Mastering vocabulary for CELPIP speaking task 3 or 4 can be tough especially because you have no way to know BEFORE your exam what you will need to talk about.

So how do you prepare?

You can prepare yourself by digging into your everyday situations!

Just by paying attention to your surroundings, whether you're at a grocery store, a coffee shop, or even filling up your gas tank, you can practice describing what you see.

This means actively thinking about the details around you and using precise vocabulary to describe what you see.

If you stumble upon words or phrases you can’t quite recall, don’t sweat it—take mental notes and look them up later to strengthen your vocabulary for those unexpected moments on test day.

Takeaways:

-- When preparing for speaking tasks, especially task 3, focus on building precise vocabulary.

-- Practice describing your surroundings in everyday scenarios to improve your vocabulary skills.

-- Take mental notes of unfamiliar words (words you might only know in your first language, for example) and look them up in English later to improve your vocabulary.

Let's work together to get your speaking skills ready for the CELPIP.

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So when you are working on speaking task three and speaking task four, one of the most common challenges that I find test preppers face is knowing what to say.

Like, not necessarily knowing what to say, but knowing precise things to say, like precise vocabulary words that will help them in the specific situation that they're trying to describe, to describe that situation accurately and in the most efficient way possible.

And the challenge is, is that you never know what kind of a scene or situation you're going to be looking at on your exam day to describe.

So how in the world can you be preparing and learning those specific vocabulary words that will help you to describe what's going on in that scene in the most effective way possible?

How can you prepare for that when you don't know what to prepare for?

Like, what am I going to see?

I don't know.

You won't know until your actual test day, right?

Well, I've been thinking about that a lot because one of the things I do is I help people get ready for their CELPIP exam.

And speaking task three and task four tend to be some of the more challenging and difficult ones to get ready for.

Specifically for this very reason, how do I know what words I can use?

And before I go any farther.

Hello, my name is Aaron.

Welcome to the Celpip Success podcast.

I am so glad that you are here.

Today we're going to be taking a look at how you can practically and easily, if you put your mind to it and you remember to do it, how you can easily, on a day by day basis, put yourself into situations that will help you to build your vocabulary skills.

The for the many different possibilities that you could find yourself in on the day of your exam where you need to describe what you're looking at.

And this is what I suggest you do.

Pay attention to the places where you go during the day.

Like, you don't need to do anything special for this.

Just pay attention to the places where you go, the different locations that you show up in, even if it's just around your house or if you're going to your grocery store or if you're going for a walk downtown in the place where you live, if you are going into a shopping center or if you're going to fill up your car with gas, all those kinds of situations are one day to day situations, right?

They're things that you and I do on a regular basis.

Just today I was in a restaurant.

So that's another place where you could potentially, if you wanted to, if you wanted to use it for this activity, you could use it as an opportunity to think about the things going on around you.

And what I want to encourage you to do is use these everyday places where you and I go.

Like what I was saying a moment ago, we don't need to do anything different or special to the things that we are already doing each day, which is a big deal.

Because I want you to find ways to incorporate practice into what you're already doing each day.

Because I know you're busy, I know you don't have a lot of time to devote to, you know, setting aside specific time where you are practicing and only practicing.

What's probably going to happen more frequently is that you're going to have little spaces during your day where you can turn those little things that you show up in, like what I was listing off before the grocery store, a restaurant, shopping center, filling up your car with gas.

You can turn those situations, if you remember, into great speaking.

Task three and four Practice opportunities.

And what I want to encourage you to do is when you are arriving in one of those circumstances, I want you to train your mind to start to think, okay, I'm in a new situation.

How can I describe what I see around me to someone who is not there?

And then begin to talk about the different things going on in the scene.

Like, imagine the place where you are is a scene.

Like, use your imagination to maybe freeze everything that's happening in front of you and just take, you know, 30 seconds or 45 seconds and if you can, talk about it for a minute, but see if you can work through all the different things that you see happening around you with your goal, and I should rephrase what I just said, your goal doesn't need to be for you to talk about everything, but to try to go into detail on two or three of the things that are happening around you and see if you can describe what you are looking at and use the most precise English vocabulary words that you can for those things, see if you can do it.

And if you find that you are running into words or things in what you're trying to describe and you're not sure what they are, like, maybe the words are coming to mind in your first language, but you can't think of what they are in English, that's awesome.

That's what we want to have happen.

Because the whole point is we want to start learning those precise vocabulary words that will help us to describe a possible scene that we might come across on the Selpwith exam.

And I think that the best way that you can be building up your vocabulary skills for that exam is to be putting yourself into situations that happen on a day by day basis and just get used to talking about what you see and being able to talk about what you see with accuracy and with precision, like with the exact words, if you can.

And so what to do when you find a word or when you find something in this scene that you've stepped into that you're not sure how to describe what it is?

Take a mental note, then Google it.

Like, for example, if you are at a, at a gas station and you're filling up your, your car with gas and you've put the hose inside of your, and you can't think about what that word is, you know, you put the, the gas hose into your car's.

Hmm, you're not sure what that is.

So what I would do is I would remember that moment.

I couldn't remember what this is called.

Maybe you could go on to Google when you get home and maybe look for vocabulary words like actually search for this vocabulary words that have to do with a gas station or filling up my car with gas and then just begin looking through that list of words.

And I'll tell you right now, the word that I was hoping you'd be able to fill in would be you're putting fuel inside of your car's gas tank.

Right?

So you'd want to begin looking for those words that you found were missing when you were trying to do it in that moment in the live practice session that you had just stepped into.

There will be things that you are not sure how to say or describe in English if you do this, and if you do it frequently enough, there will be maybe many examples of this happening where you run out of the right things to say to describe it.

So what I would encourage you to do would be what I just said.

Go ahead and remember that moment.

Remember the, like what you were doing when you ran out of words.

And then Google that situation and see if you can find the words that you're looking for or if you know the word in your first language or the phrase in your first language.

Use Google Translate to help you to get an idea of what that might be like.

Write your word in your first language and select Translate to English and that will help you to know what your missing word was.

And then try it again in your mind.

See if you can redo that moment that you had, you know, in this case at the gas station and see if you can describe what you are doing as if you were there, describe what you're doing and make sure that you're able to use that missing word or that missing phrase.

Now, if you want an even more interesting way to practice this, grab your cell phone and just go out.

On a normal day, like if, do what you normally do and instead of mentally trying to describe what's going on, when you notice that you're walking into a brand new scene, pull out your cell phone and quickly take a picture of what you see before you.

Like if you walk into a busy coffee shop before you do anything, just quickly take a picture of what you see and then put your phone away and then go and do what you're going to do.

Or if you are at the gas station, I don't know if that's a good idea because sometimes they don't allow you to take out your phone, but take a picture of what you are about to do.

If you're walking into a mall, take a picture of that and then put your phone away.

And the idea is to try to get several different pictures during your outing.

Like during the day, see if you can get four or five different shots.

When you get home, put this up.

Like if you have a bigger screen, see if you could throw this up on the screen or just use your cell phone and then give it to a friend.

Share, share that those pictures, and the idea is here, is that you want to have multiple pictures that you will use in your practice.

Okay?

And your goal will be to, without pointing, without signaling what you're talking about, only use your description to describe what you are seeing, like the picture that you are thinking about and see if your friend can pick out the picture that you're talking about based on the words that you are saying.

Again, you're not allowed to point, you're not allowed to make it obvious the one that you are talking about.

You should just use your words.

And by the power of your description, hopefully your friend or your loved one or your children will be able to figure out which picture you are talking about.

And if they can figure it out based on your description, you're doing a pretty good job.

Remember, for speaking task three and four, you don't need to talk about everything going on in the picture.

You don't have to instead focus on two or three things, but go into detail.

That's the most important part of this, that you can go into detail about the things that you are looking at for one minute without, you know, without running out of time, without feeling like you have to race through everything going on in the picture.

Just focus on one or two, two or three things.

Not one that wouldn't be enough.

Like maybe two or three things.

But go into detail.

And by going into detail, I mean you should.

You could be talking about clothing.

If there are people in the picture, you could talk about their hair color, you could talk about the expression on their face, you can talk about what they are doing, how they are feeling because of what they're doing, and so on.

Colors, all the description that you can go into.

I hope that that helps you as you are working on speaking task three and speaking task four.

Have a great day.

Bye.

Bye.