The language of academic caution can be extremely helpful in IELTS in two ways. Naturally, it can help extend the range of your writing and speaking vocabulary by being more “academic”. More importantly, perhaps, it can help improve your coherence by allowing you to extend your written and spoken answers in a way that is both natural and coherent. In this post I look at how you can… Continue reading
Before you go to the IELTS speaking test it helps to know how the test works. If you know what to expect, then you have a better chance of doing better. For me, the best place to start to see how the test works is Australia Network – Passport to English. These videoclips are not exactly in exam format as parts 1 and 3 would last longer in the real… Continue reading
When you are studying for IELTS, it is sensible to concentrate on language that will be most useful in the test. Here is a suggestion for you: study the language of problems. This is a very important area of language because almost every IELTS essay task will ask you to write about a problem and if you want to get a good band score in lexical
I have added the reading and listening “mock” tests from the English Online section of the British Council China site to the exam practice materials. They are certainly well-produced and are high quality preparation materials. A word of warning, however. Neither the listening nor the reading tests are exactly in exam format and I suggest you should be very careful in using them as exam practice.… Continue reading
Why do IELTS candidates make mistakes in the reading paper? Time and the difficulty of the texts are two reasons. Another reason is that they do not read in the right way and they focus on key words only. Key words can help but only if used correctly. Used incorrectly, they can in fact cause more mistakes, not fewer. In fact, my belief is that not knowing how to use… Continue reading
How do you write a conclusion for an IELTS academic part 1? There is no one answer to that question but I am going to give you some ideas to think about. I am also going to give you an exercise based on a piece of writing sent into me by one of my subscribers.
You don’t have to write too much. A sentence is enough. It can even… Continue reading
This is the first in a series of posts about how to write an IELTS essay. In this one I sit in front of my webcam and tell you a story. For me, this can be a great form of teaching and understanding ideas. It’s a story I tell all my “real” students in my “real” classroom and I try to tell the story in exactly the same way I… Continue reading
One essential piece of language for IELTS writing and speaking is the language of comparison. Throughout the exam you have opportunities to compare and contrast and it is worth focussing on learning some variations: different ways of saying the same thing in order to help your lexical resource band score. In this article I look at why comparisons are so important in the speaking test and then… Continue reading
Reading is the most challenging paper for many IELTS candidates and indeed it can be difficult. Some of the texts are really tough and the questions can be tricky, but time is the real problem. How can you read and process 3 texts of 800-900 words in 60 minutes? One answer is skimming, another is scanning and it is this that I am going to look… Continue reading
Vocabulary is an extremely important factor in the IELTS speaking module and a large part of this is Range of Vocabulary. This means that you have enough words to speak about different topics accurately and that you do not repeat the same words all the time. However, the vocabulary you need for the exam is not just topic vocabulary but also functional vocabulary: words and phrases for explaining, giving examples and… Continue reading
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