Pradeep was born in India and has spoken Tamil from birth. His dream was to immigrate to Australia, and to get there he needed a very good IELTS score. His first score was lower than required – because of Band 6.5 in writing he didn’t get the additional 10 points that would have helped his visa application. But Pradeep didn’t give up, he decided to work harder, and one month later we received this delightful email from him:
“I would like to convey my gratitude for all your support in helping me achieve this big milestone. I received my IELTS result and I feel proud to let you know that I achieved the Overall Band Score of 8. My scores in individual modules are as below:
Listening – 8.0
Reading – 8.0
Writing – 7.5
Speaking – 8.0
I can say without any hesitation that it was only with your help that I was able to achieve this score and I now have enough points to apply for the Australian immigration. I am happy to have chosen the right material and partner in nurturing my skills and preparing me for the exam with confidence.”
Yet another victory for Pradeep was winning in our monthly IELTS results competition, and in his winner’s interview he told us how he prepared for the exam:
“Reading and Listening
Practice makes perfect !!! The only way to succeed in these two modules is to train our ears to listen and identify answers, and our mind – to read, skim and process data in a short time span.
There is no substitute for practice and I did all the question papers that came with “ACE THE IELTS” plus tried various exercises from different websites.
Scoring a Band 8 in these modules should be easy once you get your brain and ears tuned up for the format and the content of these two modules.
Writing
Personally, this was the most difficult part of the IELTS exam and something that can easily be overlooked by people, particularly when they think they are good at writing. Unfortunately, there is a catch: IELTS essays are marked based on various aspects such as Cohesion, Coherence, Grammatical range, accuracy, structures and Lexical resources. Therefore, it is important to understand what they really mean and practice different essays by meeting all these criteria to achieve a better band score. I was able to push my score up by a whole band just because I started using the appropriate structures relevant to each essay type and I got great help from the IELTS blog’s essay correction team who gave great feedback after they reviewed my essays.”