GIVE ANSWERS - English

The original article needs a heck of a lot of work. I’m not so sure that the original authors have done too much academic writing

If I were writing such an article from scratch, I would be structuring - in summary - as follows:

- Lots and lots about years of preparation, learning vocabulary over a range of fields, differentiating between written and spoken formal and informal registers and so on. Especially working towards the ”hard” parts of the exam - the productive ones, namely writing and speaking.
(this would make up the bulk of the advice)

Then related specifically to the exam itself:

- links to ”advice” about the IELTS exam. Most of these say roughly the same sorts of things about the exam structure and a few obvious hints about ”preferred” essay structures and so on.

- links to practice exams and suggestions for practice materials

Plus advice which might or might not be said out aloud..

- cramming for IELTS a few weeks before your test session is pretty much donating money to the people conducting IELTS exams

- you are probably going to take the IELTS more than once anyway. It’s one thing to do practice exams, but another have the real one in front of you.

- taking an IELTS preparation course is not about improving your English, but about learning tricks of the exam that might/”might” come up and practising elements of the exam in a controlled environment.

- an IELTS exam prep course is generally a good idea. However, beware of courses which just give scripted advice about ”tactics” focused mainly on reading and listening, long lectures on essay structures for the short and long essay and not enough work and feedback on actual attempted writing and speaking.

- beware of IELTS courses offering lots of ”template” sentences with ”fill in the gaps” for the writing and speaking sections. Experienced examiners will immediately spot whether it is really your own words or just long sentences you have memorised then parroted - and mark you down accordingly. This tactic relies on getting inexperienced examiners assessing your work. However, there are far more experienced than inexperienced examiners out there...

- don’t use IELTS practice exams as an English language learning tool. They are about training for the exam and should only be used in this manner. If you have used a practice exam, it no longer has value for exam training.

And a final piece of advice:

Ultimately you are going to use English in whatever the IELTS cert is required for. Make sure that this is your primary motivation for learning English, not for the piece of paper your IELTS result is printed on.

That’s just a few ideas off the top of my head.

Disclaimer: I don’t own a company giving IELTS training courses