Know Your Ielts (better Than You know Yourself)
Sun Tzu, Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher, once said “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles”. Wise advice, and believe it or not it goes for IELTS, Cambridge or pretty much any English exam you are planning to take as well!
Once of the biggest difficulties I see for my students is a lack of knowledge of the actual exams themselves, the structure and how they are judged by the examiner. It is a noble ambition to go into a speaking exam with the aim of “speaking well”, but the difficulty comes when one realises that that ambition is not really anchored to anything. Students can go into an exam with great fluency, flowing idiomatic language and still not come out anything close to the grade they are capable of?
Why is that? It comes down to the categories that examiners have to use in the grading of speaking and writing exams, and whether or not a student actually fulfils the requirements of these categories.
For IELTS, the speaking criteria are Fluency and Coherence, Lexical resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy and Pronunciation (a breakdown of which can be found here). Roughly speaking, these fall into the range of English speaking skills everyone is used to such as vocabulary and correct grammar, but there is a large degree of nuance to it. For example, minimal hesitation and full answers to questions are vitally important in the Fluency and Coherence section, but these may not be intuitive at first.
After all, if someone asks you “What do you like about your home town?” in a real conversation, one might be tempted to answer something like “It’s small and it has a nice beach” rather than, “It’s a homely, comfortable spot with a great seafront where people gather on the beach during the summer to have a relaxing time and enjoy swimming and socialising with their friends”. The second answer though, in terms of a speaking exam, has just earned itself a whole lot of extra credit by fully extending the answer and throwing in a whole lot of appropriate Lexical Resource for good measure.
This is why I always tell my students how important it is to study what the examiner actually wants and by the time the big day arrives when they sit down for their exams, they should almost be able to recite the band descriptors off by heart. Once you know not just what a good answer seems like, but what is a great answer according to the exam criteria, the whole game changes and suddenly you can study with a lot more focus on your goals in a way that puts focus on actually achieving them.
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