A teacher friend of mine told me about a student of his who had just passed her IELTS. She was very happy as you can imagine and can now process her papers to move to Canada. However, although she finally got her score (7), it took her 6 years to get it!
Six whole years and several tests and in the end she had to get a teacher to help her. Had she not worked with my friend, she might have still been trying!
So, I wonder how long you are you prepared to wait? 6 years? Or 10 years as one of my students did. It’s a good deal of your life and that of your family. In the end both of these students decided to work with a teacher and this is what got them both over the hump of endless, unsuccessful attempts at the IELTS.
I received a message from another student recently who had taken the exam 30 times!! She was able to score 7 and 8 in listening, reading and speaking but her writing was stuck at 6.5 – for 30 tests!! She was one of those 6.5 IELTS writing experts that I have mentioned before in my posts. She wasn’t, however, asking me for help. She was complaining about the IELTS examiners and why they couldn’t, after so many tests, just give her the band 7 she wanted.
Naturally, they wouldn’t do this unless the writing deserved band 7 and it seemed to me that the student was missing the point, which was that her writing was not yet good enough for IELTS band 7. Sadly, she was not interested in getting any help and vowed to keep taking the test until she passed. I wonder how many more tests and how many more years it will take!
It is sad to hear these stories but in my opinion, unless you want to spend years and years or pay for test after test, the wise thing to do is to work with a teacher.
It is a very strange thing about IELTS that the majority of people think that the best route is to study completely alone. This is especially strange when language learning is not a solitary activity and generally there has to be another person involved - to speak to, to write to, even to write what you read and share what you hear.
Einstein declared that to do the same thing over and over and keep expecting a different result was a definition of madness.
To get a different result something MUST change.