I work with IELTS students all the time, so I speak to IELTS students a lot and I'm often very surprised that many don't have a plan or a system in place to prepare for their IELTS exam. In this post I want to talk about planning your IELTS study.
Now, a lot of students don't seem to have any plan. It all seems to be very random and they wander around the internet looking for things to do. Does this describe your practice?
I want you to think about another skill that you might have learned, such as driving or playing a musical instrument. Did you, on the very first day, get into the car or pick up that trumpet and try to figure out how to do it? How to drive? How to play?
Not really.
Take the car, you'd probably look first at the best way to go about it. Maybe get familiar with the different tools in the car; the steering wheel, the gears, the brake. You need to understand a little bit about how to move it and the mechanics of the car. All of those things are quite important before you actually get out on the road. It’s also the case that you would have a teacher to help you learn this skill. So, in any skill you learn, you usually you go step by step, and that's how you improve. But it seems to me, that with IELTS and with English language, people just leap in and try to figure it out from the middle somewhere.
Now if you were a child surrounded by the language your brain would sort it all out for you, providing you had good model speakers around you. But that takes a long time. If you think about a child learning to speak, it's quite a few years before they’ve figured it all out. And in fact, it's seven years before you are totally an expert in your own language (and that is ONLY speaking and listening - reading and writing come after this). If you take this approach, then it could well be seven years before you're at the level to reach Bands 7 and 8. I'm pretty sure you don't have that much time.
In order to avoid that situation, people who know about these things, linguists and language teachers have created systems that you can follow. Now, these systems start with general English, building it up to a certain level and then looking at different directions exam-wise this may be IELTS or another type of English language exam, that's the choice that students make. For you, I know this is IELTS. In the IELTS exam your job is to apply your English to certain tasks using the 4 language skills of listening, reading, writing and speaking. However, when you're preparing for IELTS, there are two things you need to continue to do.
One is to keep developing your English language. This is because in order to get Band 7 or 8, your English language skills need to be pretty good and pretty well developed. That means good vocabulary, good knowledge of grammar and sentence structure. You also need to be a really good communicator both in speaking and in writing. You have to keep developing those skills by expanding your vocabulary, improving your grammar and learning new structures to ensure you can demonstrate a wide range of these in the exam.
You also need to develop good techniques for the exam. And this is important in the reading and listening, but also, especially, in the writing and speaking, because the examiners for writing and speaking are expecting certain things. If you do not give them those things then they won't give you 7 and 8. There's a lot that you need to consider and there's a lot that you need to work on. Back to the plan and system. It’s clear now, I hope, that unless you have a proper plan and a proper system, then you're not going to reach your target across all the skills.
Yesterday I had a message from a student who told me that they'd just been working on their reading and listening. That rang alarm bells for me, because it was only 2 weeks before the exam, and not to have practiced any speaking or writing at all meant that the chances of that student getting a good score were pretty low. The one mistake, if you like, that this student had made was trying to do it all by themselves and not really knowing how to prepare for writing and speaking. This became, for them a very expensive mistake.
You have to speak to other people. You have to communicate with other people. Otherwise, you're not going to develop the speaking skills you need for the exam. The same with writing. If you don't communicate your writing with other people, ideally a teacher, how can you be sure that you're going to fulfill all the descriptors to get 7 or 8? You can't because it is incredibly difficult, if not almost impossible, to correct your own writing.
Don't do this by yourself. Get people around you who can help you and have a proper plan. Know exactly what you're going to do every day and know which areas you need to focus on.
There's no point just going through a reading every time, looking at your score, putting it away, and then doing another reading. You're not learning from your study, and it's really important that you learn from your practice. Doing whole practice tests over and over and over, and not using those tests to improve means you're just doing mock tests again and again and again.
And English language? Where are you on the English language scale? If you want to get 7 or 8, you need to have an advanced level – C1. Is yours high enough? If you don't know whether it is, then you should be testing yourself on your English language skills to check. That's important. And the most important thing and this, I feel, is a thing that students don't do at all is to monitor your progress every day.
That means - what did I do today? How did I get on in my listening, reading, grammar, vocabulary? What was my score? Write down what the score was, write down where you lost the marks. Then try to understand why those answers were wrong and what you can do to fix those problems.
Unless you analyse these things, you're not going to learn from them and then you're just going to go round and round in circles. Get something in place which is more systematic, then you will see your progress day by day. Be very specific on what it is that you need to improve. And then finally, if you have all of this in place, you will know exactly when you are ready to take the exam and get your score. Don't go into the exam with your fingers crossed, hoping you might get it. That's not the way to be successful at IELTS.
Book your exam when you're pretty sure that you can get the result you want. And in order to be sure of that, you need to be getting consistently higher scores than the ones you need. For 7, you need to be getting 8 in your preparation most of the time, or at least band 7.5. That will give you confidence and even with tricky questions you should still hit your target.
This is how I work with students. If they want band seven, we work towards 8. To do this you always need to be aiming higher than the band you need and you can only do that if you have a proper system in place.
I have an IELTS study plan that I've used with students where you can record your daily work, you can evaluate it, you can decide what needs more practice and then if you fill this in day by day, it will help you to keep track on your preparation and make improvements so that you can see your progress day by day and week by week. To get access to this planner for your IELTS preparation, just follow the link below.
https://ieltslearningtips.com/free-ielts-resources/
Finally think, plan, think progression, think tracking and those three things will help you to make sure that you can improve your IELTS and be successful in your IELTS exam maybe in three to six months rather than three to six years.