IELTS – Exam Skills You Need For Band 7 or Higher
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You are now listening to the IELTS podcast. Learn from tutors and ex-examiners who are masters of IELTS preparation. Your host, Ben Worthington. Hello there IELTS students. In this tutorial, we are going to look at exam skills you will need to get a band 7 or higher in the IELTS test. This is an overview of

And for the most part, I'm not going to just tell you what to do. I'm going to tell you how to do it as well to make sure we're delivering extra value to help you on your journey to get the results you need to get to Australia, the UK, to Canada, to start uni, to start work, to get the legal papers.

And I know the legal papers, the immigration is such an absolute money-grabbing nightmare because I've been through this recently with my wife trying to get her settled in the UK. Let's jump into it. Actually, before we start, let me tell you who I am. If this is the first time you are watching or listening online,

My name is Ben Worthington. I've been helping students pass the IELTS exam now for over 12 years and it just got easier. How did it get easier? Well, we launched our IELTS speaking test simulator and recently, not recently, about a year ago, we launched the AISA checker as well.

And there's never been a better time for self-study students like yourself. So let's jump into it. The first one is time management. I've been working with a student for the last, I think about the last month or so. And what we did, because she was struggling with time management for the writing. I'm just going to give you practical tips for the writing regarding time management now. But

She was stuck at 6.5, like a lot of students are. And I said, look, just forget about the time requirement right now. We're going to focus on the basics, building a basic essay. Then we're going to focus on making a band seven essay. And then once we've got that under control, we're going to start doing it again and again until we can do it under 40 minutes. But for the first time,

stage of your preparation, forget about time management and just get it right first. Just get it right. Get the basics in place. Then learn the more advanced skills like the vocabulary and some other skills I'm going to share in a minute.

And then the last thing you want to do is focus on your time management. Now, of course, this is incredibly more difficult if you've got your exam coming up in six days. That's why I always suggest like a month, bare minimum, bare minimum to prepare. Right then, next skill. Once you've got these basic skills in place, you need to master the skill of hedging because

The amount of essays I see where we have a sentence like traffic jams is an issue or traffic management is an issue for all cities or traffic jams and traffic issues are issues for cities in 2025, 2024, whatever. However,

This isn't true and this is what the examiners will pick you up on because what you're saying there is you've just said all cities in the world have a traffic management issue and it's probably not true so this is why we have to say most cities in the world okay or the vast majority of the cities in the world have a traffic issue in 2024 or 2025 okay

This is called hedging and it comes from the phrase hedging your bets, which is an old English phrase, but it just means not committing 100% because if when you commit 100%, you're making a sweeping generalization, which is just not done in academia. And at the end of the day, we are writing an academic essay.

Again, when we're proposing solutions or when we're proposing causes, we say the most likely cause of this issue. We can't say the cause of this issue is CAS because it might not be CAS in all of the cases. It could be

Tiny roads. It could be roadworks. So this is why we say in most cases the issue might be caused by cars. Or the issue could be caused by excessive roadworks in cities. Next one. Ideas, generation, selection and development. There's two types of students. One type of student sees an essay question and does not know what to do.

does not have any ideas their mind goes blank the second type of student has an explosion of ideas

If you are the first type of student with no ideas, then you need to start reading bbc.co.uk every morning or bbc.com or CNN and just start filling your head up with some of the major issues in the world. And the IELTS vocabulary topics, the podcasts that we do about the IELTS vocabulary are

insanely fast way to get ideas on a certain topic and we go very specific I've been recording some about juvenile crime about globalization about telemedicine about gender equality listen to that take notes and you'll get ideas you'll get positions and then it's a case of developing those positions next for the student who gets an explosion of ideas then

I recommend using a system where at the beginning of your essay writing process, you generate your ideas and you select the best. Some tutors with no experience or no ideas, no experience about preparing students, they don't brainstorm. But of course, you don't spend 15 minutes brainstorming ideas. You spend maybe one minute, two minutes,

and get there and choose the ideas that are easiest to explain. And the more you do this, the faster it gets. So in the exam, you can usually get it down to about 30 seconds. You review your ideas and then you review and you choose, you select the easiest idea to explain and develop.

As I've said before, the IELTS exam is a language exam. It's not a test of intelligence or the quality of your ideas. It's a test of communication. It's language. So we're going to develop the easiest idea to develop. Next, you need a system for tackling writing task two. What do I mean by this? Well, let's just apply the AI essay checker. Okay, you write an essay.

and then you review it in the AISA checker and what I always do with my students is we break it down into smaller components and this helps with the overwhelm

you know, and it just makes it more manageable. So, back to writing task two. We might see on the essay checker we've got a lack of complex sentences. We've got, we don't have enough complex sentences. So what do we do? We can go and listen to a podcast by Ben Worthington, for example.

about complex sentences. Write those sentences down, start playing with those sentences and then do another essay or even better, write the same essay now with your complex sentences.

Repeat this until we've got the issue of complex sentences sorted. And then we might move on to the next issue, which the AI Essay Checker might highlight for us, which could be vocabulary. And this is a bit faster to improve because you get suggestions when you're using the AI Essay Checker at IELTS podcast, for example.

and we can apply this system for the reading test, for the listening test, for the writing test, for the speaking test, now that we've got the speaking simulator up and running as well. And doing this will just help you reduce anxiety. It'll help you move forward in a more controlled way. And one side note here, when you're doing this, I suggest journaling, making notes, writing a debrief after each session that you do. For example,

Worked on complex sentences. Going to spend two more hours on this and then work on vocabulary. So the next time you go into to start studying for the IELTS, you can pick it up from your journal and you're like, OK, it's here. Here are the links to the last essay I can review and I can get I can start being productive in my study time immediately or almost immediately rather than starting out at zero.

Next one: reading comprehension. Soon I will be releasing a tutorial about paraphrasing and we go into a lot of detail. But you want to be able to read a chunk of text and then extract the main ideas from this text.

One of the best ways of doing this is doing mock IELTS reading tests using the Cambridge IELTS books. I think these are the best because they're slightly harder than the original one, than the official tests.

only very slightly and you can also try different techniques you can reverse engineer the reading test by looking at the answers then looking at the questions and the same with the listening test which brings me on to the next point listening comprehension and in both cases to improve your reading and your listening comprehension a great way is immersion just making

every minute count so you're waiting for a bus or you're in your car and you're listening and it's it can be exhausting I fully understand it can be exhausting actively reading or actively listening so just give yourself you know room to switch off sometimes but just keep the immersion going just keep

the total amount of time you spend in the English language as high as possible and the best way I know to do this is just making use of your downtime like I said a few seconds ago such as you're on the train you're on the bus you're in the car you're cooking and you could be listening to Mr Ben Worthington for example the next point I want to mention is

Confidence in speaking. You're not going to get higher than a band seven without confidence. Now, as I said right at the beginning, any tutor can say, oh, you need this. They can say what you need. But the real decent tutors, in my honest opinion, are those who tell you how you can achieve what they say you need. So with confidence,

And this goes beyond confidence just for the exam because it's going to be impossible to be confident in the exam if you still struggle with face-to-face interactions. What usually happens with a lot of students is that they say, "Oh, I can speak with my friends all day in English, but when it comes to the exam, I fall to bits."

Because this is such a common problem, we developed the IELTS Speaking Simulator so you can take test after test after test, full 12-15 minute exams online. Your answers get transcribed and then we analyze the transcription and we give you feedback and it's all automated.

So you could do four tests an hour. You could do 12 tests every three hours. And how does this help you? It helps you in two ways. Number one, you're going to get familiar with the exam. And number two, you are going to get familiar with the topics on the exam.

You're going to get familiar with how long two minutes feels like for the cue card. And most importantly, you're going to get that feedback. So you're going to be able to pinpoint accurately where you're losing points. Is it repetition? Is it vocabulary? Is it a lack of fluency? And just getting this feedback and working on those specific errors is going to help you.

And there are some other confidence building techniques you can do. And these might sound a little bit woo-woo, but they cost nothing to try. So you can do breathing exercises. You can just jump onto YouTube, try the breathing exercises. You can do visualization exercises where you visualize yourself having a successful exam.

you can start talking a little bit louder so you appear confident. And there's this phrase in the UK and the US, fake it until you make it.

you know you do enough practice tests at a louder voice it's going to sound weird at first but if you do enough soon it'll start becoming the norm another way you can improve your confidence is just by speaking a little bit slower this will give you more time to compose your answers and just like we said at the beginning beginning of the tutorial at first

Well, it comes down to breaking it down into small components. So you can practice speaking slower. You can practice speaking louder. Don't try and do them all at once though because it gets a little bit overwhelming. Another final technique is paraphrasing a question. So for the examiner, if the examiner says, imagine we're in part three, the examiner says,

"Do you think the elderly are being well looked after in your country?" And what we do is we reflect pretty much what we hear in the interrogative form, but we reflect it in the affirmative form and we say, "Yes, I do believe the elderly are being well looked after in my country and this is because..." And then after we've reflected it in the first sentence,

we say this is because in the second then we give an example and then we go back right to the beginning and we say

And that's why I believe the elderly are correctly looked after in my country. And this sounds robotic. It sounds very structured at first. But the idea is you use it numerous times until it starts becoming automatic. And just having that framework there will help you boost your confidence. Now, the final skill you undoubtedly definitely need is

for getting a band seven or higher in the IELTS exam is focus and concentration. If you have one of these minds that I think it's called a monkey mind where you just bounce all over the place and you really struggle for concentration, you need to figure out how to do this. Now, personally, I have struggled with this as well.

What I find before I sit down to do a working session, I might do a meditation. I might do a breathing exercise. Wim Hof method on YouTube works perfectly for me. I find if I do lots of sports and eat healthy, my concentration goes through the roof. But if I'm eating garbage, drinking Dr. Pepper or whatever, I have a really brutal time trying to focus.

And you need every little help you can get. And having a high level of concentration and a high level of focus or the ability to focus can only help you, especially in the reading and the listening exams. That's it for me today. I'm wishing you a beautiful day and good luck with your IELTS exam. You will get there.

it's just a case of putting in the time getting organized being disciplined with your preparation time and also using tools using tools to improve it's 2024 now there we've got essay checking tools at ieltspodcast.com we've got the speaking simulator

There's never been a better time to prepare for the exam. So good luck in your exam. Thank you for watching or listening and have a beautiful day. Cheers.