Road to IELTS 7+ | How to prepare for IELTS on your own.
Assalomu aleykum dear brothers and sisters. In this article, I'm going to show you how to do self-study to prepare for IELTS and share some useful learning techniques that helped me to improve my score from 5.5 to 7. I studied in all courses that I’m sharing now, which means I’m recommending you only tested ways of preparing.
Prerequisite knowledge:
This article is mainly aimed for people, who has a good understanding of listening, reading and writing, and also can express themselves in English. In other words, the recources that I'm going to share is suggested for individuals whose level is (at least) band 5+. If you don't have any idea about the IELTS exam and you only know grammar, I would recommend you to read books called "Mindset for IELTS" (Download).
Alright, let's get started:) At the end of the article, I put some links to practice books and some useful materials.
Listening
For improving your listening skills, I think the best way to improve it - is listening more English, especially podcasts. Podcasts can be really helpful for your IELTS preparation and you can watch this video to know about how you can get benefits from IELTS.
The most important thing is you need to listen them every single day, constantly.
And also I recommend you to listen podcasts on the topic that you’re interested in. Otherwise, this can become boring activity for you, and have a little impact on your progression. Personally, I used to listen to podcasts for an hour (at least) every single day and this led to huge improvement on my listening. Here are my favourite podcasts:
Android app to find&listen podcasts:
https://t.me/Powerful_IELTS/1416
Reading
For reading, you have to read A LOT in English. This can be articles, news or books. The main point is – you need to enjoy while you’re reading, so pick an article or book on the topic that you have an interest for. In my view, reading scientific articles is the best option you have, because IELTS reading passages are taken from scientific articles. So I recommend you to read scientific magazines such as New Scientist, Scientific American or The Economist. (I put a link to download them at the end of the article).
And also, another vital thing is you need to do good analysis of the test whenever you practice. When you do some tests, don’t move to the next practice test until you can explain all the questions and answers to anyone (where answers are found, why this answer is correct why this one is incorrect). It was quarantine when I was preparing for IELTS and we had a daily reading practice every day for 22 days. It was my responsibility to explain all my group mates where the answers found and why they are correct. Although my reading was not too good at the beginning, explaining others helped me a lot and as I noticed, my reading score has been improved from 6.5 to 8+ in a short time. If you don’t have anyone to explain, you can write the explanations on the paper. Believe me, it helps you a lot.
Your explanations should be something like this:
Also, reading news on different topics helps you to improve your reading comprehension and your knowledge on different topics. So, get used to reading the news every single day and you can use this app for that:
https://t.me/Powerful_IELTS/1417
Writing
For writing, there are many useful courses and books.
If you get stuck to find ideas, Simon’s book is the solution :)
Chris Pell – Task 1 course
https://t.me/Powerful_IELTS/244
Mastering - IELTS Writing Task 1 (AC) by Matt
https://t.me/ielts_essential_material/47
Mastering - Writing Task 1 (AC) (Band 9 Answers) by Matt (SUPER HELPFUL!) https://t.me/ielts_essential_material/1588
Simon – Ideas for IELTS writing (book):
https://t.me/Powerful_IELTS/1414
Simon – IELTS Writing Task 2 course (my favourite one)
https://t.me/Powerful_IELTS/295
Simon – band 9 essays book (Analyzing essays really helps you to impove your writing) https://t.me/Powerful_IELTS/1421
Mastering - IELTS Writing Task 2 (Band 9 Answers) by matt (this course also helped me a lot, definitely watch it)
https://t.me/ielts_essential_material/1511
Speaking
For speaking, here are the sources that I find really helpful
Keith’s YouTube channel about Speaking (he is number one online speaking teacher for me) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiVm8XcbwS8-pcDEa5lFXIA
IELTS Assistant App (it provides you with many questions on different topics that you may get on the exam. In fact, I got exactly same questions in the exam.) https://t.me/Powerful_IELTS/1415 Also try to improve your speaking by watching english movies and imitating them.
Practice books
Cambridge practice books:
https://t.me/IELTS_Cam2020
I also compiled tests from cambridge books, and made books for listening and reading as well. These are – “40 IELTS Listening Tests (Section based – 4 books)”, “40 IELTS Reading Tests (Passage based – 4 books)” . Many people told me that these books helped them to improve their skills a lot, but surprisingly, I have not used my books yet, so I don’t know are they helpful or not.
📕40 IELTS LISTENING TESTS - SECTION BASED:
https://t.me/Powerful_IELTS/1361
📙40 IELTS READING TESTS – PASSAGE BASED:
https://t.me/Powerful_IELTS/1353
In summary, here is road-map for self-study to IELTS:
You can find and download the latest issues of New Scientist magazine in this website:
http://scientificmagazines.top/tag/new-scientist/
I also recommend you to watch a video about my exam experience
That’s all, thanks for your attention. Accept my apologies for all my grammar mistakes😅 If you liked the article, don’t forget to share it and subscribe to my IELTS telegram channel: https://t.me/Powerful_IELTS