hi there it's Asiya at the moment you have only one option to prepare for your
IELTS exam at home on your own and that's what I'm gonna talk about in this
video how you can prepare in less time and achieve the best score you can
achieve with your current level of English all the materials and resources
I'm gonna mention will be linked in my PDF IELTS study plan and I'll tell you
how to download it later but now let's get started
the quickest way to find out what the IELTS exam is about is to take an
official practice test you should take official tests because only those are
exactly like real exams and some of the tests you can find in the internet or on
YouTube are simply incorrect and they will confuse you rather than help you so
two official practice tests available for free they are linked in my study
guide if you feel you need more you can buy a book like this
Cambridge IELTS academic number 14 that's a latest book for now you can get
a general training book it looks the same way and each book contains four
tests if you get number 12 or 13 those are fine too and number 15 will be
published in June 2020 once you've taken the practice test it's time to find out
how the exam is assessed IELTS listening and reading are marked by
computer you simply get one point for each correct answer and depending on how
many questions you answer correctly you get a certain score according to this
table so if you take the official practice test you know exactly what
score you're gonna get in listening or reading and I know that many people
concentrate on those two sections because they take a practice test they
see every mistake they're made and they think those two sections are the hardest
but if we look at the statistics we see a different picture actually the lowest
score in IELTS is IELTS writing and the second lowest is IELTS speaking and
that's where it's much harder to assess yourself so those two sections are
marked by human examiners and they assess you on four criteria in IELTS writing
and four criteria in IELTS speaking and they use IELTS
band descriptors those documents list requirements for each criterion and each
band score you can download public versions of IELTS band descriptors and
study them but I personally think that those two sections require more
attention you should spend more time preparing for them because they're not
just about being able to write or speak in English they are also about being
able to meet those specific requirements the next step is to master each section
of the exam if the moment your English skills at a certain level and your IELTS
score may vary up or down depending on how well you perform at the exam and the
goal is to get the top score the best score you can get at the moment and not
the bottom score and in order to be able to do that you need to have the correct
strategy for each part of the exam I've taken paper-based exam I've taken
computer-based exam and I have videos on how to approach each section how to
approach different types of tasks how to allocate your time to answer as many
questions as you possibly can answer at the moment and to avoid all these silly
mistakes because you know every time you retake the IELTS exam it's about $100 in
this academic year it seems like you may not have time to retake the exam even if
you want to one of the biggest problems in IELTS is time pressure if you spend a
bit of extra time doing something you're not gonna finish something else that you
could have finished and when you're preparing for IELTS listening and
reading it helps to know what types of tasks are used and how to approach each
task then when you see it you'll know exactly what you're gonna do and it
saves time for example in IELTS reading some types of questions come in order it
means you can read the first question find an answer read the next question
keep reading the text until you find the next
answer and so on but some question types don't come in order so you should know
which do and which don't it's a huge time-saver you should also
pay attention to the most difficult types of questions such as true false
not given when you're given a statement you need to find the correct sentence in
the text and then you need to say if the statement is true or its false or you
can't say because it's not given another complex type of task is matching
headings then you are given a list of headings and you need to match each of
them to the correct paragraph it's quite a tricky task to do which requires the
correct strategy and I have videos about all of them but basically in IELTS
listening and reading once you know different types of tasks how to deal
with each type you do some practice tasks you're good to go and if you still
don't get the score you need then perhaps you don't know enough words I
did some research and I think that if you know about 4,000 English words then
your score is going to be between 5 point 5 and 7 and if you know about
8,000 words it's going to be around 7 or higher and I have a separate video where
you can learn how you can measure how many words approximately you know and if
you don't know enough words which words will give the biggest benefit if you
learn them of course this type of preparation takes
much more time and it's not something you can do in a 1 week as we discussed
before most people get their lowest score in IELTS writing and that's where
preparation matters most and actually gives best results in IELTS writing
you're expected to answer 2 tasks in 60 minutes and write more than 150 words
and tasks 1 more than 250 words and tasks 2
and that's already a challenge but if you just write something your score is
gonna be terrible that's because in iOS writing it's not just about your English
skills it's about your writing skills as well and it may so happen that you have
to learn how to write well the good thing is you can do it quite quickly so
IELTS examiner's expect that you're gonna fully answer the question and
you're gonna provide well-structured coherent answer so you need to find out
what you expected to do you also need to learn all the different requirements for
example ayats examiners will be checking for a variety of linking words such as
nevertheless furthermore however and how are you gonna include them if you don't
even know that's a requirement so learn those find out all the types of tasks
you may get and what you're expected to do in each type of task what are the
differences between different types of tasks and of course just listening is
not going to help you with your writing you must practice writing your essays to
in IELTS speaking ayats examiners also use a set of requirements to mark your
answers but I would say it's easier to naturally meet those requirements than
in IELTS writing but if you know what those are it will be even easier to
fulfill them right so you should find out what types of questions are asked in
part 1 2 & 3 and practice your answers you should find out what the
requirements are and what you are expected to do because having the
correct strategy matters I experimented with my strategy and once I got only six
only seven point five and I are speaking while usually at eight point five so
there is a big difference depending on how you approach the both ounces and
that I am speaking is a time pressured exam if you practice at home reading
from the list of questions it's one thing when the examiner keeps on asking
your questions and you must quickly answer the next question
switch and so on it's much more challenging so you should practice
timing yourself to find out how long your answers should be and how much time
you actually have particularly in Part two and at the moment of finishing work
on my brand new IELTS speaking course that will contain all the information
you need and I already have similar courses for IELTS writing I'm gonna link
them in the description below and those courses provide you with all the
information you need for your preparation so you could get started as
quickly as possible but of course if you're ready to invest your time you can
prepare without cost as you don't have to buy anything to pass your exam but
those courses will definitely help you to structure your preparation and save
time when preparing remember that spending one hour a day for five days is
much better than spending five hours in one day so spread your preparation and
right now please download the study plan get links to all the resources I
mentioned in this video and start your preparation thank you for watching me
today good luck with your exam