***IELTS***

I am glad to crack my IELTS exam with an overall 8.5 bands.

I scored 8.5 Overall in IELTS with an amazing 9.0 in Reading or 9.0 listening. Here is a short summary of preparation and advice to other test takers.

Listening 9.0, Reading 9.0, Writing 7.5 Speaking 8.0

Overall: 8.5

These are some of the study methods I had during my preparation which I thought would be helpful to share because thanks to those who did share their experiences in this group helped me a great deal in boosting my confidence.

I have had some formal English training during my childhood but my achievement came through self study. I strongly believe scoring band 8.0 in IELTS exam is not an overnight achievement. One should use extensive English media (books, music, movies) constantly.

Reading 9.0

My greatest stronghold was in Reading 9.0 and listening with band 9.0, I suggest that everyone uses 2 techniques, namely skimming and scanning. Skimming is reading quickly for general understanding and Scanning is looking for specific information within the text. Another helpful tip would be to underline keywords in the test. It can help organize the text and save a great deal of time.

Listening 9.0

Always focus on spelling to prevent losing marks unnecessarily.

– Get familiarized with audios by listening to them even after finishing the test.

– Listen to a good English daily.

– Be aware of traps in the listening tests such as the answer is not the first sentence, but the second, especially when they are talking about prices.

– Practice forgetting about the things you missed in one section and divert the attention to the next one quickly. Key secret only Practice, practice, practice nothing else more.

Speaking 8.0

I think the Speaking part was the most challenging for me. Try to speak to a teacher or mentor long before the exam to gain enough confidence for the real test. Try to say more by adding details as much as possible when answering questions. Be aware that when you make a mistake, you can make things worse by spending too much time correcting yourself; the best thing to do is to move on quickly I practiced answering sample speaking test questions in the book, recorded myself and listened. Got my speaking recording assessed by the tutor who revealed few important errors which I’ve been making (self -correction and long pauses).

Writing 7.5

The only issue with writing is you have to have an outside evaluation from a professional tutor. This is the most important thing, to get your writing checked by someone else to look through your work point out grammatical errors will be highlighted, fixed and explained time to time by finding mistakes and make suggestions for improvement. This can boost writing skills actually I had no idea I was making all these mistakes before, so I started to work on my weak areas focused on what's really important. Besides this, I read lots of model essays. I got notes from my tutor that had model essays solved step by step with a proper complete guideline It helped me a lot to devolved and boost my confidence for writing skills

My sincere advice is here to THINK and PLAN before doing anything else. If you start writing without paying close attention to the question, you may end up losing a lot of marks. It is also very important to check your writing for grammatical errors, set aside a sufficient amount of time to revise and make corrections.

Best of luck to all test takers.

***THANK YOU VERY MUCH***

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