IELTS Preparation tips from Uli, Band 8 in General Training (part 1)

Uli Rantch is one of our Best IELTS Results Competition winners in May. Not only he scored a whooping overall Band 8, but also wanted to help other test takers by sharing his way of preparation. His tips will be posted in 2 portions, one today and the other tomorrow – there are many tips and I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed. Here is what Uli says:

“I really did not expect to be among the winners of the competition and actually participated ‘just for fun’. I’m pretty excited, thank you! Of course I’d be happy to give some advice to the other blog-readers.

In order to be well prepared for my IELTS test I started practicing well ahead of the actual test-date – five weeks to be precise. I imposed myself the obligation of learning at least 30-60 minutes a day and although this was not always easy it was one of the key-factors to success.

Internet forums and user ratings in online reviews helped me to determine which books had been useful to other learners before. I bought a bunch of five and worked through them one after the other and recognized that especially my scores in reading and listening improved day after day. While I could hardly understand anything at the beginning of my training I got much better by and by and finally scored 8 points in the listening section and even 9 in reading.

You simply have to get used to it by practicing it over and over again. Get yourself some good training-material to find out what to expect in these sections. It made me feel very comfortable to know the question-types and to know how to approach the reading-section. The training-material taught me how to skim and scan information in a text in order to quickly find the passage you need.

Tune in to English radio-broadcasts (via web), listen to English news on TV or concentrate on understanding song-texts to improve your listening skills and vocabulary. Read English online-newspapers or books to cope with the reading-section. I myself read the Australian Google News on a daily basis. It does not take more than 15 minutes but you get to know a lot of new vocabulary, you improve your reading skills and along the way you stay up to date ;).”

Stay tuned, more tips are coming tomorrow!