In a couple of day’s time many of you will be sitting IELTS exams and I thought this would be a good time to tell you about one common mistake that has been hurting the scores of other test takers.

As you know the Listening test consists of 4 sections. Before each section you will hear some instructions and there will be some time to look at the questions. Then the recording begins playing and you need to listen and write down your answers. You will be writing the answers right in the Listening booklet, next to the questions they belong to.

As you also know, at the end of the Listening test the answers must be written on the Answer Sheet. And here is the part you need to pay attention to: some people mistakenly choose to copy the answers to the Answer Sheet during the time they are given before each section begins. This is a BIG mistake, because that time is for you to concentrate on reading the questions about the new section (that is about to begin), it is the time to try and understand what’s coming – not for looking back and not for copying questions.

After the test you will be given 10 whole minutes to copy all your answers to the Answer Sheet and only then you need to be doing that. Any time spent on copying during the actual test is WASTED, it’s not doing you any good – in fact it distracts you and therefore harms your score.

Good luck with your exams, everybody!

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“MY ADVICE

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.

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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!

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Doan Hung Phuong, the winner of October results competition, shares his tips for success in IELTS Listening:

To succeed in the IELTS test, the key is practice. Never dream you will gain anything without any efforts. The fact is I had to do a great number of practice tests in a month before taking the real test. I did approximately one test a day, including reading and listening. Sometimes I practiced Writing and Speaking Tests at home.

Remember, you MUST do Listening, Reading and Writing Tests continually. In the real test, there will be no time for you to have a break. They officially say that you will have 5 minutes between each part, the fact this is not always so. Therefore, you must practice to cope with extremely high tension and pressure in the real test.

Practicing writing and speaking at home is not actually a good way. You need someone to check your writing and give advices in your speaking. However, I myself don’t have that advantageous condition as well, so I just simply do the test at home. Regardless of disadvantages, practicing at home will certainly help you deal will limited time and improve your organization in both writing and speaking in short times. Moreover, it also helps you get familiar with difficult questions and be well prepared for the up-coming exam.

I spent 3 months preparing for the IELTS test, 2 months to gain back basic English knowledge in English centers and 1 month to constantly do practice tests. It is the best if you have long-term plan for your exam , including improving vocabulary, revising grammar, learning and applying strategies for each type of question in IELTS test as well as improving 4 skills.

Now I will go into details about my way of studying and I think it will help your English improve:

Listening tips

This is considered to be the hardest skill to improve for most people. In reality, it is one of my weaknesses. To improve listening, you have no choice but to practice every day, practice as much as you can.

There are a lot of English channels where you can listen and try to understand what they are talking about. If you’ve got difficulty in understanding these universal channels, perhaps you need to learn more daily vocabulary and try to practice some easy listening books. The key here is just main idea. As long as you still understand what they are talking about, you will be fine. The purpose of this way is that you can familiarize with English and correct your pronunciation in basic words (the words you have known). Therefore, this is also an excellent way to prepare for speaking.

However, you MUST avoid BBC. There is absolutely nothing you can learn from BBC. If your level of English is good enough to understand BBC, you don’t need to come here and seek for advices; just do practice tests, it will save your time.

When doing Listening Practice Tests, you also have to catch the main ideas as well. However, this time you must practice listening to details too. The main ideas will help to you determine what the key words are and focus on important section. Stress and intonation are also helpful. Sometimes, a lot of unnecessary details make you confused and then you can’t catch the key words.

To sum up, the key for listening is Listen to English as much as you can.

Did you like these tips? Then subscribe and read IELTS-Blog in your favourite news reader – or get new posts to your email. Click here to subscribe.

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British Council in India has impressed me very much, I think that Indian IELTS candidates are very lucky. If you haven’t heard already, here is how they help people in their IELTS exam preparation:

First, you can register for the exam online and reserve a seat for the date you need. Click here for online registration.

Second, you get two free books with your registration, IELTS 6 (a set of 4 test papers from Cambridge ESOL) and Action plan for IELTS ( exam preparation advice and one full test paper). They are posted to your home and this page here explains about exam preparation.

Third, after you’ve sat for the exam, you can get your results also online, all you need to do is to choose your exam date, the city and your passport number. Click here to check your score online.

I wish more countries were doing the same for their IELTS candidates. If you know of a similar service in your country – please let me know. Leave a comment on this post or use this contact form to send me an email and thanks for your help!

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You guys often ask me this question in the emails: “How do I get ideas for IELTS essay, when I don’t understand the topic?”. And you’re right, it is extremely hard to write about something you don’t understand.

So here’s what you can do to solve this problem:

Read as much IELTS essay topics, as possible. You can find essay topics in every post in Recent exams category. Why do it? Simply because sometimes the topics repeat in future exams

Important! Don’t try to memorize essays. IELTS examiners are trained to look for memorized essays and they will disqualify your work on the spot.

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We can’t have too many free tasks samples, can we ? IELTS official site recently released some more free practice material.

They have added some Academic and General training reading passage and tasks, Academic and General Training writing tasks and one Speaking card for the 2-minute monologue. Too bad there are no correct answers given for the reading questions (and some listening samples would be nice to have too)!

So those of you who haven’t seen the free samples yet can find them here:

Academic Reading Sample

Academic Writing Sample

General Training Reading Sample

General Training Writing Sample

Speaking Card Sample

And we will do our best to publish the correct answers soon – so stay tuned!

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Lately I was thinking a lot of IELTS-Blog and what I should add to it. So far, I’ve decided to continue posting Listening tips, but if you, guys, have better ideas – please let me know.

Anyway, here goes Listening tip # 5 (see the previous 4 under IELTS Preparation>>Listening tips section )

Know your clues

The answer is usually pronounced louder and clearer, it is easier to hear and understand. If you can’t hear something clearly (because the speaker swallows words or whispers), then probably the answer is not there. Practice and you’ll learn to tell the difference.

A good clue to answer is when you hear a repetition of a word, a word being spelled out (G A R F U N K E L) or a number dictated.

The following conversation is a classic example of repetition:

Mary-Joe: “These days there are many changes in our company policy”

Kathy:”Oh, what kind of changes?”

It is clear that the word “changes” is a clue of answer.

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IELTS-Blog proudly presents new hot feature:

This nice addition is something I always wanted but never had. It converts number of correct answers in Listening or Reading sections of IELTS test to approximate Band Score. You will find it very helpful when practicing in solving IELTS exam papers; it saves you some time of calculating the exam result yourself.

But enough said – one picture is worth a million words, check it out right here.

Enjoy and tell your friends!

And now after you had the chance to check your score, here is a way to improve it:

1. Read texts from this list of sources (the passages are of Academic IELTS difficulty)

2. Practice using these Academic Reading tasks.

3. Practice using these General Training Reading texts.

4. Another bunch of Academic and General Training Reading and Listening tasks here.

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Continuing the previous post, here comes

Listening Tip # 4 – Answer as you listen

What I mean here is that you need to listen and write the answer at the same time.
Make no mistake – it is not a very natural thing for you, so you have to practice a lot in it.
The reason you have to “answer as you listen” is that you immediately forget the sentences after you have heard them. This is what stress, foreign language, constant flow of information does – it makes you forget. After hearing the third sentence you won’t be able to repeat the first. It means that when any part of Listening is over – you won’t be able to remember any of answers. So write them as you hear them, leave nothing for later.

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