1. Listening:
-Reviewing materials: The set of 8 Cambridge books. All documents are good as long as you practice listening regularly every day.
- During the exam:
+ Take time to re-read the question.
+ Take note: This is probably the most important part, not everyone can realize its importance to make it right. These are the basic steps of taking note:
Step1: Read and analyze the question: If that is the question of filling the missing words in the blanks (form, note, table, flow-chart, summary and sentence completion, etc), it is necessary to determine the type of information required to fill in the blanks, how many characters they are (read instruction carefully), try to anticipate the answers; for other types (multiple choice, matching, plan / map / diagram Labelling, short-answer questions), we need to read the question minutely, underline the keywords, analyze them (synonyms, equivalent terms, ..), analyze the sentence structures (meanings, equivalent phrases). The keywords and the structures that we underline will help us concentrate when listening to a long text.
Step 2: Please RECORD ALL what you do in the first step on the question booklet. Many people just underline and sign without notes, because they think that their superior memory will help to query notes when necessary; you should just use superior brain power for listening instead of remembering the notes. This action has several benefits:
1) As you note, you will find more words and your psychology to do the exam will be better:
2) It is easy to concentrate on a relatively long listening text.
Finally: When transferring, remember to write all in uppercase, this will make it easier to check your spelling, and avoid the capitalization errors (eg: scorers can criticize us for not using capitalized name, place, month, event, etc)
2. Reading:
- Reviewing materials: The set of 8 Cambridge books. All documents are good as long as you practice reading regularly every day.
- During the exam:
+Pre- reading the text: You can use skimming techniques, or if you read fast, keep reading the whole text at once, after each paragraph you should note next to it its main idea (write quickly, don’t need to write in full sentences, just make important phrases expressing the general idea of the paragraph).
+Reading the question: The question types include multiple choice, Identifying information (True / False / Not Given), Identifying the writer's views / claims (Yes / No / Not Given), matching information, /headings/, features/, sentence endings, sentence/, summary/, note/, table/, flowchart, /diagram label completion, short-answer questions presented.
* For the types of completion, we can do the same as the listening one, look into the blank, determine type of information needed to fill, make a guess (if possible), then go back to reading text, read fast to look for the section expressing that idea (scanning) and you will find out the answers if you are careful and patient enough. To be quicker, you need to do the initial skimming technique carefully.
* For multiple choice and short-answer question, read the question minutely, underline the keywords, analyze them (meanings, synonyms, equivalent terms, etc), analyze the sentence structures (meanings, equivalent phrase). Then back to the text, use scanning technique to look for the section expressing that idea
*The matching one is also similar to two types above, mainly based on underlining, analyzing keywords and scanning.
*The most "Difficult" one is certainly True/ False / Not Given and Yes / No / Not Given. Generally, I am not confident in this type a lot; hence, I would like to recommend the experiences that I find them quite "reasonable". Here is the verbatim experience from one of my friend, GabrielChan:
They use synonyms in the questions to make references hard to find, so it is similar to a vocabulary test. Most of the time, you only need to find one sentence. They change just one detail in the question to make it false or NG. If that detail is not possible due to the information in the ref sentence, the question is false. If you cannot prove it wrong then it's NG. There are also harder questions that require you to find two sentences in the same paragraph.
[You can contact Gabriel Chan for more experience. He also got 8 for his IELTS test. Besides, he nearly got 10 in all of my reading tests for business classes]
Bui Phuong Thao also gave me a different experience when having difficulty in determining between False and Not Given or No and Not Given:
- When you have already found the original sentence in the text (called the reference sentence) and still not identified the statement is False or Not Given, try adding NOT in the statement sentence, if its meaning is appropriate to the reference sentence, that will be FALSE , and if its meaning is still different from the reference one even being added NOT, that statement will be NOT GIVEN
3. Writing:
-Reviewing materials: I recommend the book ACADEMIC WRITING PRACTICEFOR of Sam McCarter IELTS (Note: Nguyen Thanh Yen). This book provides you with the vocabulary and structures that are necessary for the task, apparently it also has way to analyze data for task 1. Beginners can learn from the templates in the book and advancers who have got used to write should not learn available templates because of not getting high mark.
- During the exam:
Focusing on task 2 first as it accounts for more points:
Writing Task 2 includes 3 main types: Agree-disagree: Select 1 in 2 and then giving a reason, Discussion: Discuss the idea shown in the topic then give individual statements, Problem-Solution: Find a solution to the issues stated in the topic.
- An essay should have Introduction, Body and Conclusion.
Introduction includes a sentence introducing the topic, 1-2 sentences paraphrase the topic, and one leads to the body, eg: This essay will discuss the two ideas …
Body part should have at least two paragraphs. After finishing the first paragraph, you should count the number of words writen to see how many words should be written in the second one. IELTS scorer checks the number of words quite strictly.
Next is Conclusion, give your final statement and if possible, recommend solutions (for all Agree-disagree, and Discussion).
During the exam, you should use the structures: passive sentence, Relative Clause (the longer the better), the inversion, ... Normally, before intending to write an Active Voice sentence, let see whether it can be Passive Voice or not. Do not use the simple sentence and try to replace simple words with more unfamiliar words (called academic word).
1 tip for task 2 is that you should spend a little bit of time on making an outline, which helps to control the content and write a more coherently
- REMEMBER to use more strange sentence structures and words
- REMEMBER to use conjunctions between sentences
- REMEMBER to count words, the score can be lower if there are not enough words
- DO NOT write too long due to lack of time and low mark.
In Task 1, the main task is to get information, that is, looking at the chart, we need to analyze this information into groups to write about them. Don’t need to write about all of the data; just choose the remarkable one. Try to compare those data with the remaining ones to show relationships.
There are many ways to group; probably the easiest one is to group based on types of chart: normally, it will have pie chart, bar, graphs. You can refer “Writing IELTS practise” of Mrs. Thanh Yen, generally you don’t need to learn pattern in it, just pay attention to vocabulary used to describe the chart (up or down, regular, comparative).
Task 1 doing- process is:
- The opening paragraph needs to let people know what these charts mention about (Paraphrase topic), do not need an introduction at all, just go straight to the point.
- The next section (usually 2 paragraphs), each paragraph describes one group information.
- Don’t need to conclude.
Writing test lasts 1 hour but usually after task 2 has done, we just have only 15 minutes to do task 1(read the question, understand problem, analyze problems, write).
Do not concentrate on showing your fund of vocabulary too much because idea, structure, task fulfillment also occupy many points. When reading the requirement of the question, you need to handle the situation quickly.
Speaking:
- Reviewing materials: my tip is to watch films again and again (especially the series of Disney Channel, and imitate the characters to speak ^^). This way does not take too much time, about over 1 year the speaking ability will be improved
- Speaking includes 3 tasks:
Task 1: answer personal questions, in general it is easy, do not speak too short.
Task 2: follow the main points of the topic, take note, though you do not look at the note when speaking, it helps you to organize the points and be confident. When mentioning the final main points, try to lengthen it if it is still not out of time. Do not end soon, if it does not matter if you are speaking and judges interrupts , but if you finish too soon, it will not be fine (Judges will sit to staring at you until the end of time: v)
Task 3: This is a general question with the same topic with Task 2 but in this section, you should not talk about yourselves, try to generalize to a social problem. That is instead of using "I", it should be changed into "people". For example, they ask: do you think change is good? Do not say: Change allows me to do ... => Change provides people with more opportunities…
With a question, you should answer in 4-5 sentences
According to Doan Thanh Phuong’s introduction, you can also visit http://ielts-simon.com/ to learn more experience and technical advice for speaking .I also see that she has lots of great methods for not only speaking but also other skills. "
Hopefully, this post can be useful for you!
Translated by Bui Thi Chi
Source: https://www.facebook.com/thuvienbookaholic/posts/372444246292083?__mref=message_bubble
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