Spanish, like overnight. You know, I. I didn't want all this hard work. I didn't want all this suffering that I was going through as I was trying to learn Spanish.

But sadly, my friend, there are no easy fixes to improve your language skills. There just aren't. And if there were, if there were some instant fix or some. I've talked about this before in other episodes.

If you've ever watched the movie Matrix where Neo learns how to fight Kung fu, he just plugs himself into a computer and downloads a program and boom, instantly he can do amazing things that he couldn't do before that download. And wouldn't it be amazing if we could somehow make that happen with our speaking skills or with our language skills in general?

Oh, man, that would be amazing, wouldn't it? But here's the thing. Like, if you look around, I don't know anybody who has gone from zero or from a lower level to a high level instantaneously.

I don't know anybody like that.

I'm sure there might be a couple of people out there in the world who have, you know, amazing language learning abilities and they could just pick it up, like, super easy But I would say that the vast majority of us really need to just work on it and be patient with it.

And anyone who's trying to offer you easy fixes or hacks or you just need to pay me this amount of money and I will send you this secret formula or this template that will help you to answer the questions with ease. All of those things don't work. They're just, you know, they're taking your money, basically.

And what I want to try to encourage you in this point is to stay away from that kind of thinking. Probably you are. And I'm not saying this to be mean. I'm. I'm talking about myself with myself in view here. Probably.

We're not those people that have like an instant, an instant ability to learn the language. We, we have to really work on it. So, yeah, there are no easy fixes or overnight hacks to get you to a score of 10.

And that's really important for you to embrace. Don't look for it. Instead, prepare yourself to build habits that will help you to get where you want to go.

And that first habit that I just, I want to leave with you today is, well, it's kind of a combination of the taking risks one, but stepping into conversations more. This is really, really important.

And I was trying to express this idea with, with my friend that I was telling you about that we were talking about this together the other day. I think it's super important to realize that you are in charge of making this happen like nobody else is going to do it for you.

You can't depend on an English teacher. You can't depend on an English class or an English textbook. Those things can help you.

But if you are really wanting to see your speaking skills grow in a dramatic way, like from an 8 to a 10, I mean, that's quite a jump. And if you're wanting to see that happen, you have to realize that you are the one responsible to make this happen.

And that's going to mean you are the one who's going to need to start taking more risks, like raising your hand more in meetings in English.

If you work in an English work workplace and you have those kinds of meetings, it means volunteering to make presentations in English where maybe you haven't done it before. It means that you are initiating conversations with English speakers around you. You're not waiting for them to talk to you.

You are making the first step. And right there I just realized I made a mistake. I said, you are making the first step. It should be, you are Taking the first step.

You need to take the first step and initiate these kinds of conversations and initiate these kinds of opportunities. Like, begin volunteering yourself for these opportunities if none are coming to you. Like, if you are not getting the opportunity to.

Like, if people at your workplace, for example, are not coming to you to talk, they're not coming to you to have lunch so that you can, they can get to know you a little bit better. It's time to put your responsibility hat on and realize, okay, the only way that this is going to happen is if I do it.

I mean, hopefully people are coming to you and wanting to talk with you and wanting to have lunch with you or whatever. Hopefully you're getting opportunities to participate in meetings that are in English.

But if it's not happening, my whole point is that you need to realize that you need to make it happen. You're the only one who can start volunteering yourself into those kinds of opportunities to grow your English.

So this habit that I'm talking about that's going to start helping you to take your 8 to a 10 involves you regularly stepping into conversations in English instead of staying silent or letting other people do the talking. Like if you're in a group of people at lunchtime, for example, and you're with a group of people who are speaking in English, don't be silent.

Don't just be the one standing quietly listening to what's going on around you.

Take a risk and you share what happened to you on the weekend, or you share your thoughts on the project that your team is working on instead of letting other people do the talking yourself. Okay, so let's just go over the points that I was trying to make before. Number one, realize that you need to take more risks.

Number two, realize that you are in charge of this. You are the one who needs to make this happen. Don't wait for opportunities to use your English to come to you. It's time for you to initiate.

It's time for you to, to put yourself into situations where you get to use your English, where you need to answer the questions, where you need to make those presentations, where you need to invite a co worker to come and have lunch with you, and where you start that conversation with them while you're eating, like talking with them about their weekend or talking with them about what's going on in their workday. You know, it's. It's you being in charge and you initiating.

And I know I said initiate initiating way too much, but what I'm getting at here is so Important. And I'm talking to myself as I'm doing this. We need, if we want to see something grow in our life, we need to take those steps to do it.

We need to take those steps even if we're feeling scared. We need to do them anyway. We need to take them anyway, scared and all.

And as we do, like I was sharing about at the beginning with me, you know, interrupting in the middle of our. In the middle of our team meeting so I can ask clarifying questions. I was nervous to do that. I did not feel comfortable doing that.

But I knew if I wanted my skills to get better, I needed to, and I needed to force myself to do it. And I needed to do it nervously at first because I was nervous. And now a year later, I'm much better at it. Like I said before, it's not perfect.

I still get a little bit of resistance inside when I know I need to clarify something. But I've gotten much better at it because I've developed the habit of stepping into that situation. Here's the next thing that I want to offer you.

Change the way you practice. Change the way you practice. I want you to use something that I know you have probably in your pocket right now or maybe even in your hand.

I want you to start using your cell phone. And here's what I want to challenge you to do with it. I want you to start recording yourself speaking about various topics.

Like, actually, you can use your cell phone to help you to prepare for the various speaking tasks that you'll encounter on the CELPIP exam. The kinds of questions that you're going to face are out there in public. Like, you'll, you'll.

You can just go to Celpip CA and poke around, and you'll find. You're not going to find the actual questions that you're going to be dealing with on the exam, because that's.

Of course, you won't find out until you're actually doing the exam, but you will know you can find out the kinds of questions that you're going to face. Like, the first speaking task is all about giving advice to somebody, right?

So what I want to challenge you to do is to pull out your cell phone and practice recording yourself. Giving advice.

Like, come up with a fictional situation or use a situation that actually happened to you where somebody came to you to ask you for advice. Recall that situation and then try to record your answer in English, of course, but limit yourself or use a time limit as you are recording.

Like in speaking task one, which is all about giving advice. You have to record for 90 seconds. That's how long you're going to have on the actual day of your exam to record your answer for this question.

90 seconds. Well, in order to get ready for it, you should practice recording your answer for 90 seconds.

See if you can give that advice, like come up with a question, offer advice, and record your answer into your cell phone for 90 seconds. See if you can go for that long. And there's a couple of reasons why you should do that.

The first one is that it's kind of great practice for you to get ready for the, for your exam day. Because when you are recording your answer on the exam, you're not talking to a person, right? You are recording into a microphone.

You're going to be looking at the computer screen, but there's no face, there's no human in front of you. If you're not ready for that, it can really mess you up. So practice recording into your cell phone. You can use your phone's voice memo app.

I guess I should have said that at the beginning, but use your cell phone's voice memo app to record yourself giving answers. Getting used to how that feels because it is completely foreign. It's a weird feeling, I promise you.

But, and if you're, if you're not ready for it, it can really, like I said a moment ago, it can really trip you up on exam day. So practicing in this way, recording yourself speaking about a certain topic for a certain amount of time is a really good way to practice.

And it's a really good way, like to get your 8 to a 10 by making sure that you are speaking for the correct amount of time. So please use your cell phone to help you to be practicing.

And another reason why recording yourself, giving these answers is such an important thing to do is because you can replay your answer and listen to it. See, like, where can you improve your answer and then try it again.

If you don't record your answer, if you're just speaking out, how do you know what you're doing well at? Like in an everyday conversation, of course, you get the instant feedback of having the person tell you, you know, that didn't make sense.

Or having the person's face kind of go funny if they didn't, you know, completely follow along with what you were trying to say. Or they can ask you follow up questions to make sure that they understand what's going on. In everyday conversations, you get that kind of feedback.

But when you're getting ready for this, for this exam, and when you're working really hard to try to bump your score from an 8 to a 10, it's really valuable practice for you to be recording yourself, playing it back, and listening for ways that you can strengthen your answer.

And in just a few seconds, I'm going to share with you a clip from a course inside of the Celpip Success School, which is going to walk you through the ways that the CELPIP test rater will listen to your answers.

And learning how to listen to your answers in the same way that a rater, a CELPIP test rater, will listen to your answers will help you to spot what you're doing right and where you can improve. So that's what I'm going to transition to right now.

I'm going to share this clip with you and then I'll come back with you at the end for each of your answers.

You have an audience. Now, you're not speaking directly to a person on this. You're not speaking, yeah.

To it, to an examiner face to face, but your audience is the test rater and they're the ones who are going to be hearing your answer and giving you feedback or giving you a grade based on what you said. And here are some things for you to keep in mind as you are practicing on your own.

All right, so the test raters on that test day, when they're listening to.

Your responses, you need to imagine that.

They'Re going to be listening to your responses through several different filters or lenses.

Imagine them wearing a set of glasses.

That have special lenses on them. The first lens or the first filter that they're going to be listening to your answers through is called the content lens.

And here are some things that they're going to be listening for. And here are some things that you could be practicing around the first one.

When you're giving your answer, make sure that you are offering two or three main ideas about the topic that you are speaking about. All right? One idea is not enough. Try to offer two or three the second thing.

For each of those main ideas that you come up with, try to offer a descriptive detail, some descriptive details about each idea. Adding descriptive details makes your answer more interesting, more exciting, more natural sounding.

And if you don't use descriptive details, it makes your answer boring and it will lose you points. So remember to add details. And using details, by the way, will help you to fill up your time.

As long as those details are connected to each of those main ideas, like don't go off on a tangent, keep it focused and that's what this point is all about. Make sure that all of your ideas are actually working together to help you answer the question. Okay, so that's the content lens.

The next one, listenability.

I'm just going to move over here. The listenability lens or the listenability filter, it's all about how you sound. And the first thing that you need to be checking is your rhythm.

Are you speaking too fast because maybe you feel nervous? Are you speaking too slow? That's what rhythm is all about. Making.

Make sure that when you're practicing, when you're listening to yourself, make sure that you are not speaking too fast or too slow. The next one, be aware of long pauses. Short little pauses are okay. That's a part of normal conversation, right?

People pause so that they can think.

About what they're going to say next. But, but long pauses, that's something that you need to avoid. And the next one, be aware of interjections.

And what I mean by interjections are times when you are saying or ah or mmm. Those are interjections. If you overuse those, some of them are okay.

But if you overuse them, you will lose points because it makes your answer more difficult to listen to.

And the most important thing for you to be aware of as you're listening to your own answers is, do I sound like a natural, normal human being when I'm having a conversation with someone? Right.

All of those things that we just finished talking about your rhythm, long pauses, and not using too many interjections, all of those things contribute to you sounding natural. Right? Having an easy flow from of your ideas sounds natural. Not using long pauses in between your ideas, that helps you to sound natural.

And not using too many interjections like or. That also helps you sound more natural. So that's the important thing about listenability. Do I sound natural?

The next thing, vocabulary.

Your vocabulary is really important.

And I've got several different, you know.

Fruit, citrus fruits down here. And each one is different. And that's the whole point of this first idea. Variety. Variety is so important. When you are expressing your ideas.

Don't over rely on the same words or the same phrases over and over again. Try to bring different words, different ways of expressing thoughts into your sentences so that you have variety with your vocabulary.

Be aware, beware of repeating yourself. Don't say the same idea over and over again. And like I said before, don't repeat the same words. Variety. Express your ideas in many different ways.

That's one of the things that they will. Your test raters will be listening for. Are you using variety? The next one Task fulfillment Did I completely answer all the questions?

That's something that's really, really important. Sometimes the question that you see has several different questions nested together in it. Make sure that you're answering the complete question.

Don't skip out on once.

The next thing, make sure that you.

Are using the right tone of voice. Right? Make sure that you are, like I said before, not speaking inappropriately based on the situation.

Like if you are if the situation on the exam has you trying to talk with a store manager, for example, you'll speak differently with them than you would to your best friend from university.

Right?

There's levels of formality. Make sure that you are using the correct tone of voice based on what the situation the exam is asking you to speak to.

And finally, task fulfillment also involves speaking long enough.

Okay, I hope that that has been helpful for you.

So just to summarize, here are the most important things that I that I hope that you can take away from today's episode Number one Embrace the idea that there are no easy fixes to this. There are no easy hacks to get you from an 8 to a 10. You need to develop habits that you practice on a daily basis, just like drinking coffee.

You need to put these things into work in your life, and you actually do need to work at it. Number two, make sure that you're taking risks with your English.

If you're not doing things that are scary, that are like stepping out of your comfort zone, I don't think you're going to have very good luck at moving your 8 to a 10. You do need to be taking risks. Like for me today, as I shared at the beginning, I'm working off of bullet points.

You probably can hear the difference. But I'm stepping out of my comfort zone because that's something that I want to get better at as a podcaster, as a speaker.

I want to get better at sharing my ideas without following a script, without the safety of a script around me. So that's something that I want to invite you to do as well. Step into risks. Take more of them on a daily basis.

You should be having moments where you're feeling uncomfortable because you're trying something new with your English skills.

And that could be taking the form of you raising your hand, that meeting that you're having at work with other native English speakers and offering your opinion about something.

It could be you volunteering with your boss to give a presentation in English or to at least participate in that presentation if you're not going to give the whole thing. And it involves you initiating conversations with the people around you, your co workers or your fellow students.

If you're in university, it's you stepping out of that passive position as you're working on your. On your English skills.

And I'm not trying to say that you're passive, but it means, like, taking responsibility and realizing, if I want to see this 8 become a 10, I am the one who needs to make this happen. It's not my teacher's job. It's not my school's job. It's not my, you know, my English textbooks job. It's my job.

And in order to make that happen, I need to start stepping into those opportunities that are happening all around me or I need to create them.

And finally, well, not quite finally, next to finally, make sure that you're practicing with your cell phone so that you can record your answers and listen to yourself, so that you can pick out where you can improve or strengthen your answers. This is such a powerful thing to do. And finally, make sure that you're listening to yourself as you are recording your answer.

Make sure you're listening like a test rater through all those different lenses that I was sharing with you in that little clip that I played. Make sure that you're listening to yourself through those different lenses and trying to make improvements inside of them.

I sure hope that this has helped you today. Please let me know if you found it harder to follow along with me today if you listened all the way through.

I'm so grateful that you stuck with me and that I didn't lose you. And come back next week because it's going to be better.

Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of the Speak English Fearlessly podcast. Have a wonderful week. Bye.