IELTS preparation tips from winners

You may remember Sharanya as a winner of our IELTS Results competition – she scored overall Band 8.5 with an amazing 9 in Reading. This is a serious achievement for a young lady whose first language is Tamil. Today we would like to share with you the few simple steps that Sharanya recommends that you take to follow her path to success.

“Before you begin preparation, familiarize yourself with the end to end IELTS test format.

For the listening and reading components, practice, practice, practice as much as possible! Try to take as many tests as you can. Also while studying, try to simulate conditions of an actual test center. Work in a silent closed room and shut off your mobile phone. So even if you study for just 2 hours every day, ensure that you do so without any distractions.

For the speaking component, do subscribe to the updates from www.IELTS-Blog.com. For a period of almost 2 months I consolidated the list of speaking test questions. This greatly helped me to perform confidently in the speaking test. Also ensure that you practice speaking out loud.

For writing, learn about the type of essays and letters/reports that are commonly asked. Do ensure that you equip yourself with an extensive list of connective phrases and terms. Also try to hand write at least one letter/essay a day.”

Today’s post is dedicated to Lynette’s success in IELTS.

Lynette is a lovely lady from Zimbabwe. She participated and won in our June IELTS Results competition thanks to her remarkable score. Here is what Lynette did to achieve Band 8 in her exam, and what she recommends to other test takers:

” 1. First thing first – get the book ‘Target Band 7’ for the Academic exam.

2. Follow the study plan at the back of this book.

3. Be honest with yourself.

Find out what is your weakest area and work on that. For me I knew that Writing Task 2 was going to be a challenge. So I broke it down into the following areas:

– I did practice without timing myself where I just worked on the number of words I wrote. I got questions from the ielts-blog.com with the answers and worked on just writing.

– Then I checked the word count. It was too much. I spent a few days working on getting the word count down.

– The next step was now working on writing the task within the time given and allowing for editing time.

– After that I worked on Writing Task 1. It was easier to do as I was now aware of the time I had for this task.

– I also read the model answers on IELTS-Blog.com and made study notes. I read them as if they were novels. I looked at the vocabulary and looked up 10 new words every day to expand my vocabulary.

For listening I listened to the practice tests’ audio recordings that come with ‘Target Band 7’.

I studied earnestly from January. I had bought other IELTS materials but I found that all that I really needed was in the IELTS book which I bought just 21 days before I took the test.

The blog and the book Target Band 7 really helped me. I could not have done it without my friends who were my mock examiners, and also the daily exam updates from IELTS-Blog really helped me.”