Tips for effective IELTS Preparation
Tips and Strategies for Improving your IELTS Score
Here is the breakdown of Yash’s improvement
- Listening: 7.5 to 9
- Reading: 8 to 9
- Writing: 6 to 7.5
- Speaking: 7 to 7.5
- Overall: 7.5 to 8.5
Here is a summary of Yash’s advice:
Writing
- Write task 1 and task 2 every day.
- Analyse your mistakes. Keep a record of all of your mistakes in a Word file that you can revise regularly.
- Work on your weaknesses. Yash identified that he struggled with articles, so he did lots of practice activities to improve.
- Read band 9 essays and compare them to the answers that you have written. Focus on what you can do to make your essays similar to the band 9 answers.
- Check each sentence for mistakes as you write your IELTS essays.
- Give yourself 3-5 minutes at the end of the writing test to check over your writing.
- Try writing task 2 before writing task 1.
- Have a predefined structure for each essay type (Agree/ Advantage/ Discussion/ Double Question). This will allow you to write your essays quickly.
Vocabulary
- Don’t waste your time learning words from the Academic Word List
- Learn content specific collocations for each of the common topics. Yash recommends a book called IELTS Band 9 Vocab Secrets
Speaking
- Watch Keith’s YouTube videos and learn some of the phrasal verbs and idioms that he teaches you. Yash particularly liked the video from Keith on idioms for expressing feelings.
- Get a speaking partner and practise regularly. Yash practised with his speaking partner every day. Ideally, you want a speaking partner that is at a similar level and can point out your mistakes.
Listening and Reading
- Do all of the Cambridge Past Papers. Yash did books 10-15 so many times that he knew many of the answers by memory.
- Do the free IELTS Listening Tests on the YouTube channel Crack IELTS with Rob.
- Be careful of common errors, such as singular vs. plural errors, capital letters and spelling mistakes.
- Do the computer-based reading test and copy and paste the text into your question paper. This will help you to avoid spelling mistakes.
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