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.”
