CELPIP Speaking Task 2: Tips for Success

Speaker A: 00:00:00

CELPIP Speaking Task two is all about sharing an experience that you have had, and that's exciting news.

Speaker B: 00:00:09

You want to know why you're already

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an expert on the topic of you. That should get you just a little bit excited about this section of the CELPIP exam.

You're going to get the chance, the opportunity to talk about yourself and something that has already happened to you or something that you've already done. Now, I know, I know.

Even though you can talk about a topic that you already know a lot about yourself, there are still some things that can make this task a little bit challenging.

Speaker B: 00:00:43

Right?

Speaker A: 00:00:44

But don't you worry.

Today, if you'll sit back, relax and join me, we'll cover together the most important things that you'll need in order to give the best answer you possibly can on this section of the CELPIP exam. 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.

Speaker B: 00:01:37

Who am I?

Speaker A: 00:01:38

in Canada back in the fall of: 2015

This wasn't our first trip to Canada, but it was the first time we were coming as a family with the intention to stay and start our lives all over again.

Speaker B: 00:02:09

From zero.

Speaker A: 00:02:11

If you've been a listener for a while, you might remember that I myself am from Canada, but I moved to Mexico when I was in my early 20s and I ended up living there for over 16 years. That's where I met my wife, where our three boys were born, and where we lived for a long time together outside of Canada.

Okay, enough of the backstory. Let's get on with the first few minutes of our first day on Canadian soil as a family wanting to settle here.

The first thing that I remember was how nervous my wife and I felt as we were coming in for a landing at the Victoria International Airport. As we got closer and closer to the island, we started to talk about what we were going to tell the customs agents when we arrived.

Would we say that we're just here to visit? Which might make getting a tourist visa a little bit easier for my wife and for my kids.

Or would we state our true intentions of staying here permanently, which might make things a little bit more difficult as far as visas goes. Now, for me, I wasn't going to have any trouble at all because I'm a Canadian citizen. All I had to do was flash my passport and I was in.

The trouble was for my wife and for my three sons.

They were Mexican citizens and while they were part of my family and while my wife was married to me, as you know, I'm sure there's still an immigration process that you have to go through. That's what we were fretting about. Do we say we're here for a visit or do we tell them what our true intentions were?

We finally decided after a few moments of talking about it, that we of course, were going to tell the truth. I remember us holding hands and praying as that plane landed. God, please help us to get a nice immigration officer.

As we walked into the immigration area, my heart beat faster and my hands began to sweat. This was it. And all too quickly it was my turn.

I placed our passports down in front of the agent and smiled and explained my answer to his question, how long will you be staying in Canada?

To my happy surprise, he welcomed us and passed my family right on through and then asked me to sit and wait in a special room while they helped us get some important paperwork started.

After an hour or so, I emerged with visitor visas for my whole family, which would give them a year of legal status in Canada and more than enough time for us to get our PR and our citizenship processes started. That was quite an experience on CELPIP speaking. Task two, you're going to be asked to talk about a personal experience that you have had.

Much like what I just did a moment ago when when I shared about my family's first few minutes in Canada. To do well on this section of the exam is really important for you to keep in mind the following tips or ideas.

Number one, take time to brainstorm and be quick to decide what you're going to talk about on this section of the exam. You're going to have 30 seconds to do that brainstorming.

So you have to think quickly and you have to decide really quick what you're going to focus on. Usually the question itself is going to help you to focus on a certain thing. Maybe it will ask you to talk about your first job.

Maybe it'll ask you to talk about a time when you taught somebody something, or maybe who your favorite teacher was in school and why, or whatever but the point is it'll be something that you know about already, something that you've lived through or experienced. And so you will have 30 seconds to think about how you're going to answer that.

Question number two, and this is likely one of the most important points. You're going to be talking about an event that happened to you in the past.

So that means you're going to be needing to use and rely on past tense verbs when you're making your recording. And I wanted to share with you a couple of things that you can be doing right now to help you to begin practicing speaking about the past.

Because sometimes we don't spend a lot of time, you know, focusing our attention on a certain type of verb when we're speaking. We just normally kind of go off and use whatever verbs we need to use when we're speaking.

We probably don't even think about the kind of verbs that we use. I know I don't. When I'm talking, I'm not thinking to myself.

Okay, I need to be using the future tense here because I'm talking about my plans for the weekend. No, nobody thinks like that unless, you know you're preparing for an exam like the celpip, right? You're not thinking about that kind of grammar.

At least I hope you're not. I mean, that would be an awfully boring way to have a conversation with somebody. No, just wait a minute.

I need to think about how I'm going to switch over to the simple past here. Or wait, I know that I need to be thinking about present tense here, so I need to adjust what I'm saying.

All that stuff happens inside right when we're having a free conversation with someone. But for this task, I want to give you an opportunity or a way that you can be providing yourself with some focused practice time in the past.

And, and these are really simple and easy things that you can do on a regular day to day basis that won't take hours out of your day and that will hopefully be a benefit for you.

Speaker B: 00:07:55

So here are some things that you can be doing. Four things.

Speaker A: 00:07:59

Number one, at the end of your day, try journaling. You know, like just before you're going to head off to bed. What if you grabbed a piece of paper? Probably don't want to grab a piece of paper.

If you could grab a journal and take five minutes and just write about maybe five things that you really appreciated about the day or things that you are thankful for from that day, like a gratitude journal, think about what happened because that Means you're thinking about things in the past, right? And write about those things.

Tell the story of your day, the highlights or the moments that you were most touched by or thankful for or most angry about or most sad about. Whatever you want to share take about five minutes to do so. But focus your attention on writing in the past.

Speaker B: 00:08:51

So that's my first suggestion for you.

Speaker A: 00:08:53

Take five or 10 minutes at the end of your day and start journaling about the things that you did during that day. Another thing that you can be doing with your family or with your friends

Speaker B: 00:09:04

if you have the opportunity to see

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them on a regular basis is take some time, like, say, over a meal, if you're having supper. This is something that we try to do sometimes as a family ourselves. It's not always successful because everybody has

Speaker B: 00:09:19

different schedules, but we do try to

Speaker A: 00:09:21

ask each other what we did during the day.

Speaker B: 00:09:25

And that could be a great way

Speaker A: 00:09:26

for you to have some focused practice on talking about something that you did during the day.

Speaker B: 00:09:32

The first idea that I gave you was a writing challenge that will help

Speaker A: 00:09:37

you to write in the past.

Speaker B: 00:09:39

And this one, the second one is,

Speaker A: 00:09:41

what if you spend some time with your family or with your loved ones around a meal and just talk about the day's events? For us, that's. That's usually happening around the supper table. And like I said before, we don't always have this.

Have this as an opportunity for us just because of everybody's work schedules, but we try to do it. And it's a fun way to hear what the other person has done. And it's a fun opportunity for you

Speaker B: 00:10:07

to share what you experienced that day.

Speaker A: 00:10:09

And remember, because you're talking about something that happened during the day, you should be using the past tense when you're speaking. The third idea that I can offer

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you is if you're all by yourself,

Speaker A: 00:10:21

and I know that some of you are, you're here studying alone, or you're traveling alone, or your family are just in another place. One of the things that you can be doing is using. I have my cell phone around here somewhere. But using your cell phone.

Your cell phone probably has a voice

Speaker B: 00:10:40

recorder app in it.

Speaker A: 00:10:41

Now, I know you've heard me talk about this many times, but you know what?

It's a really valuable tool, and I really hope that you take the time to learn how to use it and how it can help and learn how it can help you develop your speaking

Speaker B: 00:10:57

skills, because it really can.

Speaker A: 00:10:59

And I know that that sounds weird. It's a voice memo app. How can it help me, you know, practice my speaking skills?

Speaker B: 00:11:07

Well, it can, because you're recording what

Speaker A: 00:11:10

you're saying, and that means that you'll

Speaker B: 00:11:12

be able to play it back and hear what you sound like.

Speaker A: 00:11:15

And if in a little bit.

And in a little bit, I'm going to be giving you a couple of things that you can use as, like, little lenses to be able to look through what you're listening to with the intention of reviewing what you just said. I know that that sounded really awkward. I'll rephrase that.

Speaker B: 00:11:36

Let me rephrase that.

Speaker A: 00:11:38

The. The CELPIP raters, for example, the ones

Speaker B: 00:11:41

who are giving you a grade on your answers, they don't just listen to

Speaker A: 00:11:46

what you say and give a random grade. Depending on how you know what kind

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of a mood they're in or if

Speaker A: 00:11:52

they're feeling happy or upset that day, they're just going to grade you better

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or worse, depending on their mood. Hopefully they're not doing that.

Speaker A: 00:12:00

What they do base their grades on

Speaker B: 00:12:03

are a set of frameworks or a set of lenses. You can think about them as like a set of glasses that you put on.

Speaker A: 00:12:11

And each of those sets of glasses helps you to look at your material or to listen to your material for different reasons or for different. In different ways. You know, I'm thinking about my college university professor. She really encouraged me to write and

Speaker B: 00:12:29

to write a lot because she enjoyed what I had to say and she

Speaker A: 00:12:33

thought that I had potential as a writer.

Speaker B: 00:12:36

I suck.

Speaker A: 00:12:38

I royally, royally suck at punctuation. I'm really bad at it. In fact, my favorite university English professor, she wrote on one of my.

One of my essays that I turned in, she wrote in big letters, aaron, you are a promiscuous comma user, which means I use commas everywhere. Everywhere, even in places where they don't belong. I was just putting them all over

Speaker B: 00:13:05

the place because I'm not very good at those rules.

Speaker A: 00:13:09

When she was asking me to send

Speaker B: 00:13:10

in my writing, like my creative writing,

Speaker A: 00:13:14

I remember telling her, you know, I feel really bad because I'm not good at using punctuation.

Speaker B: 00:13:20

And I know that you called me,

Speaker A: 00:13:22

you've called me a promiscuous comma user. But she said something to me that kind of, I thought was interesting, and it kind of links into what I'm getting at here.

She said, you know, I can read

Speaker B: 00:13:33

your work with a different lens.

Speaker A: 00:13:35

I can read your work with just the idea of wanting to enjoy what

Speaker B: 00:13:40

you've had to say and not wear and not Read your work with the

Speaker A: 00:13:45

lens of an English professor, where I'm looking for those grammar mistakes in order

Speaker B: 00:13:52

to help you to improve.

Speaker A: 00:13:53

So there's different ways that you can read something depending on what you're looking for. And the same thing is true with

Speaker B: 00:14:00

what the celpip raters do.

Speaker A: 00:14:01

You know, they're listening to your work,

Speaker B: 00:14:03

they're listening to your answers through different lenses. And we'll talk about what those lenses are in a moment. But. Oh, and I just kind of got lost about why I went off on

Speaker A: 00:14:15

that rant about why they listen to you through different lenses.

Speaker B: 00:14:19

But we're talking about using your phone's voice memo app to help you to practice, right?

Speaker A: 00:14:25

And the whole point of being able

Speaker B: 00:14:27

to record your answers is that, one, it gives you a way to practice.

Number two, it gives you a way to hear what you've said so that you can wear those different lenses that I'm going to share with you in just a minute. It gives you a way to hear what you're saying and to listen to what you're saying through different filters.

Speaker A: 00:14:48

You know what I mean?

Speaker B: 00:14:50

So that's why that's valuable. Whereas if you're just speaking out into

Speaker A: 00:14:54

the air, if you're having a conversation

Speaker B: 00:14:56

with a friend or a family member,

Speaker A: 00:14:58

I mean, they're hearing what you're saying,

Speaker B: 00:15:00

which is great, but there's no way to get those words back so that you can see if what you were saying was actually, you know, put together well, or if there are ways that

Speaker A: 00:15:10

you could improve your answer.

Speaker B: 00:15:13

The only feedback that you get are the reactions of the person that you're talking to, which is really important.

I mean, you don't want them to having to be having an expression on their face of, like what when you're talking, you know, like, I have no idea what this person is saying. You know, that expression of being confused, you get that kind of feedback.

But like I just said, you just don't have the opportunity to pull back your words and look at them and try to figure out if what you said was actually a good way to say what you were saying. Or maybe there was a better way that I could say it, or maybe there's a different vocabulary word that I could use right here.

Or given today's topic, because we're talking about the past, maybe by looking at a transcript or listening to what you said, you could say, oh, I realize I didn't use the past tense here. I used the present tense, or I used the future by mistake.

That's why Using your phone to record your answers as you are practicing is a really good tool because it gives you that chance to pull back those

Speaker A: 00:16:15

words and figure out if you could say something better.

Speaker B: 00:16:19

So use your cell phone to record those answers that you would share with your friends. Like that previous point that I was mentioning.

Instead of sharing what you did during the day with your family and friends, if you don't have any around at that moment, pull out your phone and record yourself saying the same things. Next one, Write all of those things out as a script. It's kind of like what I was talking about before. A transcript.

A transcript is a recording in words of what you said out loud. It's listening to something over and over and over again and writing down, line by line, the things that you said.

Like if you, if you watch a movie and you are reading the captions of that movie, that's what you're doing. You're reading the transcript of what those actors said. And that's another really good way for you to be able to study the things that you've said.

If you have everything that you've said on paper, you can read through it and begin to determine if you use the right vocabulary words or if you see if you can see an opportunity to improve on a word that you've used.

Or like I said before, because we're focusing on the past tense, it will give you the opportunity to spot where maybe you missed an opportunity or missed

Speaker A: 00:17:41

a chance to use the simple past or to use to use a past tense verb.

Speaker B: 00:17:47

But none of that will happen if you don't give yourself the opportunity to practice in that way where you're either recording your voice or writing down what you've said. So those are the four ways that I would like to offer for you today so that you can begin practicing your past tense verbs. Okay?

As I was saying a few moments ago, test raters use different filters or different lenses to listen and to read what you share with them on the exam.

And you should be wearing those lenses as well as you are practicing so that you can begin developing skills in accordance to what those raters are looking for. So here are some of the most important lenses that those Cell PIP raters will be wearing as they listen to your answers.

The first one that they wear is something called content, a content lens. This content lens is focused all around looking for the number of ideas that you share.

If they ask you a question on the exam, they're looking for you not to just give one answer. They're looking for you to give multiple ideas that help you answer that question.

So that's the first thing that they're looking for with the content lens. Have you given enough ideas? And I'll give you a hint right now, one idea is not enough. Okay?

So don't, don't get, don't let yourself get away with just saying a one idea answer. You need to offer multiple ideas, two or three at least ideas in your answer and in order to develop it.

Well, the next thing that you need to be thinking about in this content lens is are your ideas well organized and are they all working together to express that thought or that idea that is going to answer the question that the exam is giving you. Are you organized or are you like going off on bunny trails or, you know, you, you start talking about one thing and then you jump over to

Speaker A: 00:19:48

something else that is not a well organized answer.

Speaker B: 00:19:52

And it will, you know, it will result in you having a lower than desired score on, on your test. So make sure that your thoughts are following a logical order.

And by the way, brainstorming at the beginning, taking those 30 seconds, believe it or not, it can help you to organize that content piece really well where you decide, okay, first I'm going to start talking about this, then I'm going to mention this, and then I'll close by talking about this. It will help you to bring a little bit more direction to your answers. And the next one, are you adding supporting details to what you're saying?

So it's not enough to say a fact.

Like, if you go back to the story that I shared at the beginning of this episode where I was talking about my family's first few minutes, what that was like in Canada. If the question was on the, if the question on the exam was talk about your first day in Canada.

If all I said was, well, my first day in Canada was very tiring because we had a long flight and we were very glad to get back home again. That's a very simplistic answer. I could go back into that and add a little bit more details.

If you think about what I shared, I was telling you how nervous I was. I was telling you that my wife was nervous too. I was sharing that. We were trying to figure out what is the best thing that we could say.

We were so nervous that we decided to pray together and we grabbed each other's hands. I mean, I could have just said and we prayed, but I also mentioned that we took each other's hands as we were sitting together on the plane. Right.

I added A little bit more extra detail. And I even shared with you what the gist or the little idea was behind our prayer. Lord, please help us to find a really nice immigration agent.

And then I told you how nervous I was feeling, that my heart felt like it was beating faster and my hands were starting to get really sweaty as I came up to my turn with the immigration officer. So I was adding more details. You should be, too, because that strengthens your answer. Okay, so that's content.

The second lens that Celpip raters look through or listen through is something called listenability. Think about this. Do you sound like a normal person when you're talking? Like, if you're.

If you're listening through a voice memo app, if you took my suggestion and you tried practicing recording yourself, giving or sharing one of your personal experiences, like, for example, talking about what your first day on the job was or your first job here in Canada, what was that like?

If you took the time to record your answer and when you're playing it back, one of the things that you can listen for is, do I sound like a normal person when I'm listening to this? Or do I sound very robotic? Or is my voice not having any intonation? Is it, like, sounding really boring? That. I mean, sounding really boring?

That could also be a rhythm problem. And by the way, have you ever looked at how rhythm is spelled? As I was preparing this podcast, I was writing the word rhythm.

And by the way, rhythm is one of those words that I find difficult to spell. So I had to Google it to make sure that I was spelling it correctly. But I just was thinking to myself, boy, rhythm is such a strangely spelled word.

It's spelled R Y T H E M. Rhythm. Such a weird word. Anyway, that's beside the point.

But rhythm when it comes to speaking means that your word, that you sound natural, that you're not stopping and starting making long pauses.

Your words kind of flow from one idea to another and in a nice, easy to listen to pattern of speech, which is what a normal conversation sounds like anyway. So that's. That's something to think about. Do I sound like a normal person in my recording?

And if you're making another thing to be listening for are something called interjection. And those interjections are ums and ahs. And we did a previous episode on that already, which I'll link to in my show notes if you. If you missed it.

But having too many of those is something that you need to watch for. It's okay to have two or three because, you know, ums and ahs are part of everybody's conversation. It just happens.

It's just part of normal conversation. It happens. Right? But you shouldn't have those ums and ahs overpower you. I shared in that episode that I'll be linking to how frustrating.

How frustrating it can be to listen to a conversation where there's a lot of ums and ahs. And you know what? It happened again on a podcast, of all places. Just today, on the day that I'm recording this, it's a Saturday afternoon.

I was listening to a podcast as I was out for a walk, getting a few groceries. And the person being interviewed, oh, my gosh, like, every second or third sentence, it was an or an ah.

And it was so annoying because there was just. It was just happening so many times. Don't be that guy. Don't be that girl, the one who uses ums and ahs way too much. And I'll give you a hint.

Usually those ums and ahs are happening when we feel nervous or unsure of ourselves. We're. We're hesitating, right? And if you.

If you use that tip of recording yourself that I shared previously, that's a really solid way for you to begin reducing that and ah tendency that we have.

If that's a tendency that you have recording yourself and paying attention and hearing it, it's a really good way for you to notice, oh, my gosh, I do this a lot. And you'll begin focusing your attention on eliminating those from your speech as much as you can.

So please don't underestimate the power of recording yourself and listening to yourself and then recording yourself again, answering the same question. That's how you can make huge improvement. All right, so that vocabulary lens or no, sorry, the listenability lens, vocabulary comes next.

But the listenability lens, it's all about sounding like a normal person. If you want to sum it up just in that statement, that's. That's a fine way to do it.

Do I sound like a normal person that I would like to talk to and listen to?

If I don't sound that way, you should keep practicing to make that go away, to make that weirdness go away, and so that you feel more comfortable and confident with what you're saying.

And listenability is also about having a natural rhythm to your words and also making sure that you're not having too long pauses between your words, that those words are joined together and flowing nicely. And like I just finished saying that, you reduce those ums and ahs as much as you can. Okay, on to the next one. The vocabulary lens.

The thing that test raters will be looking for and listening for is are you using your words correctly? Are you using the proper word in the right place, the proper word for the proper way to express your idea? Or are they being mismatched?

You don't want that to happen. So that's one thing that they're listening for. They're also listening to make sure that you're not repeating yourself.

Are you talking about the same idea over and over again? You know, as I was listening to one of the CELPIP webinars about a month or so ago, they highlighted this, and I thought it was really interesting.

They, they, they showed a transcript of someone who had given their answer many years ago. And they pointed out, well, they let us listen to it first of all. And then they began to ask these questions.

What do you notice about the person's answer? And at first it sounded like it was a, it was a good answer. There wasn't a lot of big mistakes. They weren't getting stuck with grammar.

Everything that they were expressing made sense. But when we started looking at the transcript, there was something really interesting and they highlighted it for us.

They said this person got a lower grade on their vocabulary because they kept talking about the same idea over and over again, but just using different words. You don't want that to happen with your vocabulary.

You want to be able to express different ideas, not relying on the same phrases, not relying on the same words over and over again, and definitely not expressing the same idea in different ways.

Let your words take you forward, you know, let your words help you to move your story forward and not get stuck on repeating yourself again and again. So that's the vocabulary lens. The last lens that's really important that test readers look through is the task fulfillment lens.

And all that really means is, did I completely or did you completely answer the question? And you gotta be careful about this one because some of those questions have more than one question nested inside of it.

So sometimes it's not just one big question. Sometimes you'll have multiple questions that you need to deal with as you're giving your answer.

So that's the first lens that they'll be listening through or looking through as they engage with your answer. Did you completely answer the question? And if you're the one giving your own self feedback on your work, you could be listening for the same thing.

Did I really answer the question that I was practicing or did I kind of. You know, go off topic or did I miss a sub question? If there was more than one part to that initial question, did I completely answer it? Okay.

Another important part of the task fulfillment lens is this question, and this one can be a really tough one. Have I spoken for the full amount of time or as close as I possibly can get it to the full amount of time?

With speaking task two, you're going to have 60 seconds to give your answer and that's different from speaking task one, by the way. Speaking task one, you have 90 seconds, which is a really long time. Speaking task two, it's shorter. By 30 seconds.

You have 60 seconds to give your response. And what they're going to be listening for is for you to get as close as you possibly can to that 60 seconds without going over that.

You're able to finish what you're wanting to say and give a conclusion by the time that that time is up.

And definitely, if you've been listening before you've heard me say this, you don't want to have yourself get cut off when you're giving your, when you're, when you're giving your answer, that's another way that you can lose points. So you need to focus on sharing your answer before time is up and coming to an obvious conclusion before that time is up.

And definitely not getting cut off mid answer. When that time runs out, it doesn't wait for you to finish, it just moves on to the next answer to the next question. Sorry.

Whether you are finished or not and those points, your points or your score will suffer. If you're in the middle of a sentence and it cuts you off because it moves to the next question, you don't want that to happen.

So pay close attention to the time and make sure that you are answering as close to that time limit as you can. Meaning you don't also want to finish too soon like you don't want to be. It's a 60 second answer.

You don't want to be finishing at the 45 second mark. You need to get it inside of that last, you know, eight, five to eight seconds of time.

So you know, if you finish with 55 in 55 seconds, that's totally fine. But you know, be very careful about finishing at the 52nd mark or lower than that or sooner than that.

I don't, I don't know what word that would be, but just try your best to get close to that 60 second mark as you possibly can without going over. So those are the lenses that you can be using to give Yourself, your own answers, feedback.

If you decide to take me up on that tip of recording yourself as you're practicing and as you are recording your answer.

If you decide to do this, if you decide to take that step and actually try recording yourself and then playing it back and listening for those mistakes or listening for those areas where you can improve your answer. If you notice that some of those lenses that I just mentioned are giving you trouble, and it probably will, which is normal, don't feel bad about it.

Try answering the same question again. Repeat it multiple times if you have to.

You probably will need to repeat yourself like four or five times, recording your answer and then listening through those different lenses until you feel comfortable with your response. And that's okay. You don't have to get it right the first time. That's something that I've learned as I've been doing these podcast episodes.

You probably hear the odd mistake. In fact, you probably hear mistakes quite frequently. Maybe the audio. It doesn't always sound great. Maybe I make a mistake with my words.

But a lot of those mistakes get edited out. Get edited out. I do editing with what I've said. With what I've said. Oh, my gosh. I make lots of mistakes when I'm speaking with you.

Some of them I just leave them in because I think they're fun, but other times, I do erase them. But when I was first getting started, my friend, you know what? Those mistakes really weighed on me.

It made me feel like, oh, I shouldn't be doing this. I'm wasting so much time making mistakes. And at the beginning, when I would make a mistake, I would.

I would stop and then go back and start all over again. Can you imagine how long it would take me to record one of these episodes? It would take me so long because I would kept.

I would keep, like, what I just did. I would make a mistake, and then I'd think, oh, geez, I made a mistake. Now I have to go all the way back and start all over again. It took me forever.

And I was always beating myself up about the answer, about my recording, and thinking to myself, oh, I'm a terrible recorder. I can't do this. Everybody's gonna hate this.

But, you know, the more I did it and the more I listen to other podcasters, like, there's one podcast that I listen to a lot that has helped me to be podcasting, actually. It's called the School of Podcasting. And the host is a guy named Dave Jackson.

If you are interested at all in podcasting, you have to listen to this guy. He's really, really good.

And he taught me, as I was listening to his podcast, he taught me all about the power of podcasting, is that you can go back and edit all of your mistakes out. You don't have to go back and start all over again.

If you realize you've made a mistake, you just stop, make it an obvious break, and then continue from where you left off. And then when you're editing, you'll be able to spot those areas where you made a mistake and just completely edit it out. And you have.

I mean, the listener has no idea that you. That you made that mistake and then you cleaned it up. Nobody knows half of the mistakes. Probably even more than half.

A lot of the mistakes that I've made in this episode, I blot out so that you don't know. Right. And that's one of the cool things about practicing in this way. You don't have to feel bad about making mistakes.

It just helps you to get better at it.

And I think if I'm giving myself an honest feedback, I know I have a lot of things that I can do to improve the way I speak when it comes to making these podcasts. But I do realize that after a year and about four months that I've been doing this, I can look back and see that I've grown in confidence.

I've grown in my ability to share with you the ideas that I'm thinking in my head. I've just gotten a little bit better at it because I've been doing it again and again.

And, you know, I want to offer to you that the same thing will happen as you begin practicing in this way.

Recording yourself, speaking, giving a practice answer for one of the CELPIP questions, recording yourself and then playing it back and trying to hear ways that you can improve yourself. The first few times, you'll probably think, this is horrible. I suck at this. I even hate the sound of my voice.

But the more you do it, the more comfortable you will get with this. I really promise you that that is true.

And honestly, this is probably the best thing that you can be doing yourself to get ready for the actual exam, because you don't get to talk to a person. When you're doing the CELPIP exam, you are recording your voice and talking to a computer monitor.

There is no human face for you to interact with, and that can be a positive thing. If you get really nervous when you're trying to talk with a real person, especially if it's an examiner that can you know, set you off.

That can make you lose your focus. It can make you lose what you're trying to say because you get so nervous.

But for other people, recording to a computer without that facial, without the benefit of, you know, body language and seeing how a person responds to what you're saying, if you take that away, that can be really hard for a person. And so the more you actually practice doing this, the better prepared you will be for your exam day. Okay, okay, enough about that.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be taking a deep dive into each of the eight speaking tasks that you're going to face on the self of exam. In fact, we've already started last week, in case you missed it.

We spent some time talking about brainstorming skills as well as speaking task one, and I'll link to that episode in my show notes just in case you weren't here. But if you've ever wondered what to do and how you should be practicing for these speaking tasks, then please tune in.

Over the coming weeks, you'll get practical tips to help you practice on your own, as well as those important lenses that I was talking to you about that will help you to evaluate your own work. And of course you're going to get encouragement from me to help you not to give up, to keep going. Because this is really a game about perseverance.

So much of it is. You can't give up. Don't give up.

If you're trying to achieve your permanent residency status and all that you need to do is get through this CELPIP exam, don't give up. Sometimes it can be a long journey. I've been working with some students who this is like their third time trying to get through the exam.

You really do need to push hard and you really do need to have that sense of I'm not going to give up on this. No matter how hard I need to keep trying or how many times I need to keep doing this again, you will eventually get this if you don't give up.

And to make sure that you don't miss any of the upcoming episodes, you need to subscribe to my free weekly newsletter if you haven't already. If you enjoy listening to this podcast, you're going to love my weekly newsletter.

I share big ideas from this podcast every week so that I can help you to remember what we talked about, and I also offer additional tips and strategies to help you develop your skills.

For the CELPIP exam this month, for example, I'm offering a free video for you, which is actually a class that I taught recently around Speaking Task one Giving advice. Would you like to have that class completely free? It's simple to get to all you have to do is go to selpofsuccess.com resources and sign up.

Once you get inside, you'll have instant access to a growing bank of resources, including that video I was just telling you about. Signing up to get those resources also automatically subscribes you to that free weekly newsletter I was mentioning before.

You get two great things at an even greater price.

Speaker A: 00:40:24

Free.

Speaker B: 00:40:25

So what are you waiting for, my friend?

Head on over to celpipsuccess.com resources and there's a bunch of great resources in there waiting for you, as well as that video about Speaking Task one. Are you going to get your copy? Don't wait, grab yours today. That's celpipsuccess.com resources and I will see you again next Tuesday. Bye bye.