IELTSNetwork.com

Dear Prinks056 This looks familiar! The introduction lacks cohesion. Try making one sentence covering all the information: The chart illustrates the total time spent in billions of minutes for three categories of phone call in the UK – fixed line national, fixed line international and mobile – from ...

Dear Murad
Do you have a picture of the charts so I can check your answer?
Kind regards
Teacher Jill

Dear Nyle You need to concentrate on your writing. Your other skills look good. You dropped slightly in Reading last time, but that mightn't reflect anything other than a particularly difficult paper or a set of Readings on subjects that don't suit you. Your writing appears stuck at 6.5, so you need...

Dear Students The only way to get a high score in IELTS (Writing) is to practise writing IELTS-type essays. For Task 1 - Make sure you know the kind of graphics you need to understand (maps, plans, charts etc) - Learn how to pick out the significant information - Check if there are any correlations/...

Dear Gelever Spelling errors come under Lexical Resource , so a Band 6, for example, would be "makes some errors in spelling and/or word formation, but they do not impede communication", while a Band 8 would be "produces rare errors in spelling and/or word formation". Grammatical...

Dear Mr Azik You can improve your grammar by reading and listening to English as much as you can, and by learning new words as 'chunks' of vocabulary. Try to learn phrases rather than just words so you use them the way an English-speaker does. For a book on grammar, try the Grammar in Use books by R...

Dear Saidabayoucef Listen to as much English as you can, and practise speaking - even to yourself. There are topics you can prepare for (and follow the latest exams as topics are repeated). See some examples here: http://www.ieltsexchange.com/#!part-1/c1g62 Part 1 http://www.ieltsexchange.com/#!part...

You're welcome!

Dear Larry The introduction is rather long, and the opening sentence distracts the reader. The question is about average weight increasing (not just obesity – which is being ‘morbidly overweight’) and levels of health and fitness decreasing. It asks for the causes of these problems (plural) and meas...

Hi Owlcrack - it's very uncommon for results to be held back - usually only if the number of working days is reduced by holidays in the country you're taking the exam in.
GOOD LUCK!
Teacher Jill

Dear Chirag You must apply by 7 November if you want to query your score. Occasionally papers are remarked upwards, but you need to be really confident your mark should be higher before you request an enquiry on results. It is expensive (£60), takes 6-8 weeks for the answer, and often results in no ...

Dear Sinhasiha
Yes, spoken American English frequently drops the initial Are in questions and uses intonation (rising at the end) to indicate it's a question. And you are quite right, in the negative, the are isn't dropped, just contracted to You're.
Kind regards
Teacher Jill

Dear Possumaus How do you practise for listening? Predicting answers and being really familiar with the types of questions IELTS uses is important. You have to listen rather than hear, and understand that several possible (near) answers will be on the recording, though only one will be correct. List...

Hi Owlcrack Yes, you can do both sides of any question which says - how far do you agree/to what extend to you agree or disagree/what is your opinion. Often that makes it easier to write. Definitely you would get a higher score if you answered the question. Often that's where even the best students ...

Two listening practice exercises for prediction skills, one dialogue and one monologue.
Vocabulary for architecture and buildings - world list and two exercises using a Task 2 essay and a model speaking Part 2 answer. http://www.ieltsexchange.com/#!resources/d1wm2

Hi Mr Azik The letter would need to be recognisably English in order to get the mark. For example, some people write Z with a line through the middle (to stop any confusion with letter 2) and in many countries 7 has a line through (to stop it looking like 1). Where alphabets have different or additi...

Hi ielts.test.ef It's an interesting issue - especially for writing. Certainly students find computer-based prep easier. Some of the essay checking could be done that way. For example, giving the student the number of errors in terms of grammatical accuracy, and a score for grammatical range (compil...

Dear Mr Azik Listening and Reading marking is done by trained IELTS examiners at a test centre or main test centre. If an examiner is sent to a remote site at the request of an organisation, then the examiners take the secured, completed exams back to the main test centre for marking. Random monitor...

Dear Owlcrack Opinions vary about 'conclusions' for Task 1, but I feel that Task 1 reports are somehow unfinished without a concluding sentence of some kind. For example, if you look at the last paragraphs of these examples http://www.ieltsexchange.com/#!bar-charts/c15d9 they all start with 'Overall...

Dear Owlcrack Is it a Cambridge one? I can look it up. It is hard to correct a Task 1 report without the charts in front of me. From your answer, the first chart probably looked something like this: http://i.imgur.com/yaLGO3R.jpg The question mentions two years for the second chart - was it a bar ch...

Try University of Westminster
http://www.westminster.ac.uk/courses/in ... elts-exams
Kind regards
Teacher Jill

Dear Seafish Since there are no dates on the charts (no historical data to refer to) stick to present simple, because you are saying what the charts show (now, today). If there were dates on the charts, then you could use past simple for a time in the past, and future simple (+ a phrase suggesting p...

Dear Owlcrack
Do you have a link to the charts?
I'll try to take a look at your essays after class.
Teacher Jill

Dear ielts.test.ef I think the reason that prep materials are old school is because the exam itself is old school. There is no electronic version of the test. Students must write in pencil, and they must hand-write their essays. Listening would be fairly easy to digitise, but an on-screen test can’t...

Dear Nagasai IELTS uses different ways of asking for the same type of response and wants your position whatever it is. To what extent do you agree or disagree? How far do you agree with ... ? If you disagree, you can say that you don't agree at all, because ... If you agree to some extent, you can s...