How To Get A High Score In IELTS Writing

Every IELTS article and every IELTS book seems to parrot the same old advice: take IELTS
practice tests! Whilst this is, of course, essential, there is a whole lot more you can do to get a high
score on your IELTS test. In his How To Get A High Score In IELTS series, The IELTS Teacher
offers his top five tips for IELTS success.
1. Quality over speed

Without quality, fast writing is the fastest way to a bad IELTS score.
Before you become a fast writer, you must become a good one. It only works this way round.
Once you have mastered the art of quality writing, then you can train yourself to become faster.
So, how do you become a good writer?
Become a good writer before you become a fast one.
Feedback. Feedback is the only way to bring real quality into your writing the sort of quality
the examiners are looking for. Without feedback, youre just taking shots in the dark.
You need to have your writing assessed by someone who knows what the IELTS examiners
want. You also need to be given instructions on how to improve; what to keep doing, what to
stop doing, and what to change entirely.
The feedback you receive must be clear, concise, contain useful comments, and, most
importantly, allow you to fix your mistakes yourself. This will give you not just fast, but
permanent improvement.
There are other IELTS teachers out there who will assess your writing; they will modify and
correct everything you wrote themselves, add some comments, and then hand it back to you.
This is helpful, but it is not the fastest way to better writing.
The fastest way to better writing is to understand why your mistakes are mistakes, and then to
figure out how to fix them. This understanding will be much more complete and develop much
faster if you learn how to correct the mistakes yourself.
The end result will be writing that is of an extremely high quality and skills which will stay with
you not just for IELTS, but for life.
2. Learn the structure

Dont see this as a tip. See this as a rule. It is absolutely essential that you learn the correct
structure for the Writing tasks in the IELTS test.
Fortunately for you, the structure is easy to remember.

For example, with Task 1 of the Academic module, the structure is simple: introduce the
diagram; give an overview; give details. Task 2 is slightly different, and the content will vary
from question to question, but the answer should still consist of a basic introduction-bodyconclusion skeleton, with a separate paragraph for each idea.
The structure may be easy to remember, but students often find it difficult to implement when it
comes to actually writing their answer. Also, as mentioned above, without feedback, they may
think they know what theyre doing, when in reality theyre well off the mark.
Task response and coherence and cohesion are two of the four criteria which assess which
band score you receive. And the structure of your essay will influence how the examiner marks
you against these criteria.
In case your maths is a little rusty, let me break it down for you: 2 out of 4 = 50%! You could be
losing half your marks due to poor structuring. But structuring does not take long to perfect; it
just requires you to practice with real past test papers, and to have your practice tests assessed by
an experienced and qualified IELTS tutor. The IELTS Teachers Writing lessons feature both.
3. Plan first, write second

I want to return to theme of speed for a moment. Remember how I told you that you must stop
focusing on how quickly you can write, and rather focus on how much quality you can write
with? Well now, I want you to slow down even more.
I want you to take a whole ten minutes out of your writing time.
Dont freak out. You know the story of the tortoise and the hare, right? Slow and steady wins
the race. And thats exactly the situation here.
Slow down. Write plan. Ace IELTS. Ride tortoise.
These ten minutes will go into your planning, and this planning has the potential to bump up
your IELTS score by whole bands. A good plan can take you from a 6.0 to a 7.0, an 8.0, maybe
even the exalted 9.0!
So many students underestimate the importance of planning, and they consequently get lower
scores than theyre capable of achieving. Why do they underestimate? Well, there are 2 reasons.
The first is that they have planned in the past, and havent felt any benefits from it. In the vast
majority of cases, this is because they arent planning correctly or are planning too hastily.
The second is that they believe they can transfer their thoughts in perfect logical order onto the
page. But, even for natives, this just isnt possible. The head is a scattered mess of thoughts,
and the only way to piece these thoughts together coherently is to lay them out, see how they fit
together, organize them into a plan, and transfer that plan to the paper.
What happens if you dont plan? A number of disastrous outcomes are possible.

Some candidates run out of steam after the first paragraph, and dont know what to write. Some
write far too much, often throwing in ideas which are completely irrelevant. Some get their
ideas muddled up, thus skewing the structure, and get themselves into a real mess.
Avoid all that. Have a teacher show you how to create an awesome plan in just 10 minutes, and
then youre still left with plenty of time to write your two essays. In fact, even with 10 minutes
of planning, it works out that you still have 2 minutes to write each sentence. Thats plenty of
time, even for the weakest students.
4. Answer the question

Seriously?, I hear you say. Does this guy think Im stupid?

Ask that to the thousands of IELTS candidates who have lost entire band scores because they
didnt do something as seemingly obvious as answering the question.
Theres a reason that a whole 25% of your mark comes from Task response. If youre not
answering the question the question laid out in front of your eyes then how are you going to
survive in university or work abroad?
And yet, if it seems so obvious, why do so many students mess this bit up? Again, there is a
variety of reasons.
One is that, as I have pointed out, they dont plan properly. Theyll see the question on the page,
think oh, I dont need to plan, I know exactly what to write, and 250 words later they have an
answer totally unrelated to the question. Their confidence runs away with them and they simply
ignore what the question is asking for.
Another reason is that they dont read the question. Yes, once more it seems an almost impossible
mistake to make, but it happens. They skip over an essential word, misunderstand a phrase,
wrongly assume what isnt written down. This leads to answering questions in the wrong way,
such as giving advantages and disadvantages about one topic when the question asks for the
different advantages of two topics, or exclusively discussing a topic like obesity when the
question asks for why healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food.
There are ways to deal with this problem. One of them is the tried-and-tested classic: underline
or highlight key words. Its a tip thats lasted because its a tip that works. Keep glancing
over these key words as you write and ask yourself if youre addressing them.
Another tip is to rewrite the question in your own words. You can do this in under a minute as
part of your plan. Writing the question in your own words will give you a better understanding of
the question, make it stick in your head more effectively, and may even prompt some good ideas
for what to write about.

5. The little things

Heres a tip for you: five tips are better than one. And having already offered you the wisdom
of four tips, the fifth and final tip in these How To Get A High Score In IELTS series is
dedicated to offering you five more tips. Theyre as useful as all the others, but a bit smaller, so I
call them The little things.
Little thing #1: Dont repeat ideas using different words. Examiners see right through this. It
wastes time and can lose you marks. Instead, plan before you write. This way, you wont run out
of ideas.

Suffering from writing burn-out? Pick up a book. It helps.

Little thing #2: Start with Task 2. You get twice as many marks for this task, and many
candidates actually find it easier. Youll also feel more confident after getting the longer task out
of the way first.
Little thing #3: Avoid informal language. Save this for the speaking component of the exam. If
youre unsure about what separates informal language from formal language, there are lots of
useful articles online. I also give help on this topic as part of my Writing lessons.
Little thing #4: Dont count your number of words. This is a huge time-sink. Instead, practice a
lot, and learn to recognise how long 150 words or 250 words of your writing looks like. Trust
your judgement in the test, it will be right.
Little thing #5: Read a lot, and read a wide range. Besides being an enjoyable activity, you will
actively soak up the grammar and vocabulary on the page and this will translate to your writing
skills. Whats more, the more you read, the more opinions you will have on IELTS topics,
meaning you will have plenty of intelligent ideas to write about. And, of course, it will help with
the Reading component too. Oh, and the Speaking component, come to think of it

How To Get A High Score In IELTS Listening

Every IELTS article and every IELTS book seems to parrot the same old advice: take IELTS practice tests! Whilst this is, of course,
essential, there is a whole lot more you can do to get a high score on your IELTS test. In his How To Get A High Score In IELTS series,
The IELTS Teacher offers his top five tips for IELTS success.
1. Anticipate answers

Anticipation is one of the most useful skills you can own when it comes to the Listening
component of the IELTS test. If you can predict the answer before youve even heard it, you are
prepared for when it comes.
So how do we anticipate correct answers? You dont need a crystal ball, or time travel powers
(although these would help). You just need to look at the questions a bit more closely.
You dont need a crystal ball to be ready for answers in the Listening test. Just anticipation.
For example, if the task asks for note or sentence completion, which Task 1 and 3 often do, then
check out the words around the note. Are they asking for numbers (like a phone number or date)
or words (like an address or room preference)?
Look closer still: what is the word form of the word preceding and/or following the gap? If the
sentence reads the driver can .. and transport the food, we know that the word in the gap is
a verb, as it follows a modal verb. We know what to listen out for.
Many candidates worry about the Listening test because they worry that they wont be able to
understand it all. But you dont need to; you only need to understand the answers. And if you
can predict what the answers are before the tape begins, then your brain is ready to receive that
information.
As always, keywords are very important. You have some time to read the questions before the
tape begins, so use this time to highlight any keywords. What you are doing is telling your mind
to be alert when it hears these words. The answer will be nearby; be ready to catch it.
2. Familiarise yourself with accents

Canadian, Australian, Scottish, South African, American, Irish, Welsh, New Zealand, Indian. Oh,
and English. These are the accents that could appear in the Listening tasks, so its important
that you familiarise yourself with all of them. The countries themselves (besides USA) are
members of the commonwealth all with English as their first or second language and many of
these countries institutions and visa applications will ask for a good score in the IELTS test.
If the above list has scared you a little, here are some words of comfort: accents are easy. You
just need to spend a little time with them.
Whenever I get a new student who has previously been taught by an American or Australian
teacher, he or she tells me that they struggle to understand English accents. And yet, after a few

minor misunderstandings in the first half hour or so of our lesson, they understand everything I
say.
Admittedly, some accents are stronger than others. Scottish, for example. But this only means a
few more minutes of practice with them. Youll be surprised at how quickly you come to
understand the accent. Its often just a matter of slightly modified vowels.
Of course, youre unlikely to have any Scottish speakers near you. So how do you practice
listening to their accents? Thats easy: YouTube. Just stick Scottish accent or Indian accent or
Canadian accent in the search bar and watch the videos. The search results often show videos of
actual voice coaches, so you can practice your speaking at the same time. Champion.
3. Use your time efficiently

Most people think this advice only applies to the Reading and Writing components, but it
actually applies to Listening too.
Why? Because there is time in the Listening test which you can use to read, instead of just
listen. Its not all audio. There are gaps between the tasks, and it is these moments that can boost
your score up to a perfect 9.0. If theyre used wisely, that is.
Dont fear the clock; use it.
Dont use the time between tasks to zone out, stare at the clock, or think of what youre going to
have for dinner. And dont worry about any answer you missed on the last question. Fill
something in at the end as a guess, but dont rack your brain trying to remember the audio.
Youre much better off closely reading the next question so you can anticipate its answers.
When youre reading over the next question, do all the things mentioned in Tip 1, but also check
out the instruction for the question itself. For example, be careful whether you need to write
ONE WORD ONLY or NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS. Dont end up kicking yourself
over a simple instruction error.
Also use the time to think about words that will appear around the answers. For example, if a
multiple choice question asks What change has taken place in the school? then you can prepare
yourself to listen out not only for the word school, but also for anything to do with schools;
education, students, lessons, teachers.
Dont fear the clock; use it.
4. Immerse yourself in English

This is of course useful for all your English language skills, but it probably has most prominence
for Listening. Think about it; when youre in an English speaking country, what do you spend
most of your time doing? Reading, writing, speaking or listening? Unless you have a real ego
problem and can talk people into a coma, its surely going to be listening.

But you dont need to live in an English-speaking country to immerse yourself in English. You
can hire a tutor of IELTS (such as myself) to give you IELTS lessons over Skype. This is easily
the best way to improve all four of your language skills. But sometimes a tutor isnt possible
either; in that case, there is an alternative: videos.
Ive spoken about the benefits of movies and videos in a previous article, and Ill repeat it here:
English videos are one of the best tools you can use to improve your speaking and listening
skills. Not only because they offer the chance for real, active practice, but also because they are
enjoyable.
A neat activity that can improve your listening, speaking, reading and writing skills at the
same time is recitation.
How it works is like this: pick a movie you think youll like, but havent yet seen. At some point
when youre watching the movie, when either one or two characters are talking, hit the pause
button. Get out a pen and paper. Turn off the subtitles. Now youre going to listen to the
dialogue very closely and write down what you hear. These can just be notes. Do this for two
minutes.
Now, pause the movie again. Bring up the recorder function on your phone, or use a Dictaphone.
You are now going to practice your speaking skills by trying to recite (repeat) everything
that the character/s just said. Try to make it as perfect as possible on the first go. Finally, you
will check how accurate you were with reading skills. Put the movie on mute (no volume) and
play it with subtitles. Play your voice on the recording at the same time. Read the subtitles as you
listen to check how accurate you were.
This is a great activity because it practises all four skills, as well as testing memory recall,
accuracy and note-taking; all useful sub-skills in the IELTS test. It can also be a lot of fun to pick
a movie you know and love, choose a famous scene, and test how much of a fan you are by
reciting it without listening in the first place.
Some of my female students love going through this scene from the Notebook. Personally, Im
more of a Bradley Cooper kind of guy.
5. The Little Things

Heres a tip for you: five tips are better than one. And having already offered you the wisdom
of four tips, the fifth and final tip in these How To Get A High Score In IELTS series is
dedicated to offering you five more tips. Theyre as useful as all the others, but a bit smaller, so I
call them The little things.
Little thing #1: If youve written down what you think is the answer to a question, and then you
hear something else that could have been the answer, dont ignore it, write it down in the
margin. Dont worry about it again until the audio is over, after which you can decide which
answer is the correct one. Furthermore, one of the answers might be the answer to a different
question, which will rule it out for the previous question.

Little thing #2: Leave no answer blank. You will not lose marks for a wrong answer; an
estimated guess may just get you a mark, whilst a blank answer never can. Dont worry about
blanks until the end of the task though. Concentrate on the audio until it is over.
A blank picture is a sad picture, and a blank answer is a sad answer. Answer every question; keep
the answers happy.
Little thing #3: For a lot of the tasks, like the Diagram Labelling task for example, the answers to
the questions run in order. Figure out which tasks run in order with a quick Google search; once
you know what they are, you know that you can move through the questions in order. Youll
know youve missed an answer if the answer to the next question comes up. See Little thing
#2 for what to do in this situation.
Little thing #4: Find conversation in English. Sometimes this is difficult because you live in an
area with no English speakers, but there are great sites out there that offer free unstructured
speaking practice with English natives over Skype, such as iTalki. These conversations arent as
useful as structured IELTS speaking practice lessons with a tutor, but they helpful if tutors arent
an option.
Little thing #5: Play a bit of music whilst you study. This tip is controversial; some people
argue that music is not helpful when studying. If you feel this way, by all means practice in sweet
silence. But if you think of yourself as a musical person, a good band with easy-to-understand
English lyrics (The Beatles, for example) will make the study session more enjoyable, get your
creative juices flowing, and give you great listening practice.

How To Get A High Score In IELTS Speaking

Every IELTS article and every IELTS book seems to parrot the same old advice: take IELTS practice tests! Whilst this is, of course, essential, there is a
whole lot more you can do to get a high score on your IELTS test. In his How To Get A High Score In IELTS series, The IELTS Teacher offers his top five
tips for IELTS success.

1. Watch videos

Before you start arranging the sofa cushions ready for a four-day movie-marathon, let me clarify
this first tip.
Videos can be fantastic tools for IELTS preparation, but only when used correctly. If treated
too casually, videos are just an excuse to lounge about in your pyjamas eating ice cream. For
videos to be genuinely useful as IELTS preparation, you have to engage with them.
A movie I recommend to all my students is The Social Network. Probably because I
recommend it to everyone else, too.
Engaging with a video simply means actively listening to it: concentrating on the dialogue;
focusing on the pronunciation; picking up on the colloquialisms. And yes, it means sitting with
a pad of paper and a pen and taking notes.
Many people think videos are only useful for listening. But they apply to speaking too, if you
engage. In a video, you can pause, rewind, and replay speech, then try it yourself. You can
perfect the pronunciation and nail the colloquialisms. This is especially useful if you live in an
area with few English speakers.
When you take notes, dont limit yourself to transcribing vocabulary and phrases. Draw little
signs to show intonation and stress in words and sentences. Rewrite new vocabulary and phrases
into different contexts to see if you understand them. Highlight the phrases you like.
Its important, however, that you pick videos you enjoy. These videos can be YouTube clips,
documentaries, even full movies. IELTS preparation is at its most effective when its enjoyable.
A movie I recommend all my students to actively watch is The Social Network. Its up-to-date,
contains challenging, intelligent dialogue, could be relevant to the topic you discuss in the exam,
and its just a really good movie. Another great source of videos is TED.com. Its chock-full of
interesting talks on a variety of subjects, and Ill often use them with my students in their
Speaking Lessons.
If you have any suggestions on what makes a great study-movie, add them to the comments
section below!
2. Disguise your nerves

Anybody that tells you that they werent nervous in their IELTS Speaking exam is telling you a
big fat lie.
Its normal to be nervous. Someone is actively judging your speaking skills right in front of you.
But its important to remember theyre not judging you. Just your English.

Unfortunately, nerves have a habit of making you do embarrassing things, like turning beetrootred, or freezing on the spot with nothing to say. Whilst I cant help you with the former, the
latter is something we can work on and thats the bit thats being assessed.
What you need to learn is filler. At its most basic level, filler is just the ums and ahs of human
speech. At its more advanced level, its whole phrases, like At the end of the day, To be honest
with you, and, my favourite, Thats an interesting question, and Im glad you asked it.
These small phrases and even the small noises are extremely useful in the exam for three
reasons:
1. If you can nail the pronunciation and timing, they make you sound like a native.
2. They show off your wide vocabulary and phrase bank.
3. They give you a few precious seconds to think of what to say.
Those first two reasons are valuable because a wide vocabulary and good pronunciation are two
of the things assessed in the examiners band descriptors. The third reason is arguably even more
important as it could be the difference between you choking on thin air or eloquently offering
your opinion on the state of education in your country.
3. Have something to say, then say some more

Filler is all well and good when you just need a few moments to think of an opinion on a subject,
but what if you have no opinion? What if you have nothing to say?
My first bit of advice is to create topic kingdoms. These are a bit like brainstorms or wordmaps,
but more useful, and with a fun little spin.
Big Mouth Shark took my advice and scored a 9 on Speaking.
Get out a bit of paper and a pen, and write down a Speaking topic like Hometown. The paper is
the kingdom and the topic is the King. Feel free to draw a crown. Now, think of a word related to
Hometown; for example, Entertainment. Write this word near Hometown and link it with a line.
If Hometown is King, Entertainment is a nobleman. The King rules over noblemen, and
nobelemen rule over lords. Who are the lords in this case? Maybe the park, the football pitch,
shopping, and friends. Link these lords to their noblemen with lines, then create a new nobleman,
like History.
These topic kingdoms are more useful than brainstorms because they organize your thoughts.
When it comes to the exam and the topic is Hometown, not only will you have something to say,
but youll reveal your ideas in a logical order. One of the band descriptors for speaking is
coherence, and you arent going to win any points for coherence if youre switching between
unrelated sub-topics like a mad man.
My second piece of advice for you is to read. A lot. Ive explained why this is so useful in other
articles so I wont go into too much detail now, but here is the thrust: reading a lot will improve
your grammar, develop your vocabulary, give you lots of opinions on Speaking topics, make you

a much more interesting person, and is just an enjoyable way to spend your time. Just remember:
read things you enjoy.
My third and final piece of advice on this is to practice speaking marathons. Pick a topic. Lets
go with Education. Speak about education for 1 minute. Done? Good stuff. Now, pick another
topic. How about Travel? Speak about travel for 3 minutes. Bit harder? Lets do another:
Computers. Speak about computers for 5 minutes. And so on (protip: stop before your exam).
4. Get wise: Summarize

Despite the best efforts of your topic kingdoms, sometimes you cant help but go off on a
tangent. You begin by speaking about what you did for entertainment in your hometown, and end
up talking about the time you met Celine Dion at a cheese market in Fiji.
This could be disastorous, if not for one brilliant skill: summarizing. The ability to wrap up
everything youve said in a short, succinct summary can prevent the examiner from picking
up his red pen and penalizing you for incoherence.
Creating a summary is really easy, and its best to have a set one that can be applied to all topics.
Its also useful to add a little extra information to the end. A good example, especially for Part 2,
might be So thats how I currently feel about (insert topic here), but Im keen to develop my
knowledge of the subject further. The best thing about a short, widely applicable summary is
that its easy to memorize.
One important thing about summarizing is to not make it explicit. If you feel the seconds
counting down, you shouldnt wrap up with In conclusion, To sum up, or Heres a summary
for you:. I dont know about you, but Ive never had a conversation with someone that ended
this way.
Here are a few examples you may want to use. If you have one of your own, please share it with
us in the comments section below.
These are just my opinions on (insert topic here) though, and I realize that others may feel
differently.
As you can see, my feelings about (insert topic here) are mostly negative/positive/neutral, but
Im always open to opposing arguments.
Although Im not that well educated on the topic of (insert topic here), its an interesting area for
discussion and one Id like to look into further.
5. The Little Things

Heres a tip for you: five tips are better than one. And having already offered you the wisdom
of four tips, the fifth and final tip in these How To Get A High Score In IELTS series is
dedicated to offering you five more tips. Theyre as useful as all the others, but a bit smaller, so I
call them The little things.

Little thing #1: Learn colloquialisms. If grammar and vocabulary make up the meat stew of
speech, colloquialisms are the pinch of salt that make it just right. Using colloquialisms
appropriately will go a long way to making you sound like a native. To bolster your
colloquialism bank, just watch a lot of English videos and television and actively note the
phrases the characters use.
If you end up reciting this little gem in the exam, you can be sure you didnt read Little thing #2.
Fascinating, though.
Little thing #2: Stay relevant. Although summaries are useful for bringing everything together,
you should be staying relevant in the first place. Topic kingdoms will help you to practice this,
but remember to practice with speaking marathons too.
Little thing #3: Practice grammar. The thing that makes speaking more difficult than writing is a
time. You dont have the time to think about grammatical structures. Because of this, its a
lot more important that you practice actively, and have your speaking assessed by an experienced
and qualified tutor of English and IELTS. Good grammar could be what gets you your band 7,
band 8, or even band 9.
Little thing #4: Dont overuse transitions. Transitions sound great and are a brilliant way to
smoothly work your way through the Speaking exam. But dont go nuts. If you use Firstly,
Another reason for, On the other hand, To return to, and A final point within 60 seconds,
youve gone too far.
Little thing #5: Feedback. Ive left this tip for last because its the most obvious one. Everybody
knows that to improve your speaking you need to actually speak, and preferably have that
speaking assessed by a professional. And yet, despite its obviousness, this little tip is also the
most important. If you want to get really good at speaking, and get there really fast, you
have to commit to Speaking lessons. Lessons will give you both practice and feedback; the
ultimate combination for quick speaking improvement.

How To Get A High Score In IELTS Reading

Every IELTS article and every IELTS book seems to parrot the same old advice: take IELTS practice tests! Whilst this is,
of course, essential, there is a whole lot more you can do to get a high score on your IELTS test. In his How To Get A High
Score In IELTS series, The IELTS Teacher offers his top five tips for IELTS success.
1. Dont read everything

Question: why do so many candidates leave the exam centre feeling like they didnt have
enough time on the Reading?
Answer: they read everything in the text.
Of course, intuitively, this makes sense. If you read everything in the text, youll soak up all the
information needed to complete the questions later on. If you dont read everything, youll miss
out one essential piece of information, and thus compromise your score. Or youll waste more
time going back to read it all again anyway.
Besides reading everything from start to finish, throwing your exam papers in the air is also
something you should avoid.
So the candidates read every word intensively, fearful of glazing over a vital clue to a question.
By the time theyre done reading, the minute hand on the clock has swung forward a seemingly
impossible amount. Anxiety strikes, the candidate panics, concentration is lost, and the errors
begin to pile up.
There is a solution to this problem, and its called not reading every word like your life depends
on it. Or scanning, for short.
Heres the thing: there are over 2,000 words to read in the Reading exam, and you only have 60
minutes to read them all. Unless youre a speed-reading champion, this isnt possible. So you
need to scan to extract the information you need. Youre not reading for pleasure here; youre
reading for purpose.
Scanning is a pretty easy skill to learn and an incredibly valuable one to master. Mastering the
skill could mean the difference between a 7.0 and an 8.0, and has allowed some candidates to
skip the text altogether and go straight to question 1, then work their way back in. Imagine how
much time you would save if you did that! No more anxious glances at the clock, much more
time to answer each question with confidence.
Whether its a matching task, a sentence completion task, or a TFN (True, False, Not Given)
task, scanning is absolutely essential if you want to succeed in IELTS. But to scan like a master,
you need a few sub-skills to bolster your scanning ability: identifying keywords, understanding
paraphrasing, and intensive reading. These skills can be acquired with self-study, but for the
fastest improvement its best to find a qualified tutor.

2. Read the question

Moving from one seemingly counter-intuitive tip to one seemingly obvious one: Read the
question.
No, Im not taking you for an idiot. So many candidates come out of their exams with errors that
could have been avoided simply by reading the question carefully.

The chief culprit amongst these errors is in the completion questions. In these questions, youll
see a sentence or note with a gap in it which you must fill. Sometimes this gap asks for you to fill
it with one word, sometimes two, sometimes three.
This is the first error some candidates make: they use the wrong number of words in the gap. To
ignore such a simple instruction seems quite astonishing in retrospect, but perhaps the pressure
of the exam gets to them, they have half their mind on the clock, and they scribble down three
words instead of two. So make sure you use the correct number of words. They write this
instruction in BOLD CAPITALS after all
Another problem that frequently occurs with the sentence completion task is the wrong word
form used. This is easier to forgive as it often depends on your vocabulary and grammar
knowledge, but there are still many occasions where a candidate slips up in a way that even an
elementary student wouldnt.
For example, a sentence may ask you to complete a question on an article about journalism. The
sentence reads Editors look for someone who can .. What word precedes the missing
word? A modal verb: can. And what follows a modal verb? Thats right, a verb. So already with
this question, we have narrowed down our possible word to one select group: verbs. This
also makes it easier to scan the article; we know what were looking for.
And yet, candidates miss this. They get an idea in their head about what the word could be
without reading the question. They will think of an adjective, like motivated, simply because
they did not read the sentence; they saw is when the sentence read can. They then see this
word in the text and transfer it to the answer sheet. These are such silly, avoidable errors that
they break my heart. Dont let them happen to you. Save me from the pain.
3. Learn to love reading

Reading shouldnt be endured. Reading should be enjoyed. It shouldnt draw groans and
make you want to reach for the TV remote (spoiler: theres nothing good on), it should genuinely
interest you and make you want to reach for the nearest paperback.
If you can learn to love reading, your chances of success in IELTS (and in life) are going to be
much better. This is because your mind will be fully engaged in the task, you will read faster and
more accurately, and you will be far less likely to find distractions.
But what if I hate reading? What if Ive never enjoyed it, and never will? Is there no hope for
me?
Before you can love to read, you have to read what you love.
Well youve made it this far in the article. That says something. I dont write the shortest articles
in the world, and you can find IELTS tips elsewhere, so there must be something keeping you
here. It may be because I try to make these articles fun to read as well as informative, because I
want my students to want to read. I want them to be challenged and entertained. This is what
reading should do for you.

Reading widely, consistently and actively (taking notes) offers innumerable benefits for IELTS.
It will prepare you for certain topics that often arise in the Reading passages, thus giving you
experience with the tricky vocabulary. As you read, the grammar will infiltrate your brain and
after time difficult grammatical structures will begin to make sense. The speed of your reading
will improve. Your vocabulary will explode (not literally). Youll be able to relax in the exam.
Even away from the Reading component, a wide reading range offers benefits. Reading up on
different topics will give you far more opinions and opinions you can back up in the Writing
component. The same goes for Speaking, youll be able to speak for much longer if you
actually have something to say. Formal language in articles and journals will benefit you in
Writing, whilst informal language and colloquialisms from dialogues taken from novels will help
you in the Speaking. But the only way you can read so this widely and this consistently is to
learn to love reading. So, read what you love.
4. Do the Match Paragraph Headings task last

This is a tip which, if youve read many IELTS training books, or have already sat the exam
yourself, seems a little off.
In case youre not aware, a Match Paragraph Headings task is task which asks you to match a
selection of headings (marked A-E or whatever) to the number of paragraphs in the text. It
always appears before the text to encourage you to do the task first. And if the exam asks you to
do it first, that must be the best way to do it, right?
Wrong.
Think about it. If you do this task first, youre going to spend a lot of time scanning each
paragraph trying to work out which goes with which heading. Its a completely new text and
youve never seen it before, so your head is working frantically to try and make connections
that simply havent had time to form yet. These are general connections, about the theme of
the paragraphs rather than one or two details, and these kind of connections are harder to secure.
Furthermore, the exam is sneaky and gives you more headings than you need (and all very
similar), so youve also got to filter these out.
On the other hand, consider what happens when you do this task last. Start with the other
questions; as this is a Passage 2 exercise, these may be the Matching Names, Locating
Information or Summary Completion tasks. The answers to these questions may not appear in
order, BUT the information required to complete them is much more concrete. Scanning in these
tasks is much easier youre not scanning entire paragraphs but scanning for specific
keywords. Youll complete these questions much faster than the headings task, even if you did
the headings task first.
Now comes the good bit. As you move from the other tasks to the final task matching
paragraph headings your brain will have already made many of the connections needed to
match the paragraph headings. It will have soaked up all the necessary information whilst
completing the other tasks. The text is no longer fresh. Its had time to stew in your brain. Youll

look back at the headings and find yourself matching them to the paragraphs at lightning-speed.
Yes, lightning. Handle with care.
5. The Little Things

Heres a tip for you: five tips are better than one. And having already offered you the wisdom
of four tips, the fifth and final tip in these How To Get A High Score In IELTS series is
dedicated to offering you five more tips. Theyre as useful as all the others, but a bit smaller, so I
call them The little things.
Little thing #1: Besides your scanning skills, its a very good idea to brush up on your
previewing, predicting, skimming and evaluating skills. Youll be using all five in the exam, but
its scanning which is going to prove most useful when it comes to managing your time
efficiently (work on that too). And the fastest way to improve these skills is with the right kind of
lesson.
Dont worry, nobodys going to break down your door if you get an answer wrong. These guys
just lost their keys.
Little thing #2: So youre reading an article online, and you see a word you dont know. Dont
just skip over it, look it up! In fact, dont stop there. Get out a pen and paper, or open a Word
doc, and write up all the word forms around it (e.g. verb, noun, adjective and adverb if they
exist). This will not only increase your vocabulary, but also improve your ability to remember the
word.
Little thing #3: Take one question at a time. Dont look at the clock, look at the words on the
page. A lot of the time the answers to these questions will run in order (especially in Passage 3),
so doing them one at a time will help with locating the answers.
Little thing #4: Attempt all the questions. Nobody is going to come to your house in the middle
of the night if you get an answer wrong. There is no penalty for a wrong answer. And you just
might get the answer right, especially if its a multiple choice task.
Little thing #5: Dont sweat the small stuff. When it comes to the exam, and you see a word you
dont know, dont worry about it. See if you can work it out from context if it looks like it might
be an answer to a question. What are the words around it? What form are they? Whats the
situation? If its not important, breeze over it, and dont look back. Youve got an IELTS test to
ace.