The most important advice you will ever get
This post is about how to improve your IELTS score overnight. What I say may seem obvious, but often the obvious is what matters. In a way, all other tips for IELTS exams are just explanations of this point. Please do read this post: take a look at the examples at the end – it could make all the difference.
Mistakes in IELTS – two categories
Mistakes in IELTS can be analysed in a variety of ways. For me, they fall into two basic categories. The first is mistakes made through lack of language ability: to some extent these are unavoidable – unless and until you improve your basic language skills. The second category is mistakes made through not focussing on the question – these by contrast are very avoidable.
For most candidates a significant proportion of mistakes come about from not focussing on the question.
Read, understand and answer the question
The solution is to read, understand and answer the question. All these 3 stages need to be focussed on.
Read: this means spending time, do not hurry onto the writing/reading/listening part. The more time you spend reading, the more efficiently, you will write/read/listen.
Understand: I thank Nadjwa – one of my students – for this. It is not sufficient just to read, you also need to understand. Why? If you don’t understand, you won’t answer the task. If you don’t answer the task, you don’t get the marks.
Answer: in practice this is where it goes wrong I suspect. So let me give a couple of examples of what needs to be done.
Listening paper example
In the listening paper you need to know that there are distractors: answers that look right, but are in fact wrong because they do not answer the whole question, but simply mirror some of the words in it.
You may have problems because you don’t like the local food and this can affect your health and studies. Angela Pease is our dietary representative in the Student Health and Welfare Department and you should contact her.
Students should contact Angela Pease when:
a) their health is poor b) they need to diet c) they can’t eat the local food
The correct answer is c). Why? Answers a) and b) do not refer to local food. Answer a) simply word matches the word “health” and b) the word “diet”. Read, understand, answer.
Reading paper example
This example is simple.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from Reading Passage 1 for each answer
Which of these possible answers must be wrong?
a) Blue Moon b) Blue Moon Cheese C) The Blue Moon Cheese Company
C is more than 3 words and simply cannot be right. Read, understand and answer.
I AM FINDING DIFFIULTTY IN READING.HOPE THESE TIPS WOULD HELP ME. THANKS A LOT. J
Excellent. I am planning a series of posts in the next month on how to approach the different types of reading tasks. Hope that that helps.
Dear Dominic,
Hi I just wanted to know if all questions in Reading and Listening marked equally, what I mean is are they all 1 point for each questions or different question have different marks.
I will appreciate your help
There is one point for each question in the reading and listening papers.
Thank you so much for your tips. They are useful for me.
Yeah, for me reading is tough as well..cant get more than 30 out of 40 in academic…i was studying in in australian university for three years and read a lot of academic materials, including articles and books..but still find it hard to get more than 30… especially the most difficult excersises are – true/false/not given and multiple choices…
30 out of 40 isn’t bad at all but…. Well, if you’ve been studying in an Australian university for 3 years, something isn’t quite right.
In your case, it seems unlikely that the problem is in the language, rather something is going wrong in the exam technique. Here are a couple of my standard tips that sometimes make a difference:
1. Always refer back to the question before you write in your answer – when you do this look for the tricky words like “always” and “some” – they can change meaning radically.
2. Underline the words in the text that you think relate to the question. This helps you focus on precise meaning as opposed to general meaning. And there will always be something precise in the text that gives you the answer.
Yes, the true/false/not given type is horrid. Have you seen my tutorial and exercise on this? I am planning on posting 30 or so more reading exercises in the next two weeks. One option here is just to mark the ones that are definitely true and false – and then the rest must be “Not Given”.
Hi, Dominic. Thank you for good advices!! REALLY work
There is another thing, referring to listening.
How to approach reading a particular question in the listening test?
I mean, I dont have enough time for reading multiple choices and to get what that question is actually wants to ask for 30 sec…
The situation is that i understand every single word when i am listening a test, but If i didnt have enough time to read the question, i would defenetly make a mistake…especially in a multiple choices question and a question where you need to choose, say, two options out of 10 or something..
Thank you!
Good question.
The normal teacher advice is to spend as much time as possible in between listenings reading the questions and trying to predict what you are going to listen to. Increasingly I am slightly doubtful whether this is really practical – as you yourself point out. What you describe is perfectly normal: you hear all the words but you can’t process the answers quickly enough.
For me this happens because a large part of the difficulty of the IELTS listening is concentration – you listen for up to 25 minutes and that’s much longer than you would ever do in a classroom. One radical solution is to take time out between questions. If you give yourself 15 seconds off, you then have more mental energy to concentrate on the listening part so that you can listen, read and write all at the same time. I want to be a little cautious here as this advice is really quite unusual but it is a technique I have used with some success with IELTS candidates. Give it a go at least.
My advice on the multiple choice questions is this. Before you listen, only look at the stem of the question and ignore the variations. Two reasons for this.
1. If you look at the variations you have information overload – you can’t process all that info all at once.
2. You start to confuse yourself if you look at the variations – most of them are wrong after all.
What you want to do is just note quickly the topics you will be listening out for. Then relax until you hear them mentioned and then you start to really concentrate and go through the options as you are listening.
Hey Dominic,
I have been reading your blog for a few days now and just wanted to let you know how helpful your suggestions are. I’m German and have got a conditional offer from Oxford, which wants me to pass the IELTS with a 7.0 in each section. I have to admit that writing had been a problem for me until I managed it to find a certain structure; some kind of an outline.
But, seriously, the reading part is just too tough an excercise, in my opinion. I’m still trying to figure out a specific system to achieve 31 correct answers (at least) and your blog tramendously helps me with that.
I’m also greatful for your advice to watch a video by EnglishRyan, whose ebook I actually bought (to score high in the essay part). Both your advice and his way of dealing with that helped me to improve (I hope so^^) my writing skills.
And to the listening discussion: I agree with you, Elena. I have problems with the block of 7 or so questions in a row, 4 answer possibilities each and much stuff to read as well. Sometimes I’m just lost and realise the narrator to be 2 questions further.:) Unfortunately, my exam date is the 12th of Feb. .. Still a little bit time..