I’m talking a lot about practice and the best way to prepare at the moment and I have been speaking to a few IELTS students recently who tell me that they are finding it hard to get motivated.
Some of these are students who were previously working maybe 4 or 5 hours on their IELTS before the lockdown but now that the test has been cancelled, they are finding it very hard to do anything. Others are at the very beginning of their preparation and because they are not sure when the exams will resume are also seeing time expand ahead of them and thinking they might get started once the exams are again timetabled.
Both these groups of students are making a big mistake.
The Time is NOW!
Now is the time to get into action, to get started with your preparation and to take steps to improve your English.
You may feel disheartened, you may feel discouraged and you might also be feeling ‘what’s the point’. We all feel like this right now but the fact is that this will be over and when it is, if you are well prepared you can be first in the queue for the IELTS exam and not only that, you can also be confident that you’ve done the work that will get you the band that you want.
So, don’t shilly-shally, make a plan and get started right now!
Start with something simple, easy and fun to do – perhaps some Part 2 speaking or a bit of pronunciation. Or maybe a spelling bee or some punctuation practice – sort out those commas and colons once and for all! Or maybe there is a grammar point that keeps cropping up in your writing that you need to fix – address this and make sure you don’t ever make this mistake again. Or perhaps you’ve been meaning for ages to learn some new vocabulary around the topics that come up in writing or speaking. These things are quick and easy to do but they can really help you with your IELTS.
Move on then to planning your writing, working on an introduction or conclusion and then work on your linking words and complex sentences.
Remember marathon runners don’t run marathons every day they work on the small parts of their running that will help them to go faster and build up more stamina.
Now do some reading – go through a text (or even whole test if you can ) and write down all the words that you don’t know and look them up in the dictionary. Decide which ones are pertinent to the topic and learn them – there is every chance they will appear again in another reading passage about this topic.
Don’t neglect your listening. Pick the section that you find the most challenging and just work on this. If you miss a question go back and listen again until you get it – this intensive listening practice will really help your overall listening skills. Trust me I’m an English language expert 🙂 Now pick a question type that you also find challenging – it might be MCQ or maps and just work on this question going over the listening again as much as you need until you can work out all the answers and can hear everything clearly. Use the transcript if you need to.
These small bursts of activity, which need only take 15-20 minutes, if done regularly will help you to improve and they are a relief from the endless slog of complete IELTS tests. Keeping your practice varied and fresh will also help you to enjoy it more.
Short and sweet will keep you going, improve your skills more than you would ever have thought and keep you motivated throughout this difficult period.
Try it, I know it works 
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