IELTS Grammar: Six Reasons Why Every IELTS Student Should Study Grammar

by Dave | Oct 9, 2017 | IELTS Grammar

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In my experience, IELTS students seem to focus less on grammar than other areas.

This is probably because it’s not very fun and it takes a long time to improve.

But here are six reasons to motivate you to open those grammar books!

Dave

1. Too Many Basic Mistakes are Very Bad for your IELTS Score.

Let’s be honest, grammar is worth 25% of your writing and speaking marks, which is a lot.

If you know that you make a lot of mistakes in your speaking or writing but you don’t do anything about it, that isn’t a very smart strategy.

It’s really easy for an examiner to notice basic grammar mistakes so there’s no chance of avoiding losing marks for them.

Also, if you make a lot of basic grammar errors, it will be really easy to spot as it will make it difficult for the examiner to follow your ideas.

So this will mean you end up with a grammar score of 5 or worse.

You should identify your common mistakes and then study and practise these areas.

If you don’t know your common mistakes then looking carefully at your writing and listen to yourself (on your phone), or get a friend or teacher to help.

2. Bad Grammar Will also Affect Other Aspects of your Writing and Speaking.

As well as your grammar score being affected by bad grammar, it will also bring down other parts of your IELTS score.

In writing, a lot of mistakes will make it difficult for your ideas to link together well, so this will impact on your coherence and cohesion score.

In speaking if you’re not confident about your grammar, it’s likely you will hesitate and self-correct a lot. This will decrease your fluency and pronunciation scores.

3. A Good Range of Grammar is Essential to Get a Band 6 or Above.

As well as avoiding basic mistakes, you need to demonstrate a good range of grammar.

If you use the same basic structures again and again, you will only get a 5 for your grammar, even if you don’t make any mistakes at all.

So for band 6 or higher you need to study your grammar so you can be comfortable using a range of tenses e.g. to talk about the past, present, and future, as well as being able to use a range of different complex structures e.g. conditionals and relative clauses.

4. The Better you Know your Mistakes, the More Able you are to Self-Correct.

I always ask my high-scoring students for their personal tips, and a lot of them talk about being able to notice and correct their own mistakes in their writing at the end of their exam.

In order to achieve a high band score (7+), most of your sentences must be error-free.

In the exam you will be rushing and feeling nervous, so you’ll probably make more mistakes than usual.

Therefore if you’re aiming for a high score, it’s important that your awareness of grammar is good so you can spot any errors as you’re writing.

Ideally, you should also finish with a few minutes to spare, so you can review your writing and fix any mistakes.

However, if you lack the ability to spot and correct your mistakes, you won’t be able to do any of this.

5. Knowing your Grammar will Make Reading and Listening Easier.

Not only does mastering grammar help your speaking and writing scores, it will also improve your reading and listening ability too, so it really is a no-brainer!

The better you know your grammar, especially more complex grammar, the easier it will to follow the ideas in difficult reading or listening passages.

Therefore you’ll have more brain time to focus on the exact meaning of what is being said.

6. It Feels Good to Master Something Difficult.

Taking on a difficult challenge requires focus, dedication and organisation.

So mastering something difficult will increase your mental toughness and build your self-confidence.

As a famous teacher and author once said the greatest satisfaction comes from mastering something that is truly difficult.

As well as improving your IELTS scores in some pretty fundamental ways, studying and mastering English grammar has the power to develop you as a person.

So, what are you waiting for?

Now it’s your turn! Put your answers in the comments.

What ways do you use to improve your grammar?

What are your common mistakes?

The Simplest, Most Important Tip for Part 1 IELTS Speaking Preparation

by Dave | Oct 9, 2017 | IELTS Speaking

The Speaking Test is a Videogame

I often tell my students to think of the IELTS speaking test like a videogame. The early levels are easy; it gets harder later in the test.

Check out some of my speaking sample answers for free on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@howtodoielts

Be sure to avoid the mistakes that most students make on writing by signing up for my exclusive IELTS Ebooks here on Patreon.

Here’s an example of some easy part 1 speaking questions (you can find some more samples on our YouTube page):

-What do you like doing at the weekend?

-When you were a child what did you like to eat the most?

-Do you enjoy sunny days much?

Compare that with speaking part 3 questions about a much harder topic:

-Why do you think many people prefer working alone?

-What can the government do create more public spaces?

-How has the internet changed how people consume the news?

The speaking test starts out easy and gets really hard by part 3.

The difference in a videogame is that you are trying to get to beat the last level to win. In the speaking test you are graded at every level.

That means that a question in part 1 has equal value to a question in part 3, even though part 3 is much, much harder.

Think of IELTS speaking all the time, please!

So… what’s the tip?

It’s simple, just talk a lot in part 1.

Take more chances with good vocabulary in this part because it is more likely you will use it accurately when talking about familiar topics.

Why?

Because part 1 is the easiest and you’ll do the best in this part.

The part 1 questions are simple, you’ve probably practiced them before, and you don’t have to think of ideas since they are always personal.

Essentially, your answers have more value early in the test (when the questions are easy) than they do later in the test.

In the videogame example, this is like getting as many points for beating level 1 as for beating level 10, even though level 10 is much harder!

It’s true that examiners might give more weight to part 3 because the topics are unfamiliar and therefore a better test for strong candidates.

That doesn’t change the fact that speaking as much as possible in part 1 offers you the best value on the whole speaking test and is the surest, quickest way to bump up your speaking score.

Top 3 practice ideas

I know it sounds easy to talk a lot but in fact this is a skill that many students need to practice as well.

If you go to the test and you haven’t practiced and you start talking a lot you may start hesitating and self-correcting. That will really hurt your fluency score.

So please please try some of the practice ideas below!

1. Have a conversation with Siri or your voice assistant on your phone. Give long answers.

2. Have a sample conversation in English in your head as you go to bed and the same one when you wake up in the morning. Research has shown that imaginary practice in your head has the same impact as actually speaking!

3. Watch a YouTube sample speaking test and pause after the examiner asks the question. Answer it yourself. Repeat with the same video twice in 1 hour to really develop!

4. Write down a topic on your hand to talk about (robots, sunshine, eating vegetables) and practice talking about it throughout the day when you have some free time (on the toilet maybe).

Here’s an example of Nguyen from our Facebook and Instagram doing a Part 1 Speaking question on DREAMS:

Here are some other speaking model answers: friends, phones, school, and history.

IELTS Speaking Part II: How to Improve your Grammar Score

by Dave | Oct 9, 2017 | How To

Be sure to avoid the mistakes that most students make on writing by signing up for my exclusive IELTS Ebooks here on Patreon.

Check out some of my speaking sample answers for free on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@howtodoielts

Your Native Language

This IELTS speaking tip depends a bit on your native language. I’ve taught in Germany, South Korea, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam.

In some of those countries, for example Vietnam, they don’t have a the past simple. In Germany, they have it but it is more common to use the present perfect.

So before you decide to do this tip consider this: what are the main grammatical differences between your language and English?

Think about a common area of grammar like the past simple or present continuous.

Vietnamese students very rarely use the past simple during the speaking test even though if I asked them to write a sentence in the past they could do it easily.

Why?

Because the speaking test is fast. You have to focus on your pronunciation, grammar, vocab and fluency and there’s no time to get it right.

So, for Part 2 of the speaking test I recommend to my students to spend their preparation time writing down regular and irregular past simple verbs if the topic takes place in the past (most do).

Write the verbs again and again.

Not only will that help you remember to use them when you talk, but they will also light your way through your response.

Here I am (in a video from our YouTube) talking about the same tip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GiAxfvylKc

Here are some helpful speaking model answers: friends, phones, school, and history.

How to be Relaxed and Confident in the IELTS Speaking Test

by Dave | Oct 9, 2017 | How To

(To really relax check out some of my model answers here: friends, phones, school, and history.)

Check out some of my speaking sample answers for free on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@howtodoielts

Be sure to avoid the mistakes that most IELTS students make on writing by signing up for my exclusive IELTS Ebooks here on Patreon.

Dave

Nervousness

One of the biggest problems students have in the speaking test is they get really nervous.

This is natural.

You’re speaking in your second language to a native language speaker who is silently judging you and determining your future. You should be nervous!

But you shouldn’t.

When you are nervous you probably will: hesitate more often, make more simple mistakes, forget simple vocabulary and speak more softly with worse intonation.

All those things will hurt your speaking score.

You can improve your score on the IELTS speaking by relaxing.

I’ve got some ideas for how to get over that nervousness, but I’m not an expert because I’ve never had to take an IELTS test in another language!

So I asked some of my best students for ideas. Which ones do you think will work for you?

Nguyen: ‘I don’t usually drink coffee much, I prefer tea or something sweet. But when I’m studying I drink coffee to stay alert. Lots of studies have shown that coffee makes your working memory faster and your long-term memory better. If you drink coffee right before the test you will be more confident and remember more words. This really helped me to get an 8 on the speaking exam.’

Minh: ‘Before you take the IELTS test (in Vietnam, but it’s probably similar in most countries) you may have to sit outside the room waiting while the test before you finishes. This is a good opportunity to prepare and the way I prepared was by starting to hate the examiner! I know, haha! But it worked for me. I imagined that he was the most annoying person and I couldn’t stand him. When I went in for my test I wasn’t intimidated at all – I was so confident (and I got an 8, as well).

Here I am talking about some other ways to relax from our YouTube channel:

It might also help you to understand exactly what the examiner is thinking so you can calm down: howtodoielts.com/why-is-the-examiner-like-a-robot-in-ielts-speaking/

So those are some interesting tips from 2 successful students of mine.

Do you have any other normal/crazy ideas for how to relax before or during the IELTS speaking test?

IELTS Ideas & Topics: Space (Part 1)

by Dave | Oct 9, 2017 | IELTS Ideas and Topics

Hi everyone! These were previously posted on Facebook and Instagram but we’re making them available all at once for you now! If you want the high-resolution images, you can download the free pdf .

Be sure to avoid the mistakes that most students make on writing by signing up here for my exclusive IELTS Ebooks here on Patreon.