Hello! My name is emmelda and today I will be talking about one of the most comprehensive
and competitive examination for English Tests. Any guesses? Yes! We will be talking about
IELTS.What is IELTS? IELTS IS International English LanguageTesting System. It is meant for those people,
who speak English as a second language, however, aspire to go to different countries either
to pursue higher education or to migrate, to work there and live there permanently.
But in those countries English is spoken as a first and official language. So that is
what IELTS is all about.
Let us know few facts about IELTS before we
discuss this topic at length. First thing, a lot of people have this misconception that
if you go United States or any country where Queen’s English is not spoken,
you don’t require IELTS. Wrong! The United States of America do accept IELTS score. There are
various educational and professional bodies who accept IELTS score. Second thing, it’s
not very easy to book a test date for IELTS. Wrong again! Firstly, you have two ways and
they are very convenient. First, either you go online and get your test dates booked.
Only thing you may to notice that it will some time before the test material or the
practice material is delivered to your home address. So when you are booking a date be
conscious of the time frame. The second option for booking a test date is you go directly
to may be British council and book the date. There they will give you the practice material
in your hand and from there you can start a date start practicing. So let’s see what
IELTS actually tests you on. IELTS test four skills of yours. First one is Listening skills,
then we have reading skills, writing skills and speaking skills. There are basically those
skills that you would require to survive in those countries and especially if you are
going for higher education; how will you communicate with others and how will you articulate your
thoughts and bring it into writing. So let’s see the listening. The listening test will
take no more than 30 minutes. You will be given a pair of headsets which, most probably,
will be cordless. You will have audio clips and booklet in your hand. You will be given
some time to go through these questions. They are approximately 40 questions that you can
expect for your IELTS listening test. As you get the booklet, you will be given a minute
or two to read though the questions; to know exactly what are the key words you would be
looking for. Are you looking for time, place or a person or anything else. So that you
listening. You will have two sets of conversations. One set will be a monologue and conversation.
One set will be of conversation between two people and other one would be in a group of
three to four people. So that what you can expect in IELTS Listening. Moving on to general
reading. Now you’d notice, I have written general reading and academic reading. It is
actually meant for those people who have different purpose in mind when they are entering a country.
For example, are you entering a country so that you can pursue higher education or you
want to migrate so that you can work there and live there and start a new life. If you
are going for higher education or any profession such as educators or nurse where you have
to interact with people a lot and plus you need a lot intellectual interaction, then
you would go for academic reading. If not, you are going to pursue secondary education
or live a normal basic life work as probably as an IT engineer or any other person may
be a HR manager, you don’t require academic section of IELTS. You may want to go general
section. So that’s the basic difference between academic and general section of IELTS
testing. Again this section will have two components, first is the reading, second is
the writing. Both these tests will last for 60 minutes approximately each test. That means
you will give 60 minutes on reading and 60 minutes on writing. In general and academic
reading you will three sets of passages. The only difference between general and academic
is this is based on more day to day life, for example the extracts will be taken from
newspapers, magazines, notices, flyers where you have to read about them and give your
opinion or conclusion or explanation. However, academic reading will be a little more tougher
as they are actually checking out your academic skills. So the major sources of extracts here
are journals and both of these will have again 40 question. And what you have to note is
since general section is little easier than academic, you have to score higher in general
to increase your score bandwidth, so that’s general reading vs academic reading. Now let’s
move on to general writing vs academic writing. In this writing exam, you are given two tasks,
one is for general you will have a letter and the other one will be an essay. However,
for academic you have to for a description and an essay. Letter and description are 150
words each. However essay is 250 words. Here you will be talking about general conversation,
general description vs someone who has academically more intellectual conversation or description.
Letter, you will be expected to explain or requesting to explain a situation. Description
will be based on a chart, table, graph. You will be expected to describe something like
that in your own words. You may have to describe, you may have summarise the entire table or
chart. Essays are pretty much the same. However, this will be a very detailed argument or solution
centric essay. You have to put in your own thoughts, what do you think about it. Lastly
we have the speaking test. So hope we are clear about writing and reading. It has two
components. General has letter and essay and academic has a description and essay. So moving
on to the last section we have is speaking. Here they are trying to check your accent,
vocabulary; how you pronounce words, how you articulate your thoughts. Are you comfortable
speaking to someone who is speaks English as first language. The first that will happen
is general topic. They may ask you to introduce yourself or talk about education life or work
life. The second thing will be; they will give you a card. They will give you a minute
to prepare your thoughts and arrange them and give two minutes’ speech ok! Two minutes’
speech. And the final aspect of speaking would be is they would ask you questions about the
topic. So the question would be more abstract areas of the card topic. So that all. It’s
very simple concept, however, a very comprehensive test. Speaking of test, we would talk about
score. There is no pass or fail in IELTS. The IELTS score will tell you your ability
to converse or to comprehend things in English. The score band ranges from 1-9. Where one
means non user, you can say basic words, nine means that you are very professional that
you know the words and you have practically or you know you have very good English vocabulary.
Sorry, so it’s one to nine. The higher the score the higher your score band would be.
Last thing that you have to know about the score is they usually round up to the next
half or full number. For example, in each test you will get 6.5, 6, 7.5 in speaking
and you have 8, 7 here and 6.5 here. It may happen that your overall score or the mean
or average of the score you will get probably 6.25. In this case, they will round it up
to 6.5. That means they are rounding up to next half. If you get a score of 6.75, they
will round up the score to 7. IELTS is considered as one of the very fair tests that we have.
It is basically test your ability and survival skills in English speaking countries. So that’s
about it for IELTS. I hope I was able to clarify the doubts you may have. Now, understand that
IELTS topics are very comprehensive and everything cannot be covered in one session. So, I will
be taking these sections individually and give you tips and tricks to ace IELTS. So
that’s about it. I hope you enjoyed my lesson. I will be back soon with probably new tips
on skills reading and writing. I will see you soon. Have fun learning English. See you in a while..