I was speaking to one of my students, Abdullah, this morning to work out what he needed to do next to get his band score in his upcoming IELTS exam. We’ve been working together for quite a few months now. When I first met him last year he had just taken the exam and got bands 4.5 and 5s and needed to have band 7s.
He took the exam again last December and achieved band 8 in listening, 7 in reading and speaking but the writing was 6.5 not 7 - although I had thought he could get 7 if all went well.
I suggested that because he was so close he could just jump straight in and take the exam again.
“But band 7 is not enough” he told me, “It’s too close and the result could go either way”.
Of course he is right. To be sure he needs to have a more comfortable margin. He needs to push himself further – to be at band 7.5 or 8 so that there are no risks in the next exam.
“You can always be better, higher more proficient,” I told him. “That’s the thing about language, you can always improve. Even I can improve!” I said, “I could learn new words and write better too!” We laughed about this but it is true.
We are putting together a new plan now for the next exam to get over the final hurdle, to go further, to be better, to achieve more and I am certain that he will. It’s rather like being an athlete (and ironically he works in sport – so he really understands this) there are lots of small improvements that you can make to improve your skills and all of these small improvements add up to gain a higher level and a higher band.
So, our targets will now move upwards to reach consistent 35s and 36s in practice. We’ll do more speaking – pronunciation, vocabulary, more sophisticated grammatical structures and I have already given him exercises to do to improve coherence, sentence structure and error analysis. Notice, I haven’t told him just to do more tests! I firmly believe that like improving in sport, improving in IELTS at the high band level is more about fixing the small things rather than just doing more tests.
In fact, the more I work with high band students the more I come back to grammar, vocabulary and correction – these are the building blocks of language learning and the better they are, the easier and more successful your IELTS will be.
So, to answer my question – Is Band 7 enough? Probably not if you need to get band 7 – go above and beyond to be certain. Thank you Abdullah – a great lesson.
So, don’t just work hard, spending endless hours on IELTS tests. Push your English skills higher too so that you’ll be better equipped for the test itself – work smarter!
Hard work doesn’t always pay off!
It’s not what we learn. We learn that if you work hard then success will come - but it’s not always true. In fact often those who don’t work hard seem to get the best results!
I was speaking to a couple of IELTS students today who are really working hard at their IELTS. Hours and hours of study and I admire them for their passion and dedication but it doesn’t have to be just about hard work.
When we are facing university or professional exams we often need to put in a lot of hours to learn all the information and memorise all the formulae so that we can regurgitate it in the exam.
However, language isn’t really like that – language is a living thing and the very best way to practise is to actually do it. To speak, to write, to listen and to read.
IELTS needs two things; it needs excellent language skills - best gained through practice and it also needs exam practice - best done in the run-up to the exam itself. To ignore either of these things will hamper you from getting a good band.
The two things can be done in conjunction with each other so split your practice and make sure some is language and some is exam preparation.
Language – this is the fun stuff !
Watch movies, listen to songs and stories, read books, magazines and newspapers, speak as much as you can in English to other people and write – comments, blogs, stories poems – not IELTS writing this but it gets writing ‘in the muscle’ – team up with study buddies – speak and write together. It all helps.
Exam Prep
Now use your new-found language ability to do the exam practice – the more boring bit – but important. Don’t become a slave to this – little and often is the best way. Try to set aside an hour a day if possible but if you are too busy then 30 minutes will suffice. You can do a lot in 30 minutes; a listening test, one reading passage, a task 1, record yourself doing part 2 of the speaking. Imagine if you did this every day you’d cover a lot of ground.
And the very best thing? This is not ‘hard work’ Not ‘hours of slog’ it’s a manageable, efficient, and dare I say, more enjoyable way of preparing.
You don’t need to DO the IELTS test every day – you just need to prepare for it.
And if you want a ready-made way of doing this then speak to me. I’d love to help you create your IELTS study plan.
https://englishlanguagetraining.wufoo.com/forms/zeexrjk00ssc9d/