👀 HOW TO START IELTS PREPARATION?

Here is my guide as to how to start preparation when you have just decided to take IELTS and don't know what to start from! Find here books, tips, links, materials, planners and my advice.
Applies to beginners as well.

https://youtu.be/C1sU1c6r_2k

#videos #ielts
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#books #writing #ielts
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​​✒️ WRITING TASK 1 - BAND 9 (GENERAL)

This book has been written to provide the IELTS student with details on how to prepare and perform effectively on the written Task 1 of the IELTS General examination.

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⬆️ Download it above ⬆️

#books #writing #ielts

❓ WHAT'S NEW IN IELTS 2020

The IELTS test doesn't frequently change, however some alterations will come into effect from the 4th of January 2020 onwards. Let's find out what they are, how this affects test-takers' performance and what's the new preparation strategy!

https://youtu.be/yPn-YflxHUo

#videos #ielts
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#writing #books
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​​✒️ WRITING TASK 1 - BAND 9 (ACADEMIC)

This book has been written to provide the IELTS student with details on how to prepare and perform effectively on the written Task 1 portion of the IELTS Academic examination.

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⬆️ Dowload it above ⬆️

🔉 AUDIOBOOK: THE FOUR

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are the four most influential companies on the planet. Just about everyone thinks they know how they got there. Just about everyone is wrong.

Listen to the audiobook about the companies that have changed our lives and services of which we use every day:
🔉 https://yadi.sk/d/aJA7G30o3YBJmo

#listening #audiobook #books
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​​🚀 ROCKET SPEED IELTS PREP

The course is 100% online - don't miss your chance to level up your IELTS skills in 1 month only 🙌🏻

Join the intensive high speed IELTS course with lots of practice for all modules - Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking.

I will personally guide you during 4 weeks. 1 week = 2 blocks of information. One block - theory and practice for one of the modules, second block - efficient IELTS vocabulary.

Start on Monday, 20th of January, read more details, buy and join here - http://wsecommunity.com/rocketcourse

​​📚 CAMBRIDGE IELTS 14 ACADEMIC

Authentic examination papers from Cambridge publishing provide perfect practice because they are the closest mock tests could get to the real one. You will find 4 full IELTS tests with audio in this package. This one is for the Academic Module.

Download here - https://yadi.sk/d/8pQkv56R8vfgHA

#ielts #books
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👻 BODY LANGUAGE ON IELTS

I noticed that many students doubt whether body language, eye contact, confidence and face expression matter on IELTS Speaking. Let's discuss this together.

My arguments are the following:
1) You're assessed based on your fluency, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and structure of ideas. So, your body language is technically not taken into account when grading your performance.
2) Your speed is recorded, so when there is any confusion in your answer examiners will re-listen to it and won't see your body language, so again - it won't count in.
3) However, we naturally sound more fluent, persuading, our speech is more coherent and pleasant to listen to when we use appropriate body language - calm, positive, confident, welcoming.

So, the conclusion for me is that it is definitely beneficial to improve gestures, facial expressions and my tone of speaking - because they will inevitably influence the whole speech. I'd like to sound confident and relaxed, not tensed, anxious and shy.

What are your thoughts on this?

#discussion #ielts
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​​🚀 NEW ROCKET COURSE STREAM LAUNCH

We're starting off a new stream (13th!) of the Rocket Speed IELTS Prep course. The course was entirely developed by me to encompass working strategies and approaches to IELTS that I used to get 8.0 overall with self-preparation. Therefore, the materials I share on the course are exclusive and not available on any other of my platforms. The learning is quite intensive, so there is no time to relax.

I keep course groups relatively small - under 20 people - to cater to all of the students, provide high-quality guidance and reply fully to any comment/question/doubt. We work on all 4 IELTS modules + 3 blocks of advanced vocabulary for the test. The course is very flexible, so that anyone who studies / works full-time can participate. I am super excited to work with the group members in the following month!

#rocketcourse #ielts
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​​🚀 11 COUNTRIES IN ROCKET SPEED COURSE

It's still unbelievable to see that this month the Rocket Speed IELTS Prep course runs for people from 11 countries! Wow, what an opportunity to connect with members from all over the world - and not only boost the IELTS score during the course, but also learn more about cultures and unique features of different nations 🗺

💫 I hope you will also join us in the next course batch and broaden geography of the course group!

#rocketcourse
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👋🏻 LET'S TALK!

Hey! I am looking for people from the following countries:
- Russia
- Ukraine
- Bangladesh
- Nepal
- India
- Pakistan
- Uzbekistan
- UAE
- Syria
- Israel
- Iran
- Iraq
- Kazakhstan
- Europe
Or people from there who have already migrated to the UK / Canada / USA / Australia.

I will ask some questions about your life: what do you do, what goals do you have in the future, how do you learn English / prepare for IELTS, what solutions for your language problems have you tried before.

We'll have a good chat and get to know each other better! Please text the WSE bot (button below) if you want to talk with me on these topics for a little bit. In your message, indicate what country you are from.

Let's meet! 🙌🏻
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​​🚃 PHRASAL VERBS ABOUT TRAVELLING

Contrary to the popular belief that phrasal verbs should not be used on IELTS, I am sharing here a nice verb list to enrich your vocabulary with when talking about journeys and travelling.
Remember, it is perfectly okay to use phrasal verbs in your writing or speaking on IELTS - they make your language richer and help sound like a native.

#vocabulary
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👯‍♀️ TYPES OF SPEECH IN WRITING

When more than 2 people are involved in a conversation, DIRECT and UNDIRECT speech is used.

💬 Direct speech repeats, or quotes, the exact words spoken. When we use direct speech in writing, we place the words spoken between quotation marks (" ") and there is no change in these words. We may be reporting something that's being said NOW (for example a telephone conversation), or telling someone later about a previous conversation.

 She says, "What time will you be home?"
"There's a fly in my soup!" screamed Simone.

💬 Reported or indirect speech is usually used to talk about the past, so we normally change the tense of the words spoken. We use reporting verbs like 'say', 'tell', 'ask', and we may use the word 'that' to introduce the reported words. Inverted commas are not used.

 She said, "I saw him." (direct speech) = She said that she had seen him. (indirect speech)

'That' may be omitted:

 She told him that she was happy. = She told him she was happy.

#grammar
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​​⭐️ WSE HERO - JANUARY 2020

I want to celebrate people who have been World Speaks English members for a long time, have contributed to its development, participated in live streams, courses, and our discussions in the community chats. All of them - WSE Heroes - have a unique story to tell.
————
This is Rito from India. He has always had the dream of working and settling abroad. IELTS was the first step towards this goal, however it was not easy to prepare. Let's start off from the fact that he has recently got a child in December (congratulations!). He also works as an Audiologist and Speech Therapist in his own clinic, which is a lot of responsibility.
So, having been simultaneously looking after the baby, the clinic job and working his way through IELTS preparation, Rito took the test in January 2020. He claims he hadn't slept for more than 3 hours since November! 😱

Rito stumbled upon my YouTube channel and found lots of helpful resources that made him more confident and well-prepared. When the results arrived, Reto was delighted to know that he achieved overall 7.5 band score! 🎉 He appreciates the WSE community as a helping hand for non-native speakers like him to realize their potential and achieve dreams abroad.
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Congratulations for becoming the WSE Hero of the month, Rito! We love celebrating outstanding community members 🎉

#wsehero
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🌟 MY IELTS STORY - DAY 1/6

Picture a miserable day - it was raining, I had a day full of classes (some of them - particularly boring), and what served me as home was an old distressed Russian dormitory.

🐜 With cockroaches.

3 years ago I lived an ordinary life of a typical student who studies in a common Russian university. But I had never wanted this! The usual life cycle in my country: school - Bachelor’s degree - work for 30 years - poor pension. Such perspective brings regrets and depression, not a bright and exciting lifestyle.

No wonder I desired to change the boring life I was living.

I had no idea that soon I would be sharing a classroom with the Prince of Luxembourg at the best business school of Switzerland! 👑🤯

Curious how this transformation happened to me?

I knew there was more to youth than just sitting in an old dorm, eating cheap noodles and reading textbooks for class. So I started looking for international Master’s.

And such a surprise for me - the requirement for studying abroad was IELTS - a test I knew nothing about!

To be honest - I procrastinate a lot, so I started preparation only when there were 3.5 weeks left until the test date 🙈 Long story short, I had to prepare for the Academic IELTS on my own and then successfully scored the overall band of 8.0!

If you want to know how I did it - click the star button below 🌟

Why do you want to take IELTS? Is it for work / university and where? Share with me your story in the @wsecommunity group!

#DarianIELTS
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🌟 MY IELTS STORY - DAY 2/6

So, you already know from my previous post that when I was living a dull life of an average Russian student, I decided to radically change the future ahead of me and go study abroad. Turned out, for that I needed IELTS.
⠀
You probably know how nice it is to make such bold decisions! You feel happy and excited and capable of everything! But only a couple of day passes when your confidence drops, you don’t know where to start, you feel demotivated and helpless. I felt exactly the same way.

But then I remembered why I needed to take this test.
⠀
💵 Do you know how many doors does English open? Today, it is virtually impossible to find a high-paying job without knowing English (even if you stay in your country). That’s because the majority of leading industry reports, books, articles and media covering innovations are written in English.
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🗺 Also, English is a key to many new people and places. Knowing this worldwide language one may get education of much higher quality, a friend network of prominent professionals and travel across the globe!

However just motivation is often not enough for success. Especially when you don’t know what to start with.

Luckly, I figured out that when there is no clear plan ahead of me, I don’t feel comfortable and don’t keep a situation under control. Everything kind of slips through my own fingers. So, this is what happened with me when I decided to get a double Master’s degree abroad. The decision was there, but I lacked understanding of how I would get there.

If you want to know how I how I planned my preparation - click the balloon button below 🎈
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What are your current IELTS preparation strategies? Share with me your story in the @wsecommunity group!

#DarianIELTS
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🌟 MY IELTS STORY - DAY 3/6

The last part of my IELTS story finished at the motivation point. I clearly felt that the motivation itself is not enough to keep me going and achieve things, even though there were plenty of reasons to study English seriously.

The golden key to all of my achievements is careful planning. I firmly believe that it is much more difficult and far from effective to try and do things without clearly seeing where you want your actions to lead you.

So, when it came to the IELTS preparation planning I followed these steps:
🚀 Identified my current level of English (took placement tests, many are available online)
🚀 Took a mock IELTS test to get familiar with its structure and understand which modules were the weakest ones for me
🚀 Set the target score I wanted to achieve (this depended on the requirements of chosen universities / countries and my level of English at the time)
🚀 Learnt what are IELTS band descriptors (publicly available, they explain what is required for each band score)
🚀 Drew a calendar for all the days I had ahead of the test (I had 3.5 weeks) and filled them with IELTS activities
🚀 Spent 4-6 hours on preparation every day, using Cambridge IELTS books for mock tests and MacMillan Advanced Grammar in Context for grammar
🚀 Used the Pomodoro technique that forces you to stay focused for 4 short periods of time (each around 25 mins) and gives you a short break in-between.

When filling in the calendar I focused on the weakest modules and planned to spend 30% more time on them. I found Speaking and Writing to be much more difficult than Reading and Listening. That helped me to always stay on track with my current progress.

I recreated my daily, weekly and monthly planners for you and made them free to download here. You’re free to print them, fill in and use at your convenience. Press the 👻 button if it was useful!

#DarianIELTS

🌟 MY IELTS STORY - DAY 4/6

Last time, in the 3rd part of my IELTS story, I described my preparation planning techniques, and how they became the key to my success. If you haven’t read the last post – please do it in my profile, you’ll also be able to get a free IELTS planner from me there!

When I figured out planning and made it clear how to approach preparation, my days were filled with hours of intensive study. However, i started to see some significant problems that made learning more difficult.

📝 Self-preparation has certain explicit drawbacks. The first is that there won’t be anyone to check what you’re doing and how correct it is. I felt uncertain about the quality of my work. Since I wanted to save money, at first I tried to ask my friends to correct essays and practice speaking with me. It worked way better with Speaking than Writing, because none of my Russian friends were proficient enough in English to evaluate essays.

🙊 The second problem was lack of support. Sometimes I felt completely alone - struggling through days of constant study. I am sure many people who prepare on their own know what I am talking about. Especially when there are more responsibilities that must be fulfilled (work / family / school / college) and no-one cares about your IELTS journey that is far from simple.

This is why in my Rocket Speed IELTS Preparation course I tried to make sure these two pains of self-preparation do not worry test-takers any more. When you join the course, you get a supportive group of fellow learners who have targeted 7+ on IELTS. You become a part of a team what is always there for you and none is left abandoned during preparation.

I'm happy to share with you my personal step-by-step guidelines and a sample to a band 8+ Writing task 2 essay. Text me to @d_sandmartin to get it! 🚀

👻 What are your biggest pains and struggles of self-preparation? Share with me on @wsecommunity and I will offer ways of resolving them!

#DarianIELTS