Hey! My philosophy as a teacher is that the only way to increase your IELTS score is to work hard on improving your language skills and academic techniques. But, I would be lying if I said that I haven’t learned a few shortcuts over the last 17 years that can help students to quickly move from 6 to 7 in IELTS writing! So, in today’s blog post, I want to share my top 5 IELTS Grammar Tricks.
Learning to use prepositions correctly is one of the most difficult tasks facing English language learners. In fact, along with articles it is usually the final thing that a student masters before becoming 100% proficient. The problem is that we use prepositions in so many different ways. We use them to show place (The cat is under the table), time (I will meet you on Sunday), and to help create phrasal verbs (I ran out of time in the exam). In fact, there are so many different preposition rules that it would be impossible for me to teach them all in one blog post. So, today, I want to focus on just one type: dependent prepositions.
Hey! If you are an Academic IELTS student, you should know that you cannot get more than a 6.0 for Task Achievement if you don’t have an overview that summarises the general trends of the chart. Now, there is usually more than one key feature in a chart, but there is almost always one that summarises all of the items on the chart. I call this the “main key feature” as it is the most important and the most valuable in terms of points. I teach my students how to find this main key feature on the first day of class. Obviously, it will depend on the type of chart you are given (the main key feature of a map will not[…]
Even though coherence and cohesion makes up 25% of a student’s score for Writing Task 1 and Task 2, it is probably the area that most IELTS test-takers overlook in their preparation. Quite honestly, I am sure that 50% of students aren’t even sure what the two words mean, let alone how they affect their band score! So, in today’s post, I want to look at the 5 most common IELTS Coherence & Cohesion mistakes and show you how to avoid them.
Hey! In today’s blog I want to look at a grammar point that is not discussed very often but can make a big difference to your Grammatical Range and Accuracy score: parallelism. This is particularly true for high-level students who often make mistakes in this area. So, let’s start with the obvious question: What is parallelism? 🤔
In the past, you automatically lost points from your Task Achievement / Response score if you wrote an under-length essay, report or letter. However, from mid-2018 the automatic IELTS word count penalty was removed. There has been no official announcement of this change and the information was supposed to be sensitive. However, as many people are now discussing this on various social media platforms, I thought it was time I addresses this issue to ensure students understand what this change means.
Let me start by saying that by far the best resource for authentic IELTS essay topics are the Cambridge 1 – 13 books. These are real past IELTS exam papers and, therefore, provide students with the highest quality questions for all parts of the test. However, what do you do if you have finished the Cambridge books? Or you struggle with one particular type of question and want a lot of that specific type of practise?
Hey! Today I want to give you a short guide to how your overall IELTS writing band score is calculated. You might think that this is obvious, but you will be surprised how many people misunderstand the scoring system and, therefore, think that they are performing better than they are!
Hey! I’m going to be honest with you – ask a native speaker where you have to use commas in a sentence, and most will look back at you with a blank face! Why? Well, most native speakers don’t care that much about them! Some sprinkle commas all over their writing, others use none at all – and most of the time, it doesn’t make a huge difference because English speakers are rarely judged by their comma use!
Every candidate has the chance to apply for an IELTS remark if they feel that their scores do not reflect their true exam performance. However, NOT every candidate who doesn’t get the band scores they need should do this! There are many factors that you should take into account before deciding on applying for an enquiry into your results – and a couple might surprise you!