Much of the philosophy of this blog is that the best the way to prepare for IELTS is to take care of your general English and not to focus solely on the exam. This is particularly relevant in relation to learning vocabulary which is a key to all 4 papers. Here is another “little but often” suggestion on how you should go about that learning process – this
Spelling does matter in IELTS – particularly in the reading and listening papers. If you spell the word incorrectly, you lose the mark. So how do you learn to spell? My answer to that is mostly by reading: if you see the word enough, you soon recognise what’s right. But it’s not quite that simple is it? Particularly if your native language has a different alphabet such as Arabic does… Continue reading
In IELTS speaking rule number 1 is to speak. In practice what this means is that you only have a limited amount of thinking time and you cannot wait 10 seconds before you start to answer the question. Indeed, a 4/5 second pause is almost certain to be noted by the examiner. What you need to do is to start speaking almost immediately. How can you do do
When you plan an IELTS essay what are you trying to achieve? Some people stop at the idea of thinking of ideas, for them that’s enough. I’m going to suggest you should be doing a little more: namely thinking about how your ideas fit together so that you writing becomes more coherent. One tool to help you think about this is this week’s recommended website is
How long should you spend planning an IELTS? There is of course no correct answer to this question, but in this post I am going to make a suggestion that you should consider spending up to 10 minutes on the planning process. Really? Yes, 10 minutes is not too long, let me try and explain why.
Overlong essays
Just recently I have seen a
If you read enough IELTS books (or take the exam too often!), you’ll soon realise that there are very definite IELTS topics. There is a good reason for this: IELTS is a very international exam and the topics have to be suitable for all countries and all cultures. Accordingly, (nice word that) the people who set the exam tend to choose relatively everyday topics -
What is the best way to improve your IELTS listening score? You often see it written that the best thing to do is to practise, practise, practise. I beg to differ. Listening is a skill and skills are improved by practice – but so long as you are doing the right kind of practice. For me it is obvious that you need to practise in a way in that
You sometimes see it said that all you have do with the listening paper in IELTS is to practice: that there aren’t any particular skills to learn. I disagree – profoundly. There are not just definite skills to learn, there are also I would suggest very definite ways in which to practice. Here are a few of my suggestions.
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Here is some more free IELTS listening practice from the internet. May I suggest before you do it, you take a look at some of my listening tips. Listening is a skill that needs to be practised, but it does help if you practise in a focussed way trying to improve your skills.
As you do these tests, it is a good idea to familiarise yourself
September the 8th is International Literacy Day and here is my minor contribution towards raising awareness of the problem. I have selected some figures for literacy rates around the world from the UNDP report of 2007/8 and your task is to summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.
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