How is your IELTS speaking band score calculated? This is an important question for any IELTS candidate because many mistakes can be avoided by knowing what the examiner is looking for and how your speaking is graded. This post gives you a brief outline of the grading criteria, how band scores are calculated and how examiners typically grade the speaking.YR3NNSCZZU73
There are 4 criteria… Continue reading
Pronunciation is 25% of your overall speaking band score and so it is obviously important that you work on it. This can be hard to do though if you are living in a country where English is not spoken and you do not have much chance to practise speaking. In this post I am going to suggest a cool website that may help you out if you are a computer… Continue reading
This is just a brief post to announce that I have added an interactive reading and listening band score calculator to the site. As you are preparing and practising tests it is obviously useful to check your progress. I have also added information and links to explain what the band scores mean.
The calculator can be found here: online band score calculator
Here is a quick post of a link to useful site for describing graphs for academic task 1. In a way it is quite limited as it only gives you the trend-based language for time graphs, but the way it does this is excellent as it shows you how to use the vocabulary. Here are some reasons why I recommend this site to you:
For many academic IELTS candidates reading is the hardest paper and the one which requires most training. Here I suggest some different ways to make that training as efficient as possible. These pieces of advice are fairly general and are designed to help you think about the best way to train yourself in IELTS reading and how to avoid some common mistakes.
This is another of my little but often series. If you are new to this site, the idea is that one of the best ways to learn English can be to do short focussed activities for a short period of time rather than sitting in front of a computer screen or a book for hours. Google News Timeline is another site that could be of real help to… Continue reading
In academic task 1 it is important to learn how to read a chart and a graph. This is because the instructions always tell you to summarise and select and report on the main features of the graphic. Many candidates make the mistake here of including as much detail as possible in their report. This brief tutorial gives you a sample task 1 report and some tips on how to… Continue reading
This is a brilliant reading resource for IELTS candidates. It is far more than a reading practice test rather it is a complete tutorial on the reading paper. It explains how to approach the reading paper and the different types of question you can expect to find there. It shows examples of 9 different types of question and then explains the different reading skills needed for each question type. For me… Continue reading
This blog is largely intended for candidates who are studying alone for the IELTS exam. The internet is good, but books are useful too, right? So here are some of my suggestions. There are of course other books out there, but here are some I know and can recommend.
This is one area where it pays to buy quality: the cheapest books may not be the best books.
Grammatical range and accuracy is perhaps the most misunderstood grading criterion in IELTS writing. The clue is in the name: it is not enough to not make mistakes (accuracy), you also need to use a variety of grammatical structures (range). Too often candidates focus only on the mistakes.
Accuracy is not a simple idea and it can be though about in 2 ways.
How… Continue reading
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