All About IELTS

Welcome to IELTS Success Formula Challenge Day 6. If you’ve just joined IELTS-Blog today, read about the Challenge here.

Today we’re going to deal with two related issues in IELTS Speaking.

The first one presents a problem for Dr. Sherif Magdi from Egypt. To be able to work in the UK he needs to get an overall IELTS Band score of 7.5 with at least 7 for each skill. Here is what Dr. Sherif finds especially difficult in his IELTS preparation:

“I have a real problem with the IELTS test especially the expressive modules (speaking and writing). Although I graduated from medical school where all the study materials were in English but it was particularly medical English with very simple English sentences. I was expressing myself using a simple vocabulary and had not performed well in the mock exams. What made it much harder that the GMC had raised the minimal accepted IELTS score for registration to 7.5 overall score with a minimum of 7 in each module. I don’t know what to do to improve my ability to hit this score.”

The second one makes Sajjad Anwar Khan’s life difficult. He wants to immigrate from Pakistan to Canada, and must have a good IELTS score to get a visa. His exam is just around the corner, in July, and here is his main problem:

“I have a problem in Speaking. When I have to speak on a given topic for a specific time, I always face difficulty with putting together ideas and vocabulary in a short time. I need an advice/tip how to quickly gather ideas in a shortest time and deliver a response in a better, more organised way”.

When your speaking is judged in IELTS, there are 4 criteria used to assess it:

1. Fluency and Coherence
2. Lexical Resource
3. Grammatical Range and Accuracy
4. Pronunciation.

But what exactly does that mean? It means your assessor is looking at

1. How much do you hesitate, how appropriate and full are your answers, how do you link your ideas?
2. What range of vocabulary are you using, and how flexible are you in your choice of words?
3. How accurate is your grammar, and are you able to use different sentence types?
4. How easy is your pronunciation to understand, and how well are you using intonation and pauses when you speak?

As you can see, vocabulary makes only 25%, a quarter of your Speaking score, so focusing ALL your attention on it is a mistake. You also need to speak fluently, link ideas well, keep grammatical errors to the minimum, and pronounce words correctly to raise your score. In IELTS Success Formula we give you advice and take you through Fitness Activities to cover all of these aspects of your speech. One important thing you will learn is the difference between a low-score response and a high-score response. We show you lots of examples and give particular reasons why response A (for example) is the best and what is wrong with responses B or C – see a sample here.

However, vocabulary is one of the common problems, which is why we created a “Top score vocabulary” list, especially for IELTS Speaking – here is a sample. It will help you to raise your score because using occasional phrasal expressions or idioms enriches your vocabulary.

Quickly putting together ideas for your speech can be a problem if you’re seeing the topic for the first time in your life, and also if you haven’t trained in doing that in a short time. How should you deal with that?

The list of Speaking topics used in IELTS is not endless, and it always pays off to go over the typical ones and think of things to say. In IELTS Success Formula we have a full recording and transcript of a real speaking test (see a sample here) where the test taker is answering examiner’s questions. You can go over it to see how to respond well to the frequently asked questions, and you can also follow our suggestions there how those responses can be improved to get a higher score.

A list of IELTS Speaking questions is available on our website, where we post daily questions shared by real test takers shortly after their exams, and of course in IELTS Success Formula we have included a collection of most popular topics with full interview question sets and cue cards for practice.

To learn more visit the IELTS Success Formula webpage and download a free trial copy (scroll down and look for the download link).

Welcome to IELTS Success Formula Challenge Day 5. If you’ve just joined IELTS-Blog today, read about the Challenge here.

Today we’re going to handle a problem that Anshad M. from India complained about. He is a nurse who needs a work permit for working in English-speaking countries such as UK, Canada and New Zealand.

To be able to get his dream job, Anshad needs to deal with the following IELTS issue:

“I took my IELTS test a year ago and my Writing module score was pretty low. When I was inside the exam hall, I could not respond to the essay topic properly. The topic was a two way discussion about whether or not creative artists should be supported by the government. Even though the topic was rather simple, I failed to find some rational arguments in the given time and that affected my sentences and brought my score below average. Because of the same reason, Writing Task 1 too didn’t go well. I believe I still may face the same issue in the upcoming examination which I am planning to sit in August and I seek your guidance.

Do you know what “drawing a blank” means? It means to be unable to think of something, to be unable to get information. This is what happens when you get a question on the topic you never thought about – and it’s a very, very common problem (you’re not the only one who has it, Anshad!)

One part of Anshad’s problem is that he didn’t have enough thoughts on the topic. It can be solved by going over a list of typical IELTS essay tasks in preparation for the exam, and thinking in advance about each and every one of them, to have something to say. We post the latest IELTS topics daily on IELTS-Blog.com, and have a large collection of them, which is constantly growing.

Another part of Anshad’s problem is that he didn’t follow a proper essay-writing process. When you know what to do step by step, it helps with managing your time, it helps with writing a good essay and it helps to calm you down, because when you feel in control of the task there is no stress.

IELTS Success Formula does exactly that for you – it teaches you the process, explains the essay types you can get in IELTS, it shows you how to handle each essay type, how many paragraphs to write, what should be written in each paragraph, what sentence structure to use to get a higher score, what vocabulary to use, how to link your sentences while developing your viewpoint and more (have a look at this fitness activities sample). In addition the book reveals you 10 secrets how to impress the assessor with your writing, and how to identify in your writing very common weaknesses so you can avoid them. After doing the fitness activities in the book you will find that 35 minutes is enough to write a great essay and will even have 5 more minutes to check your work.

Writing reports in IELTS, just like writing essays, can be broken down into steps. By following a simple process you can quickly understand the task, what you’re required to do, gather your thoughts and put them in writing, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and when finished, give your work an overall check to ensure quality and quickly find the errors. The types of charts and diagrams or maps you can encounter do affect the report you will be writing, but we cover all of them in great detail in IELTS Success Formula. You won’t be caught unprepared if you went through the Writing Task 1 fitness activities in the book (view a sample here).

To learn more visit the IELTS Success Formula webpage and download a free trial copy (scroll down and look for the download link).