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
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
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
This is a continuation of my series of little but often exercises. The basic idea is that sometimes the mot efficient way to learn a language can be to spend 10- 15 minutes really doing, rather than one hour getting bored. This works particularly well internet based exercises, for those times you are sitting in front of your computer and you feel the need to do something else for a… Continue reading
Newspapers are an excellent free online resource for IELTS students both for reading practice and vocabulary and you will find below a list of links to some newspaper sites. To get the most out of these so that your language actually improve, here are some tips on how to use them.
For me, this is key. Language is a skill and skills are learnt through practice and… Continue reading
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
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