Are you doing really well with your reading and listening, but your speaking and writing seem to be dragging their feet and hanging behind? I often see comments about this and it seems to be the case for many IELTS students. To get the best result you have to balance all the skills so why does this happen. Read on and I’ll explain why and give you some ideas about what you can do by yourself in order to try and improve these two skills.
Let's have a look first at these two skills. You've probably seen me write before about productive skills, namely speaking and writing. To my mind, these are the true test of your English, because they come from you, they are about communication which is after all, the function of language. Furthermore, the primary aspect of any language is being able to speak it, this is what we all learn in our formative years. Therefore, if your speaking is hanging behind, then you are missing the chance to be an excellent user of English.
In order to demonstrate the fact that you are a good user of English, you need to be able to speak well. That means fluently, spontaneously, with a wide range of vocabulary and sentence structures. You need to be able to make yourself understood in many different scenarios. That's what the speaking tests and to a lesser extent, the writing test, are there to assess. Writing is generally the last skill to acquire in any language so this may take longer to develop. It’s not uncommon for the writing to be a bit behind the others.
Nevertheless, in IELTS, you need all four skills at a good level. In order to get a band 7 or 8 you have to have all your skills high. That really means not starting with reading and listening and spending weeks and weeks and weeks on those two ignoring speaking and writing. This is the primary reason why many students find that their writing and speaking fall behind – not enough attention is focused on them. Start with all four skills together because reading and writing are connected and speaking and listening are connected. Each one will help the other. Listening will help your speaking and your speaking will help your listening. Reading will help your writing, and your writing will help your reading. In other words, it's really important when you start on the IELTS preparation route that you make sure you cover all four skills tests and don’t treat them as isolated ‘modules’.
This is the main reason that speaking and writing often score much lower bands, because people leave practising them too late.
The second reason is a lack of ‘real’ communication. You can't speak to yourself. It is not a natural thing to do you need to have other people to speak to. If you don't have this, then your speaking is not going to develop well. Writing again, is for other people. You write for an audience, in IELTS - the examiner. If you don't start by writing for an audience, then you're just going to be writing for yourself and you have no way of knowing if your writing makes sense, if your ideas are coming across, or if it is going to be good enough for the band you want.
Lots of IELTS students don't speak to other people and don't get their writing checked - This is a big mistake.
Clearly it is important to involve other people in these two parts of the exam preparation and I would urge you all to do that but I realise that, especially with writing this might cost money and so you may want to wait until you are closer to your exam, which makes sense. For that reason, there are some things you can do by yourself to help to develop these skills from the beginning of your preparation.
Speaking:
Let's look at part one. You can look for typical questions and think about the answers that you might give to those questions. Imagine if you got that question, how you would respond. You can do it with a friend if you know someone who is also preparing. One is the examiner, the other is the student, then you swap. If you haven't got anybody at all to practise with and I want to stress that this is a risky position to be in if you want a high band. However, if you haven't, then you need to record your supposed answers and listen to them and be critical. How does it sound? What about the vocabulary? What about the pronunciation? Does it fully answer the question etc. Then repeat, repeat, repeat. That's how you improve things like pronunciation and vocabulary. A lot of language is about repeating and making it better.
Part two can be done very easily by yourself. In fact, in part two, you don't necessarily need to have somebody else there to practise (unless you're able to get good feedback from somebody) as it is essentially a monologue. Choose a topic, practise it first, then record it, listen to the recording, criticise it, think about how you can make it better, record it again and do this with the same topic maybe three or four times. I've had students who've done it up to ten, eleven or twelve times and each time it was better and better. The more you do this, the better it will become. But it's important to record the same topic more than once, otherwise there's no point. You have to repeat and improve and then do it with a different topic. Soon you’ll find the whole process of organising your ideas becomes much easier, more spontaneous and more fluent.
Part three do what you did for part one. Look for typical questions, work on more advanced vocabulary and structures. This is where you need your modal verbs, conditional sentences and more advanced vocabulary and structures – this is what the examiner will be looking for. This is where you need your more developed answers. In part three, you're going to be asked about the future, or to imagine things, and also your opinion on things. You may have to compare the present with the past, or the present with the future, or maybe even the past, the present and the future. You will need to be able to manipulate different tenses and compare them with each other. Quite a lot of sophisticated language needs to go into your part three practice. Follow the same process as before record and listen multiple times but ask yourself how you can make it more academic or more erudite or more formal. Think about all these things and then imagine yourself being in the exam and giving your absolutely tiptop answer to the question. Remember, this is a performance. You have to demonstrate to the examiner that you are worthy of a band 7 or 8.
The more you do, the better it gets. Where you focus on things, they improve. Many of you will have had this experience. You cannot do this through osmosis, you cannot do it through looking at YouTube, or through listening to lessons online, reading blog posts and looking at websites this will not help you improve your speaking or your writing. It's got to be active and physical not passive.
And it takes time.
IELTS Writing. Look at models. Native speaker models, or certainly good teacher models or examiner models, because that is your ultimate aim, to write like that. What you need to do with the models is to look at the language, look at the style they use, look at how the writing is organised and look at the vocabulary. Take some of this language and try it out yourself. Look also at the cohesion. How do the sentences flow one from another? How do the paragraphs work? How do all the ideas gel? How does the writer do that? Try to use those linking words and devices yourself. Use the vocabulary and sentence structures.
If they work, use them again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. I cannot say this enough about language learning. I've been an English language teacher since 1977. It's a long time. I know that the best way of improving is by repeating and recycling.
In the task 1 academic look at charts and graphs in newspapers for models. They often have graphs and charts with a short explanation. Looking at ‘real things’ for models helps you understand what's going on here and this is language you can use. The same with letters for GT. Look at real letters that have been sent to a newspaper, because that's the kind of thing that you're being asked to write. Look at other kinds of letters. You'll find lots of examples if you are just a little bit creative about where you go to look - don't copy them. Use them as models. I work on writing every day with students, and I know from the students I've worked with over the years that most of them, when they get to the exam, look at the question and know exactly what they're going to write. They don't have any problems thinking of ideas or thinking about how to express them. That's the result of lots of practise.
Try new things. If you see a word in a model, try it out. You can't possibly use it unless you've tried it and ideally get some feedback so that you know you're using it correctly. After trying all kinds of things, you will settle on the language that you know you're going to use in the exam because you can write it without mistakes and it's comfortable for you to use. But never, never, never try anything new in the exam.
If keep trying things you will soon build up a bank of words, phrases and sentence structures that you like to use, that you know you can use well, and you know will get you a high score. If it doesn’t work, just ditch it. Don't bother with it because it's only going to cause you problems.
Finally, find people to study with. If you really are sitting there today without anybody to practise with, well, the onus is on you to try and find some friends or other students to study with or join my IELTS Champions Club. I started IELTS Champions Club to help people who didn’t have anybody with whom to practise IELTS and we've now had five students from the club who all achieved Band 8 and moved on with their lives. There is a chance to practice both speaking and writing and get feedback.
If you want to speak about your IELTS Speaking and Writing and how to improve it to Band 8 then I’d love to have a conversation with you. Go here and book a call with me.
https://ieltslearningtips.com/breakthrough/
Above all – make sure you practice everything equally well 🙂