Hey everyone and welcome back to the Understandable English
Podcast. My name is Oliver and today I am
going to be talking about the IELTS examinations.
Many of you who use or want to use English academically so in
in in education or professionally will know what
IELTS is and what the IELTS exams are.
But for those of you who don't, I will explain.
OK, so IELTS stands for so it's an acronym for the International
English Language Testing System. Wow, quite a mouthful.
You can understand why I would rather say IELTS and why most
people just say IELTS. And it is one of the most
popular English tests in the world.
And it looks at your ability to communicate in English and
measures it across 4 areas. So listening, reading, writing
and speaking, all of the main areas that you need for a
language. And this examination or result
is accepted by thousands of universities, employers, so
companies and also immigration authorities.
So if you need a long term visa in the UK, Australia or Canada,
for example. So that is why IELTS is
important. If you're planning to study at a
university where courses are taught in English, then you'll
probably need to take the IELTS exam.
And like I said, it's important for visa applications and even
for some jobs in English or jobs that use English language.
Basically, having a good IELT score can make it easier for you
to live, study and work abroad. So in this episode I am going to
talk a little bit about some ways to prepare for IELTS, some
important bits to focus on and quite generally about the exams.
But first I want to mention kind of an advertisement or a
sponsor. So I am partnered with the
British Council, which is actually the company that runs
or administers. It's one of the companies that
run and administers the IELTS exam.
And in the description below there is a link for their
courses and classes that they do for IELTS.
This is great because the British Council run the exams
and they have very thorough and well put together materials and
teachers that are fantastic to help you prepare to get the best
result. The plans and subscriptions are
designed for quite intense short term learning and there is
different levels, there are different varieties of plans
that you can choose. I won't lie, it is quite
expensive and I know it's not something everyone can do, but I
do thoroughly recommend it because with the plans you can
get both private and group classes and you get plenty of
practice tests including speaking practice tests which
are fantastic. Free webinars and sessions with
unlimited access which is fantastic.
It's a very high quality English learning for IELTS and probably
the best place or way to learn IELTS that I can recommend.
So if you're interested, do click the link in the
description. I do also benefit from this if
you do decide to learn with the British Council.
I get it supports me as well. So thank you.
OK, back to our podcast episode. So as you probably know already,
IELTS is split into 4 main sections.
So we have listening, reading, writing and speaking.
And what I always tell people to do is to 1st think about the
areas that you are strongest with.
Depending on how long you have to prepare for the exam, you
will need to pick and focus how you organize your time for
study. For example, for me with foreign
languages, usually I'm a lot better at reading and writing
than I am at speaking and listening.
Sometimes it's the opposite for other people, and in this case,
it would be wise or smart for me to put more of my focus into the
reading and writing, especially because they are much bigger
sections of the exam in terms of time.
But it's important to understand the different parts of the exam
and how long you have for each. So do make sure that you
understand and you know which areas are probably going to be
harder for you. So I recommend to practice each
section or part separately, so to take a day for each, perhaps
in the week and focus on a different skill related to the
IELTS exam. And then towards the end of your
study, closer to the exam, you can begin to start doing
practice exams together to make sure that you have enough time
and that you get everything done on time to start with the
writing section. So the writing section can be
quite tricky, quite difficult, and the best thing you can do is
to practice writing lots of essays and reports under timed
conditions. So you want to time yourself,
and the number one way to do well on this is to focus on
structure and sentence structure.
Learn lots of sentences and structures that you can change
and use in the exam. In general, the writing section
is usually quite formal and learning some of these more
formal sentence structures can really help you.
And it can be good to ask maybe a native speaker or a teacher to
look at some of the sentences or the structures that you have
made to make sure that they are right and correct before you
learn them. It also means when you get into
the exam, you already know how to write a general structure of
the essay or report and all you need to do is add in the extra
details to make it specific and relevant.
OK so another key point I would like to make a note about is the
speaking section. So for the speaking section, it
is important to practice Outlawed a lot.
And I recommend to people to record yourself giving a speech,
maybe on a practice topic, and replay this to yourself so you
can look for or listen to areas that you can improve.
And if you can send it to a native speaker or a teacher or a
friend and get their feedback too on how you can improve that
speech. And the final point I'd like to
mention is time management. Timing is so important in IELTS.
I have had so many students that have had problems with timing.
They have had great scores on the content that they have
finished, but they have ended up with a bad overall score because
they have not had enough time and they've spent too long on
one section and not enough on the other.
So once again, there are so many ways that you can learn for the
IELTS exam and prepare. There are official examinations,
study groups, lots of apps and websites, and of course the
British Council classes and courses that I've linked below.
But it's up to you to find your own study routine and the best
way of learning. So that is everything for today.
I wish you luck on your IELTS learning journey if you are
learning it or preparing for the exam and let me know in the
comments below. And if you have done the IELTS
exam or if you will or want to do it in the future, thank you
for listening and I hope you have an amazing day.
Goodbye.