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.
Welcome to My IELTS Classroom podcast. Today, Nick and I discuss one of the most important IELTS questions – why are so many students stuck at a 6.5 for IELTS writing? Is it because there is a conspiracy to trick test-takers, or are there other less sinister reasons?
Hey! Grammatical Range and Accuracy makes up 25% of your IELTS Writing and Speaking scores so should be a very important part of your preparation. Today, I want to look at the 5 most common IELTS grammar mistakes that I see when marking students essays to show you how you can avoid them.
Welcome to the fifth and final lesson in our IELTS 101 series – an introduction to IELTS Writing. Academic writing has been my on true love since I started teaching English for Academic Purposes at the University of Newcastle 15 years ago, so this is the episode that I have been looking forward to most! The good news is that Nick loves writing just as much as me, so this is a cracking episode of My IELTS Classroom Podcast!
Hey! We all know that every IELTS essay needs at least ONE clear example to satisfy the band descriptors. But, where are you putting that example in your essay? Did you know that examples have to support the sentence DIRECTLY before them? If not, read on to save your Coherence and Cohesion score in your next essay!
Hey! When students prepare for IELTS writing, they often learn “chunks” of language – these are groups of words or certain sentence structures that can be used in any essay. I encourage this. For example, I tell my students to always use an “although” sentence in the conclusion of an Advantages / Disadvantages essay as this is the best way to summarise both sides. In the same way, it can be great to use a cleft sentence when you are writing topic sentences for an IELTS To What Extent Essay, or to use a “while” sentence in the introduction of a Discuss Both Sides essay. Using these “chunks” will help you to write more quickly and be sure that the[…]
Hey! A lot of students tell me that they have problems with time management in the IELTS writing test. If you don’t finish both Task 1 and Task 2 in 60 minutes, you are going to find it very hard to achieve a high score (even if your writing is great!). So, in this week’s blog, I want to show you two steps that will help you to analyse your writing to find out where exactly your IELTS time management problems lie.
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?
In the writing exam, it can be easy to make claims that are generally true, but NOT always true. This can limit your score for Task Response to a 7.0 (which I know for most people won’t be a problem, but for some test-takers an 8.0 in TR can be the difference between a 6.5 and a 7.0!) So, how can you avoid over-generalising in an essay?! IELTS hedging!!!