Five sentences for reporting information in IELTS Academic Writing Task 1

If, like many IELTS candidates, you find it difficult to report information from a graph, chart or table, then you may find the following IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 sentences useful to remember. (If you’re not familiar with IELTS Academic Writing Task 1, you can see an example in our post ‘The chart shows… (2)‘).

 1. A useful sentence for reporting an increase or decrease in a number (in the past)

• The number of _____ increased/decreased from  _____ in ____ to  _____ in ____ (e.g. The number of men taking full-time courses increased from just under 100 000 in 1970/71 to around 200 000 in 1990/91)

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Which of the following grammar mistakes do you make in your IELTS speaking?

In your IELTS Speaking test, the examiner is going to assess your spoken fluency, vocabulary and pronunciation, and of course your grammar. To give yourself a better chance of getting the band score you need, it’s important that you start noticing and correcting the grammar mistakes you make.

To help you make fewer grammar mistakes in your IELTS Speaking test, here are five common grammar mistakes that IELTS candidates make.  As you look through the examples, think about which one(s) you make in your speaking and make a note of the corrections.

1. Using the present tense to talk about past events

Perhaps the most common grammar mistake in IELTS Speaking is forgetting to use the past form of verbs to describe past events. Here’s an an example from a candidate talking about a special gift he gave to his girlfriend:

“I went to many shops to find it but I never find…”

In this example, the candidate should have said ‘I never found…‘ and not ‘I never find…’ because he was talking about a time in the past. Read the full post »

Hi

How many different ways of comparing things do you know? (For those of you who have been reading this blog for a while, you may remember that I’ve asked you this question before).

I’m asking you this again because in your IELTS Speaking test there’s a good chance your examiner will ask you to make some comparisons and then listen to how you do it.

As I said in my the post ‘Compared to…‘, if you use a variety of grammatical structures and/or linking words to make comparisons, you’ll have a better chance of getting the IELTS band score you need.

Here are some different ways of making comparisons (taken from a recording of a native speaker comparing two cities in her country): Read the full post »

Hi

At the end of last year, I wrote a post explaining what complex sentences are and why you should use them in your IELTS writing. Today, I’d like to give you a couple more examples of complex sentences and show you why they are important in IELTS speaking. Read the full post »

Hi

I often get asked by IELTS candidates about whether they need to use complex sentences in their IELTS writing, and so I thought I’d use this post to explain what complex sentences are and why it is important to use them.

Complex sentences are sentences which have two or more parts called ‘clauses’ joined by words such as ‘if’, ‘when’ or ‘so that’.

To show you what I mean, here are two examples from an essay written by an IELTS candidate who used our IELTS tutoring service and got 6.5 for her writing. Read the full post »