Hi there and welcome to Australia.

As an experienced teacher of both GE and English for Academic Purposes and as an IELTS examiner I am happy to have this opportunity to pass on some tips and advice which I hope you will find useful in your studies.

I thought I would start with some general advice and information on the IELTS exam, in future articles I will look in more detail at the various parts of the exam and some of the common problems students have and the common mistakes that they make! So let’s get started….

IELTS is the exam that many international students need to do to get into university. IELTS is also the exam for many people wishing to obtain permanent residency in Australia.

The IELTS exam consists of 4 parts:

Listening
Reading
Writing
Speaking

The Academic exam contains harder Reading and Writing sections. The Listening and Speaking exams are the same for both General and Academic students and so are much harder for General students.

The IELTS Listening Exam
This is often a difficult part of the exam for many non-native speakers. To improve your listening skills you have to listen! Which means listening to people speak English, listening to talkback radio, listening to the TV, listening to movies, any opportunity you get. There is not a lot a teacher can do to help you improve your listening skills except give you listenings to do, give dictation or help you with your pronunciation. The rest is up to you!

The IELTS Reading Exam
Reading skills can be improved by doing a LOT of reading and grammar exercises. There are some IELTS tips you can learn to slightly improve your reading score and we will look at these in the future. More specifically you need to work on building your vocabulary.

The IELTS Writing Exam
Writing! In my experience this is the skill that non-native speakers find the most difficult. Am I right? I have a lot of tips and advice on this one to help you improve your letter writing skills (General IELTS Writing) as well as to improve your interpretation of graphs and charts (Academic IELTS Writing). We will focus on the Academic Writing Skills.

The IELTS Speaking Exam
PRACTICE. PRACTICE. PRACTICE. Preferably with a native speaker. Again I have a few tips and some advice that may help.

I very much hope you enjoy your studies at the schools, colleges and universities here in Australia.

Until next time, have a very Happy Christmas!

Your online teacher!