The IELTS test is taken in order to evaluate an individual’s fluency and competency in the English language. It is required by people who have to immigrate to a country where English happens to be the native language.
There are four different phases or parts in the IELTS test. The purpose of the different phases is to determine the competency of the candidate in different activities such as speaking, writing, listening, and reading.
Failing an IELTS test can come with different types of consequences. Should you fail your test, you can end up having your immigration plans getting put to a stop, or you could end up having your college/varsity application rejected.
Tips to Perform Well in Your IELTS Test
In this post, we are going to be looking at some tips that you can follow to ace your IELTS test. Since the text consists of different parts and phases, we will try and enumerate such tips that can be beneficial in all of them.
Work on Perfecting Your Grammatical Understanding
This is a tip that can help you in all four parts of the IELTS test, be it listening, reading, writing, or speaking. If you have the grammatical rules all down, you will be able to listen more effectively, and you will be able to understand the provided text without a lot of confusion.
On the other hand, when it comes to reading, knowing the grammatical rules and regulations will help you understand the written content easily. The same goes for speaking and writing. You will be able to show your competency in English if you don’t make any mistakes verbally or in the written content itself.
Now, saying “work on perfecting your grammatical understanding” is a bit general, and it may sound a little overwhelming. You could be wondering, “Where do I start?”
Here are some good tips that you can follow in this regard:
- Learn about some of the common grammatical mistakes that people make and also find out how you can avoid them
- Have someone look at your content and point out the issues that you are prone to make consistently. You can also use an online grammar checker for this same purpose. Once you find out the errors that you make more than the others, you can work on improving them.
Work on Your Vocabulary
If you use some nice and effective words during the writing and speaking parts of the IELTS test, you will be able to score some good marks.
Having a nice trove of words and phrases at hand can help you look more like an expert and a native speaker. If you keep on using the same words over and over again, or if you don’t use the right words for the situation, you’ll probably come off as a rookie.
Here are some tips that you can work on to improve your vocabulary:
- Read professionally-written content. By reading content that contains diverse wording and vocabulary, you will be able to build your own. Reading content is a good technique in this regard since it exposes you not only to the words themselves but also to their correct contextual usage.
- You can also directly read a thesaurus or a dictionary to learn new words. This method is, as we said, direct, and it requires a lot of attention (and retention).
- Using an online word changer can also be a great way to improve vocabulary. A word-changing tool (AKA paraphrasing tool) can swap the existing words in the provided content and substitute them with suitable alternatives. This gimmick can help you in learning new words while simultaneously understanding their correct contextual application.
Make a Habit of Reading
This is, by the way, something other than the reading stuff we’ve mentioned in the heading above. While the purpose of the reading exercise mentioned above is to build vocabulary, here, we refer to reading as a practice for the “Reading” phase in the IELTS test.
When we talk about building a reading habit, our purpose is not to encourage the inculcation of reading speed. While reading fast is good, and it can be useful in the IELTS test, you also have to focus on your reading comprehension.
Reading something fast alone won’t help. Reading something and understanding it alone won’t help. Reading something fast and understanding it will help.
Ideally, for this purpose, you should engage in a reading exercise that involves you reading a certain piece of text and then answering questions based on it.
Practice Speaking Fluently
In the IELTS test, there is a part that is made to test the ability of the candidate to speak English fluently. If you want to do well in that phase, you need to get your speaking skills down.
To practice your speaking skills, you can try out this simple exercise:
- Select and open a speech-to-text software
- Grab some content
- Speak the content and check if it appears correctly in the software
If the software struggles to correctly capture your voice, then it could indicate some deficiency in your speaking style or pronunciation, etc.
Conclusion
Taking an IELTS test is a big deal. You have to properly prepare yourself so that you pass with good marks. If you don’t know how you can start preparing for the test, try out the tips we’ve mentioned above.
