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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.
Hey! IELTS is well-known for recycling the same topics for Speaking Part 2 again and again. However, they do sometimes introduce new topics into the exam, which can confuse some students. Today, Nick and I analyse 5 new IELTS Cue Card topics 2022 to show you how you can come up with ideas quickly for ANY topic. Plus, we will provide model answers for two questions.
Many students find IELTS Listening Part 3 difficult. There are a number of reasons for this, which you hopefully remember from our IELTS Listening 101 episode: there are more than two voices, the questions usually focus on the outcome of a discussion in which many views are offered, and you may also be asked to locate a person’s feelings (and we all know that feelings are much harder to find than facts!).
Last week, IELTS IDP announced that they are planning to introduce a new test called the IELTS One Skill Retake. This will give students the opportunity to retake only one section of the four skills (Listening, Reading, Writing or Speaking) in the IELTS test if they did not achieve the score they aimed for the first time around.
One component of your score for Lexical Resource in the IELTS writing exam is spelling. I am often asked how many IELTS spelling mistakes a student can make and still receive a 7.0. The answer is “it depends”. There is no fixed number of errors that automatically results in you getting a 5, 6, 7, or 8 for lexical resource. This is simply because not every spelling errors is the same.
Yes! That’s right – this week Nick and I are looking at a grammar point – parallelism! This is not a topic that is widely discussed in the IELTS world, but if you are looking for a score of 7.0 or higher in Writing, it is definitely something that you should pay attention to.
Hey! Today, Nick and I take a look at what we think are new Cambridge IELTS 17 letters. In other words, although the book was published in July, we were unable to get our hands on a copy, so we are hoping that these are the real questions as we got them from a third source!)