IELTS Results
- Listening 9
- Reading 8.5
- Writing 7
- Speaking 7.5
My IELTS Tips for Band 8
Good day, I wrote UKVI academic IELTS and got band score 8 overall.
First of all, I want to appreciate your efforts in making the whole exam process easy for me and others around the world, your lessons really helped a lot.
IELTS Writing
I’ll start off with my weaknesses. My weakest section was writing, I “hated” it with passion. I don’t enjoy any exam that requires me to write an essay, either short or long, and since this is unavoidable, I always try to find out alternatives/shortcut to the essay writing. Also, I had a very busy work schedule and would get home in the evenings, very tired to read or practice. This is where your tutorials came in, I found it easy to follow, and the way you presented your examples and explained how the essays were marked gave me some confidence in approaching it.
I’ll also say this was one section where I followed your instructions totally, especially in task 2, which I believe helped me to crawl to that 7.0 I got there. I downloaded the sample answer booklet and practiced with the little time I had as you suggested, which made me know the number of lines I needed to get to the required number of words.
The task 1 on the other hand was another issue. The only type of question I did not practice was what we were asked to describe, the maps/diagram description and comparison. I didn’t have enough time to go through all the types and had to select the ones I felt were high yield. This I believed translated to a poor task response and organization which dragged my score in writing down.
IELTS Speaking
The other section I dreaded was the speaking section, I have this phobia for oral examinations and tend to get nervous about it. Though I went through most of your tips on speaking, I didn’t practice by recording and evaluating my answers, and this affected me in the exam. I don’t think I started well because I was using “sir” for the examiner in the first few minutes and jumbling up my answers, but when I eventually settled in, things began to go smoothly. I believe that early period of nervousness caused me to lose some points, hence the 7.5 for speaking.
IELTS Listening and Reading
Now to my strong sections, the reading and listening. I love reading a lot and I’ve found IELTS reading passages a lot of fun to read. It provides lots of new information and interesting facts, and I even sometimes just read the passages without answering follow up questions. Despite this though, I didn’t want to take the exam a second time so I still went ahead and watched your video tutorials and followed all your instructions. I wrote my answers in capital letters for both sections, I also practised more of both sections than the writing and speaking, and I found it more convenient to read passages before answering questions.
I need to say here though that it was not all sweet for me during practice as I remembered a listening practice test I did where I scored 26. I just blacked out and lost focus while listening to the tape and missed a lot of answers, this jolted me up and made me realize that the exam was not going to be as simple as I thought.
Overall
To cap it all up, I’ll advice anyone preparing for the test to first if all identify a pattern that suits them, work well on perfecting it and do lots of practice questions. It also helps to simulate exam conditions as this goes a long way in calming the nerves on the day of exam. The most important advice though is to listen to Liz 100%. I listened to get 85% and got an overall score of 8, I wonder what would have happened if I had listened to her 100%.
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PS: you might be wondering how someone who hates writing was able to write all the above, well, it’s because I want to show appreciation to a wonderful teacher.
Message to Jubril: Thank you so much for sharing your tips and experience of the IELTS test. Very well done with your results 🙂 From Liz
