1.

In the exam listen to and answer the question

The best advice for IELTS speaking is very simply to listen to the question and answer it. The reason for this is for this is the one time you are face to face with the examiner and nerves are a sigificant problem. If you are trying to remember complex advice, you are likely to become more nervous and not perform to your best. Keep it simple. One example here is in part 1. If you here a question in the past tense: Eg What sports did you play as a child? A good answer will use the past tense the examiner will be listening for this.

2. Before the exam practice

Following on from the previous advice, you need to practice before the exam to make sure that the appropriate skills are automatic. This will only happen if you practice sufficiently. However, you also need to practise the right skills each part of the speaking paper tests a different skill.

3. Immediately before the exam speak English

The problem for many people is not speaking English, rather it is moving from their own language into English. The advice here is plain: make certain that you are already speaking English before you go into the exam.

4. Key advice extend your answer appropriately

If there is one key piece of advice, it is to extend your answer appropriately. For example, this is inappropriate: Question: How many languages do you speak? Answer: Two. Chinese and English. Better would be:

Answer: I speak two languages. My first language is Chinese and I speak English too. Ive been learning English since I was 10. I started learning it when I was in primary school. Be aware, however, that very long answers are not always a good idea. It is possible that you will go off topic and lose coherence.

5. Make eye contact

A large part of communication is non-verbal. You are marked by the examiner in the room and you should do everything you can to show that person that you are a good communicator. If you do not make eye contact with the examiner, s/he is probably going to be less impressed with your performance.

6. Do not learn answers

One temptation is to learn answers before the exam. Do not. The examiner will notice and your score will be badly affected.

7. If you dont understand the question ask

This is a speaking test and not a listening test. If you dont understand the question, ask the examiner to repeat or explain it you should not be penalised for this. If you try to answer a question you do not understand, you will almost certainly become incoherent.

8. Give yourself time to think repeat/reformulate the question

In parts 1 and 3 you are not given any thinking time: you are supposed to start speaking immediately. This does not mean, however, that you need to start answering the question straight away. What you can do is start by repeating/reformulating or commenting on the question: What did I enjoy doing as a child? Let me see Thats not something Ive thought about before. Its an interesting question.

This has several benefits. It is good communication. It allows you a little time to think. It should also make you answer the question and not the general topic.

9. Correct yourself if you can do it immediately

If you make a mistake and you can correct it immediately, do so. This will show the examiner that you have control over the language. If, however, you are unsure how to correct yourself, move on: the examiner may not have noticed the mistake in the first place and if you try unsuccessfully to correct it, a small mistake may become a much bigger one.

10. Do not relax too much its not a conversation

This is an exam and you need to show the best side of your spoken English. If you relax too much and become too conversational, your English may suffer. You need to recognise that this is not a true dialogue between two people: it is more of an interview with one person speaking and the other listening. In a conversation the speaking conventions are quite different: you expect the other person to share 50% of the talk time and to react to your comments, typically one person will not speak for any length of time.

Read more: IELTS speaking 10 top tips | Dominic Cole's IELTS and Beyond http://www.dcielts.com/ielts-speaking/tips-for-speakingexam/#ixzz2GoGi6KRs Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives

Writing essays
Writing introductions

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Try not to look at the task 2 question as youre writing the essay introduction. You do want to identify the question in your essay introduction, but you dont want to repeat its exact wording. Its quite hard to do that if you are looking at the question as you write. The skill you want to develop is summary writing: you note key words and ideas and then write from those notes.[/toggle Checking for repetition

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Its easy to get stuck on some words when you write essays often without realising it. The writing tip today is to check your writing for words you repeat. This is good advice because its easy to find repeated words, much easier than finding grammar mistakes. And, well, you want to make sure that any time spent checking is time well spent. If you cant find any probs, youre wasting time. Check for your own mistakes

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IELTS advice for the day is not to check your writing for mistakes, but check it for your mistakes. Confused? Its a simple idea. Almost all learners have their own particular problems which they repeat. To improve your writing you need to learn to correct those problems the ones that you typically make. for example, if you have a problem with articles? Check for articles.

The thing is if you just look for problems in general, you are likely not to find anything much error correction exercises are hard and in exam terms you may simply be wasting your time. If, however, you look for a particular problem, my experience (19 years and counting) is that you have every chance of finding what is wrong. Thats time well spent. The practical advice is this. Make a list of the types of mistakes you make I mean really write them out on a piece of paper. The when you check, see if you have made those mistakes again. This will not just improve the writing score, it is an important step in learning the language the only corrections that really matter are not when a teacher corrects a student, but when a student corrects him/herself. Using essay models

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Thought Id share my thoughts on a comment I had on the site about different types of essays. The question was whether it was appropriate to include opinions in an advantage/disadvantage type essay. My belief is that some candidates can get confused in learning different essay models and worry too much about what type of essay they should be answering and which of their various models to use. My preference is that you should just try and answer the question as it is asked and not worry too much about any special model. It is quite easy to go wrong by following models as you may find yourself not answering the question fully in an effort to get the model right. There is always more than one way of answering the question. Id add that I see no problem with including opinions in an advantage/disadvantage essay. When you are asked to discuss the advantages and disadvantages, you are necessarily also saying what you think those advantages and disadvantages are so you are giving your opinion anyway. Moral of the story? Practise writing about different topics and aim to look at lots of different practice questions. But always, always look at the question in front of

you and try and answer that question as fully as you can. Dont try and repeat an essay you have written before. Clarity, coherence and concision

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Do you know what the three Rs are? How about the three Cs? The three R s are shorthand for Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic the oldfashioned view of the foundation of a good education and a little English joke for you. My three Cs may be more relevant, They are 3 of the key qualities of all good writing: Clarity, Coherence and Concision. Your IELTS essays need all 3 qualities all the way through. But it can help to focus on one quality at a time under exam pressure. Keeping things simple is good for exams. Heres my suggestion:

Clarity for introductions focus on the question and your point of view Coherence for the main body your main ideas are developed and fit the structure of the essay Concision for the conclusion try to restate your position from the intro and the main points from your body para in a few words.

This is one of the main ideas behind my series of lessons on the process of writing an exam essay. At each stage you focus on something slightly different.

Reading
Skimming

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A quick question. Which is easier to read in IELTS? A paragraph or a complete article?

If you chose the paragraph option, I suggest you work on your skimming skills. All this is the skill of reading a text QUICKLY for meaning. If you learn to do this, then you should be able to choose immediately which para has the answer for each question. If you dont, then you will waste time scanning the whole article for key words. You may think you are saving time by not QUICKLY reading the whole text, but in the end you will spend more time looking for key words. Scanning and skimming again

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Todays tip is for IELTS reading. A comment on the site said how much easier it was to find the answer if the text was a short paragraph of only 4/5 sentences. This is true enough. The problem with IELTS reading texts though is that they are longish (around 900 words) and sometimes the paragraphs are up to to 200 words long. My solution is here is to focus on your reading skills when you are practising. If you just try and find the answer, then you may well go wrong. instead I suggest you do practise skimming the text for overall meaning and understanding how it is organised. I also suggest you practise your scanning skills this is looking for particular words and pieces of information in the text. It may seem at first that this takes up too much time, but in the end you should find that you read more efficiently this way. Learning these skills allows you to identify which part of the text the answer comes in and you will save lots of time this way. Then all (?) you have to do is read the text closely to find what the answer is. True/False/Not Given

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What causes most difficulty is normally the difference between False and Not Given. This is slightly over-simple but the main idea is that Not Given means that you find nothing about that QUESTION in the text, which does not mean that you

wont find words in the question in the text. In contrast, with False you will be able to find info answering that question in the text but the other way around if you see what I mean. One tip is to read the whole question and think about its meaning and dont just focus on individual words. This is where key words advice may very well make you go wrong it is a very, very dangerous strategy if you use it wrongly. To repeat myself read the WHOLE question sometimes the little words make all the difference. Another tip is to make sure you dont spend too long on any one T/F/NG question. It is after all only one question and you may be looking for something that isnt there if the answer is NG. Dont waste too much time. This brings me back to my first comment, you do have a one in three chance (which is better than most question types), give yourself a bit of time, then guess intelligently. A final tip is to invest in a Cambridge exam book and go through the answers carefully. See how the examiners set the questions and what F and NG really mean. Once you have done a few questions of this type, you will soon get the idea.

Speaking
Opinions

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A simple speaking tip for IELTS speaking is to practise different ways of giving your opinion. This makes sense because you are going to give your opinion throughout the test and you dont want to go I think I think I think. There are lots of different ways of giving your opinion in English and if youre smart you dont want to just learn different words/phrases, but learn how they can mean different things too. I suppose says something quite different from Im convinced. Vocabulary

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Just had a comment asking about how to improve the range of vocabulary in IELTS speaking and I thought Id share a summary of my comments here. 1. When we speak (native speakers too) we tend to use far less variety of words than when we write. It can sometimes be a mistake to concentrate too much on finding the exact word not least because this may make you less fluent. 2. It can help sometimes if you structure your answer so that you give a simple first and then go on to give a more complex answer later. This allows you more thinking time to get the right words (and ideas). 3. Dont be afraid of rephrasing your answer if better language comes to you later. This is quite natural in spoken language. 4. Very often the best language is specific language simple words used appropriately, rather than over-complex clever language. One way to find these words is to think of specific examples to illustrate your answer this should also help the coherence of your speaking. See a picture a practice suggestion

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One way to improve your IELTS part 2 long turn speaking is by practising describing photos. The idea here is that you should use your own photos because the question almost invariably asks you to describe your own experiences. So look at pictures on your phone and think when you took them, why you took them, who else was there. etc. If you look at the questions in the exam, this is what they ask you to do. Looking at pictures is also a good idea because it helps you see detail. And if you are able to describe detail, then you will almost automatically use better/more precise language in the exam.

When you get to the exam, a top tip is to try and visualise this means try to see pictures in your head. You will do this better if you have first practised with your own photos. Eye contact

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Having spent the weekend interviewing people I can assure you that eye contact does count. Practise it. Pretty much without exception all the best communicators I spoke to made good eye contact with me. There is almost certainly a relationship between making eye contact and speaking well you learn to pause in the right places and you are much more likely to speak at an appropriate pace. Id add that examiners are human too. There is no scorefor communication skills and IELTS examiners may try not to take account of eye contact and nonverbal skills. However, they will almost certainly be affected to some degree they are not tape recorders and they mark you as they listen. Record yourself for better pronunciation

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Most people hate the way they sound so record yourself speaking an excellent incentive to sound better! Its easy to forget how important pronunciation is. While it may be one of the harder skills to improve that doesnt mean you cant it may just take a little time. Todays tip is to think about recording yourself and it comes with a lesson attached for an idea about how to do it.

The exam
Read the question

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If Saturday means IELTS exam day for you, just concentrate on one thing listening to/reading the question and answering it. That may seem too simple but keeping your head clear is one of the keys to exam success.

Sunday -the day of rest

Review

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What should the IELTS candidate do on a Sunday? Here are 3 ideas for you: 1. Go back over what you have done this week. Language is not learned in straight lines. What I mean by this is that if you want to learn a bit of language, you need to review/revise/recycle it a few times if you want to use it and not just know it. To go forwards, you need to go backwards first. 2. Do something that isnt IELTS why not. There is no special IELTS language, rather what you need is good general English. Id add that IELTS can be very boring and boring is not good for learning. Find something that interests you. 3. Take the day off. It is possible to work too hard and everyone works more efficiently when they are rested. Because IELTS means so much, it is easy to be tempted into trying to work on it non-stop. That can be a mistake. You want to focus on quality as much as quantity that is the way to improve.

Task one
Which tense?

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Which tense should use you use in IELTS academic task 1? Theres no one answer. The first step is to consider whether the graph/chart you are looking at refers to a particular time or not. If it is one which refers to a particular time- then you need

to use that time in your writing. So if it refers to 1998, you need a past, but if it refers to 2050, then you need a future. For some charts/graphs there is no time element in this case you should aim to use the present simple- and this is almost always the case for when you have to describe a process. Id add that you cannot choose the time only by looking at the form of chart/graph. Some bar charts are static and have no time element and some pie charts do refer to a particular time. The only way to decide is to READ THE QUESTION and LOOK AT THE AXES/INFORMATION PROVIDED Clarity before complexity

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Is it good to use words like nadir and apex in IELTS task 1 writing? Just answered a comment on this on the website. My answer was a fairly strong no. These are very low frequency words, which means we dont use them very often. There is a reason for that they have quite precise, almost technical, meanings and we use them in limited circumstances. In truth, you are unlikely to impress an examiner by trying to show off exciting words if you get them wrong More generally, you are much better advised to stick with the normal Task 1 vocabulary. There are plenty of variations available, even if you restrict yourself to words such as increase decrease climb drop reach a peak sink and level off. The main idea is to describe the data as clearly as possible. It is perfectly possible to attain a very high band score if you use this kind of language accurately, making sure of course that you remember to vary the words you do use. Concentrate on your writing skills

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If you want to write a good IELTS task 1: make it a good piece of writing. May sound obvious but it isnt.

Many candidates make the mistake of producing lists of information and/or treat it as a vocabulary exercise for trend language. To do it well the key is to read the rubric: write a summary by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant In practice this means you should aim to write organised paragraphs grouped around one main idea boring old topic sentences! Task 1 is not that different really. Good writing is good writing. This excellent tip I should say comes courtesy of Jingjing in China a successful IELTS candidate. Yesterday I published some more tips from her with some book recommendations. If you missed it, do check it out the tips are first class.

How to study
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Is it better to learn one IELTS skill at a time? Or should I practise them all together? Most/many traditional IELTS coursebooks look at all 4 skills together. Sometimes I find this frustrating in class as I think it can be confusing to skip from task 1 to writing task 2 to reading etc. So very often I study the skills in a modular approach one at a time this allows my students to become expert in one skill before they move on. That can be a touch boring though variety can be the spice of life and there is a lot to be said for doing different things to keep your mind stimulated. And it can help to see the connections between the different skills. So to recap, I dont have any particular answer to this question . But I do think its something worth thinking about. The solution you choose needs to depend on who you are, what your needs are and what time you have.

Read more: 20 more tips and ideas for IELTS | Dominic Cole's IELTS and Beyond http://www.dcielts.com/ielts-tips/20-more-tips-and-ideas-forielts/#ixzz2GoIHtzeh Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives

IELTS Speaking Test: Key Facts

Duration: Between 11 and 14 minutes. Participants: Candidates interviewed individually. The test is recorded. Format: The test consists of three parts.

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Part 1 (Interview)
Part 1 of the IELTS Speaking test lasts between 4 and 5 minutes. The examiner will ask some simple 'getting-to-know-you' questions which will help the examiner find out a little about you and help put you at ease. These will be general questions such as about your family, your studies, where you come from or what your interests are. Example Questions Q: Where are you from? Q: Why are you studying English? Q: Have you visited any English speaking countries?

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Tips!
Giving full, relevant answers to the examiner's questions will help get the interview off to a good start.

1) Avoid giving short, uncommunicative replies. Q: Where are you from? A: I'm from Hoorn in the Netherlands. (Don't stop there!) It's about 35 kilometers north of Amsterdam. It's a modern city but with a lot of history and a lovely place to live. 2) Avoid short, 'yes', 'no' answers to closed questions. (These are questions beginning 'Have you ...', 'Do you ...', 'Is it ...' etc which can be answered simply with a yes or no answer). Q: Have you visited any English speaking countries? A: Yes. (Don't stop there!) I went to England last year and spent two weeks seeing the sights. A couple of years ago I went to New York with my parents and had a great time. Q: Do you play any sports? A: No. (Don't stop there!) I'm not really interested in playing sports. I like watching sport on TV and I really enjoyed keeping up with the Olympics recently. 3) Offer examples to help you explain a statement. Q: Why are you preparing for the IELTS exam? A: Because I need it for my studies. (Don't stop there!) I've been offered a place at a university in England to study on an MBA but I need to show my level of English is good enough.

Part 2 (Long Turn)

Part 2 of the IELTS Speaking test lasts between 3 and 4 minutes (including 1 minute preparation time). The examiner gives you a task card and you have to speak about the subject without interruption for between 1 and 2 minutes. Example Task Example 1) Describe a place you have visited that you have fond memories of. You should say: where this why you went what you did and what it was about the place that makes it so memorable. Example 2) Describe your favourite personal possession. You should say: was there there

what this when you when you and why it's so important to you. Tips!

first

possession use

got

is it it

1. Use your 1 minute preparation time wisely and make notes of the points you'd like to make. 2. The question will help you with the structure of your talk. The introduction can include the item itself and maybe a brief description. The main body of your talk could describe the situation when you acquired the object and go on to explain when you use it. You can then end with an explanation of why the object is so important. 3. Try to avoid giving a very dry, unimaginative introduction such as 'The object I'm going to describe is ....'. Get your talk off to a memorable start with something on the lines of: 'If I was about to lose everything and could only save one thing it would be my ...', or 'I've got several things that mean a lot to me but the one that really stands out is my ...' 4. If you're concerned about not having enough to talk about for 1 to 2 minutes or running out of time before you've finished, the answer is to practise as often as possible. Time yourself and ask a friend for feedback.

Part 3: (Two-Way Discussion)

In Part 3 of the test, which lasts between 3 to 4 minutes, the examiner will ask you questions linked to the topic in Part 2. Example Questions (Based on example topics in Part 2 above) Q: do Q: Q: Q: It is sometimes argued that local cultures are being destroyed by tourism. Why think people might feel this? What benefits do people get from travelling to other countries? Do you think people are becoming too materialistic? To what extent are people's buying habits affected by advertising?

Tips! 1. If you need time to collect your thoughts use expressions (sparingly) like: 'That's a good question.', 'Well, let me think ...'.

2. Don't forget to avoid short, 'yes', 'no' answers. Try to offer examples to back up a statement. 3. Help make your contributions memorable. Try explaining a point using a short, personal anecdote. 4. If the examiner asks a question that you don't understand, take control of the situation with questions such as those that appear below. Responding like this will show evidence of your communication skills. A) If the examiner uses a word or phrase that you don't understand, say something like: "Sorry but could you explain what you mean by ........" or "I haven't come across that word/expression before. Could you explain what you mean?" B) If you simply didn't hear something that was asked, respond with: "Excuse me, I didn't quite catch that. Could you say that again?" "I'm sorry, but would you mind repeating that?" C) If you want to make sure you've understood what the examiner has asked you could say: "Do you mean ........" "When you say ........, do you mean/are you asking ........?

Speaking test advice

Follow this Speaking test advice and try to talk fluently.
The Speaking test is a face-to-face conversation with a certified examiner. It is as close to a real-life situation as a test can get. The examiner will ask you about familiar topics such as home, work or studies in part 1. This should help you feel comfortable when speaking. Try and relax so that you can speak as naturally as possible. Take time before the test to practise speaking with a partner, friend or teacher. Make the most of your Speaking test:

try to talk as much as you can talk as fluently as possible and be spontaneous relax, be confident and enjoy using your English develop your answers speak more than the examiner ask for clarification if necessary do not learn prepared answers; the examiner is trained to spot this and will change the question express your opinions; you will be assessed on your ability to communicate the examiners questions tend to be fairly predictable; practise at home and record yourself
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