IELTS-Blog

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Our latest winner, IELTS candidate from Philippines, Donmarl Camua explains what he did to achieve Band 8.0 in his Academic exam.

“MY ADVICE

Coming from the Philippines, a country where English is the second official language, I do certainly have some advantage in taking the IELTS. However, in IELTS – just like in any exam – preparation is always the key.

I may be good in English, but if i didn’t take time to do homework, attend a class or do online exercises, I may not have the score that I need for my Immigration Application.

If you want to get high scores, dedicate enough time to studying.

WHAT I DID

Prior to taking the exam:

I did some research. I searched and downloaded reviewers and e-books on the Internet. I gathered all the reviewers I could find. I made sure that I do at least one reviewer a day.

I subscribed to the IELTS-Blog.com. I thank the creators of this website, because it helped me a lot during my review. The “overview of IELTS Exams” shared by blog subscribers, helped me plan what to practice in.

I took a review class sponsored by the test center, the IDP Philippines, to get tips from the actual examiners. We were given some tips on what the examiners look in the written exams. We were taught on how to do skimming and scanning in the Reading exams.

Again, if you want to be successful in IELTS, make time to prepare.

And when you prepare, prepare to WIN.

Simone says: I would like to ask all the people reading this post – if you achieved Band score 7 and up in IELTS and have tips to share – please click here and let me know.

Today I have more free Listening resources for you. I’ve had several requests this week to find and publish links to some Listening practice tests. This is the list I’ve compiled, feel free to let me know if you’ve found additional resources – every little bit helps.

1. Here you will find a short listening sample (mp3) with 5 questions, the correct answers are provided too. Click here to proceed to the test.

2. This test is prepared by the British Council, and I think it’s great. On that page you will find 15 short recordings and questions, five for each recording. The beauty of the thing is that you can set the speed of the recording to fast, medium and slow, depending on your listening skills. I think that this speed-tuning option is very useful.

The answers are of multiple choice style, you have three options and need to select the correct one. To find out whether or not your answer is correct, look at the bottom of the window, it will say “Correct” or “Incorrect”. The topics are about a magazine, a camping trip, a house explosion, a robbery, a train station, banking, difficulties of having a car, helpline, post office, a language school, making a hat, making a pizza, student interview, weather report, work problems.

Click here for the practice exercises.

3. Another useful piece of software is the IELTS Listening Conqueror 2.0.

It’s a program that you need to download and install on your computer (some will see this as a downside). It allows you to run 4 full listening tests for free (there are many more in the full version but it costs some money), and the transcript is displayed as you listen, sentence by sentence.

You also have the option of typing as you listen (they call it the method of dictation). The speed is adjustable and you can set the software to repeat every phrase as many times as you like. I have tried it, the quality of the recordings is not bad and the software is pretty easy to use.

The file size is 7 Mbytes, not an issue for any broadband users, people with dial-up will have to take a coffee break while the file is downloading.

That’s all for today, enjoy!