IELTS preparation involves understanding the test format, how it is marked and then making a plan to achieve your desired score. In order to do this, you will need to improve your English, practice test skills and join a preparation course to check your progress before you register.

Improve Your General Level Of English - IELTS is essentially an English language test, therefore, the higher your level of English, the better your score should be. Simply studying IELTS skills and doing practice tests will not be enough if your level of English is not high enough. As indicated above, this is probably the slowest part of your preparation. Most English schools recommend at least 6 months to improve a student’s level of English by the equivalent of 0.5- 1 band score.

Perfect Your Test Skills- There are four parts to the IELTS test- Writing, Speaking, Reading and Listening. Each of these parts has many different possible questions and each of them has a specific skill that you need to acquire. For example, academic students can expect to see one of seven different types of question in Task 1 Writing. Each of these different types of question requires differing skills. The Listening and Reading tests have over 10 different types of questions each. Again, all of these questions requires a different strategy and set of skills The majority of your IELTS preparation should be spent learning these skills and when these are combined with a high level of English it should result in a high score. Learning these skills does not take as much time as learning the language itself, but does take a significant amount of time. Most schools recommend spending 2-3 months learning these skills.

Know How The Test Is Marked - The fastest and most effective way to improve your score is knowing exactly what the examiners want and giving it to them. Most of my teachings are based on this principle. However, you can’t simply learn this and get a high score; they should be combined with improving your level of English and test skills. Below we will look at the official marking criteria to help us understand what the examiner wants.

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