An Interview with an IELTS writing examiner (Part 2)
This is our second interview with an IELTS writing examiner. The first one can be found here https://upmyielts.com/an-interview-with-an-ielts-writing-examiner/ We asked members in our private Facebook group IELTS writing and speaking support (Feel free to join) for questions and these are the questions that we got. A lot of them were similar to the previous interview, but a lot were new. If you have any more questions, you can post them in the comments here and we will answer them for you. What mistakes...
Did you get 6 in speaking and writing and need 7? This is what you can do.
This is what happened to one of the members in our private Facebook group (Feel free to join!) This person got in touch and asked this question I really need IELTS help. I got 6 in speaking and writing and I need 7. What can I do? One of the IELTS examiners working here answered this one This happens a lot. At upmyielts, we can generally increase your speaking/writing score by 1 Band score. However, it depends on certain things. For some you, your...
What are the most common IELTS writing and speaking topics?
So, this question came from a member of our private Facebook group (Feel free to join) We asked the IELTS speaking and writing examiners that work at upmyielts.com and this is the list they came up with. This is not all the topics, but it is the most common 10 that they could think of. THE TOP 10 IELTS SPEAKING/WRITING TOPICS Health Environment Education Development Globalisation Public Transport Criminal Justice Youth Crime Technology Government Spending So, how can you prepare for these when...
How to write a topic sentence in IELTS writing
This was a question from a member of our private Facebook group (Feel free to join. You can talk to IELTS examiners there) First, let's look at what a topic sentence is. A topic sentence is just the main idea of your body paragraph and is generally the first sentence. You only need 2 topic sentences as you only need to write 2 body paragraphs. Let’s look at an example question like “Learning a foreign language in primary school is more beneficial than in...
The IELTS writing criteria and what you need to know
This is a good question from an IELTS teacher in India who is in our private Facebook group (feel free to join). I am an IELTS teacher from India at an academy in Mumbai. What is the most important part of IELTS writing criteria? What should I help my students work on? One of the upmyielts IELTS examiners answered it. Without doubt, Task Achievement. Let’s look at why. Your English level is basically marked by your Coherence, Lexical and Grammar score but Task Achievement...
Advanced IELTS vocabulary for your writing and speaking
This blog post comes from a question we received in our private Facebook group IELTS speaking and writing support. Feel free to join. The question was "Can you give me some advanced vocabulary for IELTS writing?" One of the examiners had this to say. No. Stop. Learning from word lists is the worst way to learn a language, especially for IELTS. Why? Because English is very very highly collocated. You cannot just interchange words for others in English as it will more than likely...
How do I get a higher score in IELTS writing?
We received this question from a member of our private Facebook group. Feel free to join - You can ask any questions you have about IELTS there. To answer the question, you get a good IELTS writing score by practising. IELTS writing is marked to a very strict criteria and you need to tick the boxes to get to a certain level of writing. Most people seem to need Band 7.0 and to get Band 7.0 in IELTS writing, the majority of...
How to write an IELTS Task 1 – Process
Writing a process in Task 1 generally has the lowest word count so don’t worry if you only hit 150 words. There isn't really very much to say about them usually. So, to start with, you need to introduce what the process is about; usually it is making something, like how to make cut diamonds/electricity/cement etc. So, you need to state what the process is showing and then you need some kind of overview. The overview may be that the process takes...