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  IELTS Teacher Training Success Story, Alisa!

  19 January 2021

  IELTS Teacher Training Success Story, Alisa! Hey! Students take the IELTS exam for a range of reasons, but most are either migrating to an English-speaking country or planning to study in one. However, occasionally, we get to work with a student who has a totally different and much simpler goal – to improve their own teaching. Alisa is such a student. Having achieved a very respectable 7.5 in the academic exam in her first attempt, Alisa decided to try to better herself and managed to climb from a 6.5 to a 7.5 in writing, and from a 7.5 to an 8.5 in speaking after preparing with us at My IELTS Classroom. Today, you can listen to her full story to[…]

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  IELTS Band 7 Essay Checklist

  05 January 2021

  Today, Nick and I want to give everybody self-studying for the exam a head-start by sharing our IELTS Band 7 essay checklist. When you are learning to write IELTS essays, it’s really important that you constantly check that your writing satisfies the IELTS Band Descriptors. 

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  The Best and Worst of IELTS 2020

  29 December 2020

  Hey! I think that we can all agree that IELTS 2020 has not been easy. COVID has meant that many of us have had to spend weeks or months indoors, with test centres around the world closing, university courses moving online, and future plans being put on hold as we all try to ride the storm into 2021. However, despite of the hardships of this year, there have been bright spots.

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  IELTS Christmas Quiz!

  22 December 2020

  Hey! The festive season is with us, and whether or not you are going home for Christmas or even celebrating at all, today, Nick and invite you to join us for three fun IELTS Christmas quizzes – we will practice some grammar, review some lexis and, most importantly, have some fun at the end of what has been a very long year!

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  IELTS Heading Matching

  15 December 2020

  Last week Nick and I looked at box matching questions, which I think are the most difficult type in the IELTS listening test. Today, we turn our attention to IELTS heading matching, which, once again, is probably the most challenging in the reading test. The sad thing about headings match questions is that not only are they genuinely the most difficult to answer as they test you ability to summarise information, but they are made doubly-difficult by all of the poor advice given online about how to tackle them.

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  IELTS Listening Matching Questions Made Easy

  08 December 2020

  The matching questions in the IELTS exam should be easy. I mean, you can see the answers – they are just sitting there in the box. So why is it so difficult to match them? Well, that all depends on what the type of matching task you have been given. That’s right – there are TWO types of IELTS listening matching questions – one that focuses on testing your vocabulary, and one that focuses on testing your ability to follow a conversation.

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  IELTS Myths: 14 more busted!

  01 December 2020

  IELTS Myths – 14 more busted! There is so much misinformation online about the IELTS exam is that it can be hard for  test-takers to know what is an IELTS myth and what is an IELTS fact. In one of our first episodes, Nick and I discussed 15 questions from our listeners that started with the expression “Is it true that…” and then we discussed which were correct and which were not. Today, we do the same with 14 more IELTS myths!

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  Generating Ideas for IELTS essays

  17 November 2020

  One of the main problems that students face when they start IELTS Writing is generating ideas for IELTS essays. Today, Nick and I look at one way that you should definitely NOT use to find ideas, and then look at two simple approaches that you should. I also have a great blog post that discusses idea generation that you might want to read first before you listen.

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  The Best Approach to IELTS Speaking Part 3

  03 November 2020

  IELTS Speaking Part 3 In IELTS Speaking Part 3, the focus moves away from you to the world around you. This means that you will have to be able to speak about abstract topics, which is not easy even for high-level test takers. In the episode above, Nick and I explain how to approach these questions well by looking at the types of question you will be asked, the common topics covered, and the best way to answer the questions in this part of the test.

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  Why overgeneralising is damaging your IELTS essay score!

  27 October 2020

  I sometimes think that the world that I live in is very different to the one that IELTS test-takers live in. For example, when I was a child, my sister and I played a lot of computer games. The result? A lot of happy memories and good hand-eye coordination. However, if you ask IELTS test-takers about the result of playing computer games, the answer is always the same: blindness, lack of social skills, and maybe, a life of crime! Do you see the problem? These results are just TOO BIG! In IELTS overgeneralising is specifically mentioned in the band descriptors as a mistake that stops students getting an 8.0 for Task Response.

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