Here you’ll find our posts and podcasts on a wide range of subjects to help you on your IELTS journey! Join us at My IELTS Classroom today for our video courses, marking service, 1-2-1 lessons and so much more…
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 error 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!)
Hey! I have noticed over the last few years that IELTS test-takers really struggle to write letters that are genuinely informal. Even good students who follow all of the language rules for an IELTS informal letter send me one to mark that feel “cold” and “stiff” and simply still “too formal”. Why is that? Well, that is what I sat down this week to ponder, and the result is this podcast! Today, Nick and I will show you how you can turn your good IELTS informal letters into great ones by making PERSONAL COMMENTS.