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First a quick update: Ace The IELTS book is NOT on sale any more, so the price now goes back to 19.95$.

One of my students took his IELTS (General Training) yesterday and lived to tell about it . Of course he didn’t remember much, but I managed to “squeeze” some details out of him:

Writing

Writing Task 1 (Letter) – Write a letter to publisher in a newspaper, asking to advertise a meeting of people from different countries you are organizing. Explain where, when and why.

Writing Task 2 (Essay) – Nowadays for many people Internet is replacing regular books. What do you think will happen in the future and what is your opinion.

Speaking

Interview – the interview was completely ordinary, questions : name, student or employee, what is your job, describe your regular day.

Card – questions about public transportation in your country.

Discussion – ecological consequences of public transportation and what can be done to improve the situation.

That’s all, I hope it helps!

I said this many times and I will repeat it again – “to write good IELTS essay, you need to get into your examiner’s head”. You’ve go to understand what makes you gain or lose marks, because once you do – you can’t go wrong. What I am about to reveal here can be found in IELTS official site, but I am explaining it in simple English.

This is how they grade your essay: you receive points for Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Looks heavy? Never mind, here comes the simple English version:

“Task Response” means that your essay shows that you understood and covered the topic from all its sides, aspects, etc. Let’s take this topic for example – “Internet: connecting or isolating people?”. Those who chose to write about how Internet connects people – loose marks, those who chose to write about how Internet isolates people – loose marks, those who compare and contrast both sides of the Internet and give arguments for and against – gain marks.

“Coherence and Cohesion” means how well you connected the paragraphs and sentences inside each paragraph. You see, all of your paragraphs need to be logically connected. For example, if paragraph 1 explains the advantages of the Internet, and paragraph 2 explains its disadvantages, then paragraph 1 should have last sentence saying something like this: “In spite of Internet being such a help in communication, its drawbacks can not be overlooked”. This sentence creates the connection between 1st and 2nd paragraphs. If it wasn’t there, examiner could think that you jumped from advantages to disadvantages without a reason. The same rule applies to sentences inside the paragraph. Every sentence should lead to the next one.

“Lexical Resource” means vocabulary and different types of sentences, simple and complex. You should be able to use words and their synonyms.

“Grammatical Range and Accuracy” means spelling and grammar of sentences. You should be able to spell the words correctly, do not forget articles “a” and “the”, punctuations is also important, etc – you get the picture, don’t you?

One more important thing to know: the four criteria are equally weighted. It means that if you forgot about “Coherence and Cohesion” in your essay, you will loose 1/4 of your essay points.

It is quite possible that after reading this explanation you still couldn’t write good IELTS essay. This is where “Ace The IELTS” book comes in. It has a full chapter dedicated to IELTS essay, which explains from A to Z the whole process of essay writing and makes it so easy, a kid could do it.
There are topics of essays for you to practice on and our teacher is waiting to check your essays and make sure you are ready for the big IELTS. And, of course, I am here to answer your questions, solve your problems and support you every step of the way, write me to simone@IELTS-Blog.com