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Part 3 is definitely the most difficult part of the IELTS speaking exam. This is where the questions move from asking about you, to asking about the world around you, and for many students, it can be hard to come up with ideas for these more abstract questions. Today, Nick and I discuss how to unlock IELTS Speaking Part 3 questions by finding the “hidden topic” inside them.
Hey! I have always loved teaching IELTS Academic Task 1. Many students are afraid of charts, but I have always found that if you teach test-takers some basic principles, then it is always possible to find the key features and organise the report well. However, this week, I was looking at the new IELTS Cambridge 17 Academic Report Questions and I have to say that two of the prompts in the current book are VERY difficult. Seriously, I am talking climbing Everest bare-foot with an elephant strapped to your back difficult.
Hey! Today, Nick and I are travelling back in time to complete the IELTS Cambridge 6 Test 3 listening test, which was first published in 2007. Why? Well, it’s not because we were younger and better looking then, but because we want to give you a chance to experience the older IELTS test format, which seems to be making a come back in exam rooms.
Please do NOT panic! I want to make it clear right at the start of this blog post that there are no major changes happening to the IELTS exam (that I am aware of) in 2023. Cambridge is not adding a new section to the speaking exam, or changing the amount of time that you have for writing, or making the reading passages more difficult. However, some of our students have reported over the last few weeks that some of the exams that they have sat at the start of 2023 have deviated slightly from the current Cambridge book format. Today, Nick and I explain what those changes are and how the IELTS exam format changing in 2023 could affect your[…]
Hey! Yes, Nick and I have finally got out hands on a copy of the new Cambridge IELTS 17 General Training book, so today we look at the four essay questions to discuss how difficult they are, how they should be approached, and what ideas we would use as the basis of our arguments in the body paragraphs.
Unless you have been living under a rock (or not spending every moment on social media) for the last few weeks, you have probably heard about ChatGPT – the new artificial intelligence search engine that can write advertising campaigns, poems, or hundreds of pages of code in milliseconds. Oh, and did I mention that it will deliver these to you as if they had been written by a human? Seriously, the future is now! However, while the launch of ChatGPT is causing people to fear for their jobs (and teachers to fear that homework assignments may now be useless!), what Nick and I want to find out today whether students can use ChatGPT for IELTS.
Ho ho ho! It’s the final Tuesday before Christmas, which means only one thing – it is time for our annual Christmas Quiz! Join Nick and I as we exchange stories from Christmas Past, explain what people in the UK do on December 25th, and attempt to answer this year’s fiendish quiz questions. For example, do you know how many turkeys are eaten on Christmas Day? Or when people in Spain open their Christmas presents? No? Well, come join the fun.
Hey! Last week, Nick and I explained exactly how the examiner will determine your grade for Fluency and Coherence in the speaking exam. At the end of the episode, we set our listeners the challenge to record themselves attempting three current cue card questions. Today, we will be going through a selection of those recordings to give band scores and advice that will be helpful for every test-taker.
In the IELTS Speaking exam, the examiner will give you a score in 4 areas: Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Range, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation. Your final score will be the average of these four scores rounded down (yes, you read that correctly, the scores will be rounded down, so you will need an average of at least 7.0 to achieve that score). However, recently I realised that that there is a lot of confusion among students as to exactly what the examiner is looking for when they grade IELTS speaking Fluency and Coherence.
IELTS reading MCQs have always been one of the most difficult to tackle in IELTS. That is because they can either test your understanding of the information given in the passage of your understanding of the writer’s purpose or aim. Until now, 90% of questions have focussed on the former, but I noticed that in Cambridge IELTS Academic 17, almost ALL of the questions asked you to analyse what the writer was doing. This is obviously a massive change and one that could be challenging for many students.