IELTS preparation tips from winners

Aruna is a lovely Indian lady in her 30’s who speaks Telugu as a first language. When she won our monthly IELTS results competition with a great Band 8.0 overall score, we asked her to describe her exam preparation process.

Here is what she said:

“I would like to express my gratitude to your blog from the bottom of my heart for providing such useful information like daily broadcast exam updates which not only made me familiar with the IELTS test materials from around the globe, but also helped me always stay alert for my exam.

I would like to share my preparation tips for all the four modules:

Listening

Listening to the English radio stations helped me a lot. I used to listen to the world news or regional news every morning that helped in two ways: to get used to listening at fast pace and also to know the current affairs and what is happenings around me. Sometimes I also watched English documentaries on the Discovery channels to make myself familiar with the native speakers’ accent. Finally, when I just wanted to relax, I used to tune in and listen to English songs and try to follow the lyrics word by word. I would say that apart from practicing proper IELTS listening materials, it is good to look out for additional ways in the areas of your interest to add more excitement to your preparation.

Reading

The above tips also apply to Reading – choose the article or novel or story of your interest. It could be related to the events in your city or the biography of your favorite sports star or movie star or it could also be reviews of your favorite tourist locations on a travel blog or Facebook or just anything written in standard English. This helps us increase our reading speed and add new and uncommon words to our vocabulary bank.

Writing

IELTS Blog model essays are a great start for anyone to learn how different essays are graded and also the structure and types of essays. The best part is the comments written below each essay which give us insights into the merits and the drawbacks of different writing approaches. The model letters from the blog also guided me towards writing a well-structured letter with a complete task response in the least possible time. The last but not least is the spelling and grammar correction done to those essays which taught me to stay watchful while writing.

Speaking

For Speaking, practicing regularly on different topics published on IELTS-Blog.com has been very handy to me. It saved me the hassle of searching for the topics. Following those topics by either framing sentences in your mind or speaking aloud to friends or recording and listening to myself to dig out the repeated mistakes helped me get rid of the phobia of speaking openly.”

IELTS Band 9 in the Speaking test is thought of as next to impossible for non-native English speakers. However, Marlon – a 30 year-old man from Sri Lanka – has proven this can be achieved even by a person who did not speak English from birth. And he won in our monthly IELTS results competition in June as a result 🙂 Even though Marlon’s first language is Singhalese his English is apparently just as good, and today he shared a few tips that can help you, too, get a similar score in the IELTS test.

Marlon says:

“As far as speaking is concerned, I think what really helped me was the fact that I watch English dramas (British) as I love watching such dramas, for example, ‘Midsomer Murders’, ‘Doctor in the House’, ‘Doctor at Large’, etc, and also watching programmes such as stand up comedy shows or even shows like ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’ as well as documentaries about history, politics and travel.

I think that watching these dramas not only helped me improve my vocabulary but also pronunciation and expressions as well.

Almost on a daily basis I read the news by visiting websites such as CNN, CBS News, NBC etc and whenever I come across a new word, I refer to the Cambridge Dictionary Online for its meaning and usage.

And besides these habits which I follow not because of IELTS test but because I find it interesting and stimulating, I also did some practicing using past test papers, especially the listening and writing modules.

Hope this helps :)”