Improving your reading and listening skills

I am a massive fan of keeping up to date with what is happening in the world, and I always try to convince my international students of the importance of reading and listening to the news.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is the very best way of improving your English, as well as giving you lots of ideas and information for writing essays and doing various types of academic speaking.  

The problem, for many learners, is that it's just too difficult - the news articles they find are too long and complicated, and they can't see any improvement quickly enough.  They just give up.

Today, however, I've made a great discovery.  Some of my lovely INTO students have been asking me to help them do better in Listening and Reading tests, and I was delighted to stumble upon this fantastic website while I was looking for useful online resources.  You can decide which level you are at (but I think it's probably best to start the first time at Level 1) and each news story is given at all 3 levels, using more vocabulary as you move up the levels.  If there is a video clip, the words which are spoken are written down for you to see.

There's a great story here - and it's about something which happened in China, which will be interesting for my current class, most of whom are Chinese.  Have a look at the 3 different levels, and decide which one is right for you.  

If you're struggling with your reading and listening, or disappointed with your test scores, why not work through one of these stories every day?

How to improve your score in the IELTS Writing test

Many of the students I work with are looking for the one key to getting a high score in the IELTS Writing exam.  The fact is, there's isn't one single factor which will guarantee you get the score you need, but there are a few do's and don'ts which are worth remembering.

While you are preparing for the exam: 

• Do focus on making your language easy to understand.  If your teacher is always writing question marks on your essay, you are not making your meaning clear.  If the examiner does not understand what you are trying to say, you have failed to communicate your message and you cannot get the high score you are hoping for.  
• Don't get obsessed with linking words and phrases.  Of course you do need to use these effectively in order to get a high score, but you won't get a higher score by using unusual or obscure words and phrases.  You definitely won't get a high score if you put them in the wrong place. Learn to use a small range of linking devices correctly.
• Instead, do work on developing a really wide range of ideas and opinions about all the common IELTS topics.  Read the newspapers and your coursebooks, listen to the news, watch YouTube videos and, most important of all, make an ideas book.
• Don't try to memorise long lists of model sentences out of an IELTS book. Of course you need a range of good vocabulary to get a high score, but it's better to find a few good phrases then use them as soon as possible in your writing until you are really familiar with them, and sure that you are using them correctly. Then repeat the process with a few more.  

On the day:

• Do make sure you only spend 20 minutes on Task 1.  You cannot get a good mark overall if you do not spend enough time on Task 2.  
• Don't panic if you don't fully understand the question.  It's not the end of the world.  Read the question carefully several times, and if you really, really don't understand it, don't just give up.  Make the most sensible guess that you can and take the opportunity in the introduction to clarify what you think the question means.  This will make it less confusing for the reader, who will understand where you are coming from.  You will still get some credit if you write a good essay.
• Do jot down your ideas and make a quick plan before you start writing the essay.  A lot of the marks are for how well organised your essay is, and it's very difficult to do this as you are writing.  
• If you do get to the end of your essay and suddenly think of a really, really good idea you should have put in the second paragraph, don't just put it in the conclusion.  Leave a space after the end of the conclusion, write down your great idea, then link it to where it should have gone in the essay by using a long arrow.  

I hope these ideas are useful - good luck with your preparation!

How reading the news can help you to get high scores in IELTS - or just improve your English in general

If you are serious about improving your English, especially if you are preparing for a test like IELTS or one of the Cambridge ESOL exams, you need to be regularly practising your speaking and writing - what we could call output.  But you also need to make sure that you are getting enough input - that you are taking in enough  of the right sort of English, through your eyes and ears.  

Although a large part of your exam preparation should be in the form of practice tests, you need more than that. Chatting with friends, both face-to-face and on the internet, is a great way of practising your informal speaking skills, but you need more than that.  Reading about your favourite fashions or sports on websites is an excellent way to improve your reading skills and give you the vocabulary you need to talk with your friends (and the examiner) about your everyday life and the things you love. But you need more than that.

To get really high scores in exams like IELTS, and to pass exams like Cambridge Advanced, you need to know a bit about the world.  Not just your world - you need to know about what goes on in the world as a whole.  I don't mean that you need to know and remember a huge number of specific facts about current affairs.  What you do need is a general understanding of other people's lives and experiences, so that you can talk and write about things of which you have no direct experience.  

I'll give you an example.  If you are reading this, you are a literate, educated person, but to write an essay about the problems of illiteracy you need to be able to imagine what it would be like to have little or no education, to be unable to read and write. It's much easier to write about the less familiar topics if you have got into the habit of thinking about what happens outside your own family and social life. Newspapers, or news websites, are the place to find this type of information.

I'm going to make two suggestions about how to read the news to improve your English (I'll talk about listening another day):

1. If you live in the UK, buy the newspaper called the 'i' every day.  It's only 20p, and is a shortened version of one of the high quality newspapers called the Indpendent.  I know that Metro is free, but the type of English used in Metro isn't as good as the language in the i.  The first two pages are full of very short articles (about 50 words each) on the hot topics of the day from around the world.  If you look through these and read about half of them, you will get lots of new vocabulary and ideas for essays (don't forget to add all your new ideas to your Ideas Book).  If you flick through the next 20 pages or so, you will find lots of longer news articles - and you could pick one or two a day and read them quite closely, making a record of the useful vocabulary and ideas.  After that there's pages about the day's television, fashion, technology, cars - all sorts of different 'general interest' topics.  Then come the business pages, so if you are studying for IELTS with a view to doing a Master's degree in Business, you can make sure that you are aware of all the latest developments.  Finally, there's lots about sport, and some great crosswords and other puzzles.  You don't have to read it all, but commit yourself to spending a certain amount of time on it, and do it regularly.
2. If you don't live in the UK, or don't want to buy the i, do the same but use the internet.  You can use websites by the Guardian or the BBC, or have a look at this website which lists the top ten news websites for English language learners. Read the headlines, and choose one or two articles a day to look at more closely. I do this for my German, using the German version of Yahoo. Sometimes I don't feel like it, but I always enjoy it once I actually start, and it's a good habit which has really helped me.

The most important thing is that you develop a daily routine (or at least a routine you follow on a few set days of the week) and follow it as regularly as you clean your teeth! You can make a real difference even if you only spend half an hour a day.

Ideas for IELTS Speaking and Writing

Students complain a lot about the IELTS exam.  A lot of complaints are about how hard it is to do the Reading test in the time available, but even more people complain about how hard it is to think of ideas for some of the Writing Task 2 essay topics, and the Speaking Part 2 talk.  Without some good ideas, it is very unlikely that you could get a high enough IELTS score to be accepted onto a postgraduate course.

A really good way to overcome this problem is to begin an Ideas Book as soon as you possibly can, and add to it regularly.  You can do this on your computer, in a Word document or Excel spreadsheet, or use a folder or A4 notebook.  

It's very simple - basically, you list all the topics you can think of (especially difficult ones) in your document or spreadsheet, or allocate a whole page to every topic in your notebook or folder.  Then, over a period of time, you write down all sorts of ideas, opinions and useful vocabulary relating to that topic. 

There are lots of different places where you can get ideas.  If you go to an IELTS preparation class, you will certainly do lots of activities which can be a good source of ideas.  Your teacher will probably give you lots of handouts, and you can make a note of anything useful which you talk about in class.

Even if you're working alone, you can still find lots of good ideas, from websites or from the test practice books which you are using. For example, if you do the practice reading test called 'Nature on display in American zoos' from the IELTS Trainer (p140), don't just heave a huge sigh of relief when it's all over and forget all about it as quickly as possible - use some of the ideas from the text for your Ideas Book. In the case of this text, I would add the following to my page entitled 'animals':

Zoos

Goals of zoos: recreation, education, advancement of science, protection of endangered species, captive breeding programmes.

Problems: animal welfare - some zoos in the past did not provide adequate care

Funding: public (municipal funding), private financial support, admission fees

Even this small amount of information (which took me less than five minutes to find and write down) would be enough to help me write a really good essay about whether zoos are a good thing or not.  

Your Ideas Book is also a great place to note down past IELTS questions about the various topics, and your ideas about how to answer them.  Look, for example, at IELTS-Simon's question and suggested answer about a wild animal from your country.  Write out the question and your own answer (or notes) on your 'animals' page.  

If you're studying for the IELTS exam, or any other English exam where you might have to speak or write about a range of topics, why not try an Ideas Book?  Email me if you want any help or advice about this!

IELTS Writing Task 2 and other academic essays: what not to write...

I'm not having the best of days - we just bumped our car into a friend's car and damaged both vehicles - an expensive mistake!  I'm feeling a bit grumpy, so I'm going to blog about some of the things which I think don't sound good in academic writing.  Feel free to disagree with me, as some of them really are a matter of opinion.

1. Don't be over-dramatic.  A lot of students use memorised phrases like 'One of the most controversial topics today is ....' or '..... is hotly debated around the world'.  This is fine for genuinely dramatic topics which really are the subject of heated debate, like perhaps global warming, but if it is something like 'is it a good idea for children to have pets?' then these phrases sound silly.  If you use phrases like this because you don't know what else to put in the introduction, follow the formula taught by IELTS-Simon, to write a fairly general sentence about the topic of the essay, and follow it with another sentence which sums up your whole answer to the question.  Good examples of his techniques are here, here and especially here.
2. Be careful with all sentences memorised from books.  I feel a bit bad writing this, but please be extra careful with books produced by people who are not native or near-native speakers.  One of my lovely Chinese students obviously had her doubts about some Chinese IELTS books she had at home, as she brought them into class and asked me to check if they were suitable for her to study from.  I'm sorry to say that they were FULL of mistakes, and also contained an awful lot of very unusual vocabulary which you really don't need for IELTS (a long list of different precious stones, for example).  Anyway, to get back to my point about what not to write, don't memorise and write things like 'every coin has two sides'.  We just don't use this phrase - we do have the saying 'two sides of the same coin', but that really means the opposite of what people mean when they say 'every coin has two sides'.  You don't need to use phrases like this at all - you need sensible opinions, with good examples, expressed in clear, simple, accurate English, with a few basic linking devices.  That's it!  
3. Avoid 'sweeping statements'.  These are statements where you over-generalise about things which you can't possibly be sure about, especially when they could cause offence to people (remember, examiners are people!).  Always, never and all are dangerous words!  I'm also thinking of things like 'women should stay at home with their children',  'people in the UK do not care about old people' and 'it is immoral to get divorced if you have children'.  I have read all three in essays handed in for me to mark, and they are not acceptable in academic writing.  Don't get me wrong - you are entitled to think whatever you want, but in academic writing you have to express your ideas more carefully, and in particular avoid racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination.  By the way, putting 'in my opinion' before an offensive comment doesn't make it acceptable in academic writing!  
4. Don't use 'he' to refer to people in general.  It is no longer acceptable in academic writing to use language which excludes one half of the population.  It can sound clumsy to always write 'he or she' 'his or her', so the easiest way to avoid sexist language is to make things plural - instead of 'the teacher must encourage his or her students to read widely', just say 'teachers must encourage their students....'  
5. Don't use abbreviations.  You all know this, but it's so easy to forget!  So no 'what's more', 'etc', and 'don't'...  It's not a big thing, but sticking to this rule shows that you understand and respect the conventions of academic writing.
6. Try to avoid mixing up British and American spelling.  In IELTS it's fine to use either, but try to be consistent - all British or all American, rather than a mixture of both.  I must add that some tutors at university have terribly strong feelings about British v American spelling - I personally don't think it matters, as long as you are consistent - so you need to check what the 'rules' are at the university or college where you are studying.

I hope some of these pointers are helpful - you may not think that some of these things matter, but there's no point in annoying the IELTS examiner!  I'll be in a better mood next time I write....