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One way to get more spoken fluency practice

Friday, April 30th, 2010

Hi

Imagine this…

It’s your IELTS speaking test and you’re able to give extended answers to your examiner’s questions; you even give your examiner the impression that it’s easy for you to keep talking.

If that was your real speaking test, your examiner might be looking at an IELTS band score of 7.0 or higher for your speaking.

Here’s what it says in the public version of the official IELTS descriptors for spoken fluency:

  • IELTS band score 7: “[Candidate] speaks at length without noticeable effort…”

If you need to improve your spoken fluency for the IELTS test, it’s important to give yourself more opportunities to speak in English. Here’s one suggestion for how you could do this: Read the full post »

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Have you been following the news on the Icelandic volcano?

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

Hi

With all the talk this last week of ash clouds and cancelled flights, I thought I’d have a look around for some related resources that would be useful for your IELTS preparation.

This is best of what I found:

  1. ‘Volcanoes‘ is a short talk on what volcanoes are, what causes them, and where they can be found (on Earth and on other planets).
  2. ‘Volcanic ash affects airplanes, weather, sunsets‘ is an article about the effects of volcanic ash clouds.

Read the full post »

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Speaking speed and your IELTS score

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Hi

In our IELTS seminar this week, an IELTS candidate asked me if it’s OK to talk slowly in the IELTS speaking test.

She wanted to know what her IELTS score would be if her grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation were really good,  but she talked slowly.

As I’m guessing a lot of you may also be wondering the same thing, here’s what it says in the public version of the official IELTS descriptors for speaking: Read the full post »

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What do you know about nuclear technology?

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Hi

Reading about the world nuclear summit in the USA, I was reminded of the IELTS Writing task 2 question that I posted a few weeks ago on the benefits and disadvantages of nuclear technology.

Looking at the question again, I can see how difficult it would be to answer if you’re not familiar with this topic.

As it’s possible that you could get a similar question in your IELTS test, here’s a summary of the benefits and disadvantages.

The benefits:

Read the full post »

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Put some energy into your IELTS preparation (or should that be power?)

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Hi

I’ve noticed that some IELTS candidates I work with can get the words ‘energy‘ and ‘power‘ mixed up. As you probably know, in some cases either of these two words can be used (e.g. ‘nuclear power/energy’) but do you know when to use one and not the other?

To give you some examples of how ‘energy’ and ‘power’ are used differently, I had another look at how these words were used in the articles I recommended in my post ‘Think green for your IELTS test‘.

Read the full post »

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