How to prepare for IELTS: 5 things you’re doing wrong

Hello and welcome to this article on 5 things you’re doing wrong when you prepare for your IELTS test. How to prepare for IELTS is a question that lots of students think about. Here, we look at 5 things that students often do that can negatively affect how well they prepare for their IELTS test.

As you read, think about whether you agree with our list. What things do you do that may not be helping you as you prepare?

1. Focusing too much on certain skills

Lots of students only focus on certain skills. For example, they may spend all their time preparing for reading and listening and forget to spend enough time on writing and speaking. This is often because they do not have anyone to practice with or to check their work.

Make sure that you spend equal amounts of time on all four skills, so that you improve all of them. Remember, IELTS tests your skills individually, but when you use language in real life, you often use skills together.

For example, you usually read things to help you write an essay for university or a report at work. When you send emails or text messages, you often have to read something first and then reply. 

ith speaking, you rarely just talk. Usually you have a conversation, and that requires you to have good listening skills as well. As you prepare, try to bring the skills together, so that you’re practicing several skills at the same time.

2. Memorising

A very common issue is memorising. Memorising works really well if you are trying to learn dates for a history test or a maths formula. It is not such a good idea when thinking about how to prepare for IELTS. This is because memorising is not a very good way to learn a language.

Whether students memorise long lists of words or set paragraph structures. Languages are not a set of unchanging knowledge. Rather, a language is a practical, applied skill. This means that you need to be able to use your language in lots of different situations to meet different goals.

The problem with memorising lots of words is that afterwards, you often don’t know how or when to use them. In speaking, this can even cause serious problems with fluency and pronunciation, because you are trying to remember vocabulary at the same time as producing a sentence. As a result, you pause more often, and you intonation becomes very flat. 

In writing, often people forget to use the vocabulary that they memorised because it is not part of their active memory. Worse still, sometimes they do use it, but it isn’t correctly used or appropriate.

Memorising also causes problems when students try to remember words in English and their translations in their first language. This encourages them to translate their ideas as they think from their native language to English. As a result, their grammar can get really bad because they are using English words with their native grammar.

This problem becomes worse as they answer more difficult questions, because more their brain power is trying to form ideas and find and translate vocabulary, so grammar goes out the window!

3. Only focusing on grammar and vocabulary

Speaking of grammar and vocabulary, another problem that students have is only focusing on these two technical language skills. Remember, speaking and writing are both scored according to four different criteria. In speaking, you also need to consider ‘fluency and coherence’ and ‘pronunciation’.

In writing, there are marks for ‘coherence and cohesion’ and ‘task achievement’. If all of the time you give yourself for improving speaking and writing is spent learning grammar and vocabulary, you are only actually spending your time learning half of the skills that you need to do well in these two parts of the test!

Try to balance your practice a bit more. Sometimes, you will practice grammar and vocabulary. However, you should also practice essay planning, analysing questions and linking ideas together for writing.

For speaking, sometimes you should decide to practice fluency and pronunciation. When you do this, you won’t worry so much about using lots of high-level vocabulary or getting perfect grammar. You will practice thinking in English and speaking at the same time, focusing on things like answering questions quickly, speaking speed, grouping words together and improving intonation.

4. Not getting training

There are lots of materials to prepare for IELTS online and students often start with free online materials when they are deciding how to prepare for IELTS. They can be found on websites like YouTube, Facebook, Reddit or others. For some people, these materials will be enough to help them get the score they need. However, these people are in the small minority, as they tend to be native speakers or people with very high levels of English who only need to learn the test structure and requirements.

Their grammar, vocabulary, essay planning, fluency, and all the other skills tested in IELTS are already at a native or near-native level. I even know native speakers who have had to do IELTS tests for immigration purposes when they go to Australia, and most of them spent a few weeks getting formal training! One person who should easily have scored band 7 for speaking and writing did not prepare for the test. She only got a 5.5 her speaking and 6.0 in writing because she didn’t know what she needed to do to score well!

If your first language isn’t English, you shouldn’t rely on free materials. You won’t get the training and feedback you need to perform well in your writing and speaking. Make sure you get a teacher, even if you do most of your preparation on your own, because they can give you really valuable insights that is personal to you and your English ability. This is something that you just can’t get from watching YouTube videos and reading forums.

5. Getting the wrong training

The last mistake people make when they’re preparing for their IELTS test is getting the wrong training. There are lots of schools and tutors around who will say or do anything to get your business. Very often, they don’t actually understand the test, or their English isn’t good enough to help you prepare properly..

Other trainers will promise that you can go from band 5 to band 7 after their two week course. This is very unlikely, unless you are at a near-native level. Be very careful of people who tell you that they have all the solutions to improve in only a very short time. It can take months of hard work to improve from band 6 to band 7, especially for speaking and writing.

Some teachers have worse English than their students. Often, they rely on low level students, and have no problem with teaching you the wrong things so long as you pay them! I have heard many stories from people whose writing corrections didn’t actually correct their writing and gave them bad advice.. One student told me about a general training letter correction about a complaint. The feedback started by saying that she should write ‘I am pleased to inform you that my laptop is broken’. This is obviously wrong. Bad advice is worse than no advice, so she didn’t even finish reading the feedback!

Even students going the free route and preparing by watching YouTube videos frequently use bad materials. They look for videos of band 8 or band 9 speakers and watch everything they can find. This may help your listening slightly, but not enough to make it worth the time you spend.

Make sure that the materials you use are appropriate for your goal and level. There is no point watching ten IELTS speaking tests which (according to the video title) got band 9 if you don’t know why they got a band 9 and why you are only scoring band 6

 Very often, these videos don’t even follow the actual speaking test format, and the speaker in them isn’t actually a band 9 speaker (at least based on their recorded test!) The makers of these videos know that very few people who watch them will understand that, so they have no problem with making doubtful claims to get more views and sell their courses!