English tutoring - Stephanie Jarrett

11/07/2024

How do you approach an IELTS speaking test? Like an exam? Scary hey! How about you change that and imagine it's a conversation with a friend or someone you meet at a party. Would that be less scary? Would it feel less like an exam and more like talking to someone who was interested in you? What if they ask you to talk about sport - if you hate sport and can't think of anything to say? What would you say to that friend? Probably "I don't like sport - I've never been interested. But my dad /husband/ brother is crazy about cricket/ soccer/ basketball and he . . . ". Remember it's not a test of what you know but of how you can express YOURSELF in English. If YOURSELF hates sport, your friend doesn't want to hear you being a fake. I don't think an examiner would either. You just need to provide an extended sample of your natural conversation to the examiner - as real and fluent as you can.

05/02/2024

If you want a high IELTS speaking score you MUST be able to TELL A STORY IN THE PAST TENSE. Can you do this fully - not just the first couple of verbs?
Many IELTS candidates and workers need practice and feedback to change bad habits. Join me for an interactive
PAST TENSE STORY-TELLING COURSE - 4 weeks x 2 hours
• practice • correction
• pronunciation • grammar tuition
• recognising errors in others • confidence

$200 (I need a minimum of 4 students so gather your friends for a quick start). Evenings or weekends negotiable.
Contact me - Stephanie Jarrett
[email protected] 0432 385 646

(NOTE: In any job - teaching, social work, logistics, manufacturing, building, health care etc – wrong tenses can give you a reputation for poor communication. Think about that: "I call the ambulance" - does that mean you called already, you will call, you call often?? This particular error can cause big misunderstandings at work.)

Email me if you are interested in this fun little course of story telling.

02/04/2022

https://www.ted.com/talks/lydia_machova_the_secrets_of_learning_a_new_language?utm_content=2022-04-02&utm_campaign=social&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&fbclid=IwAR1o0eB8xjxp6XqguWNZO7AM81A2LoOGP6SkMNpHxfrvzXLPbhlINHp8WlU

Want to learn a new language but feel daunted or unsure where to begin? You don't need some special talent or a "language gene," says Lýdia Machová. In an upbeat, inspiring talk, she reveals the secrets of polyglots (people who speak multiple languages) and shares four principles to help unlock yo...

15/03/2022

Here is a good exercise on tenses. See how you go with it - answers are there. Knowledge of tenses is basic for getting good scores in any test - speaking, writing or whatever.

Fill in the blanks. Answers He has been absent since Monday. Suddenly I realized that we had met before. I finished / had finished my

22/01/2022

Are you a social work student or graduate struggling to get 7 for academic writing? I've noticed there are some common problems with your group for task 1. You really need to get very familiar with finding important information in graphs. If you don't find something interesting and relevant in the graph you are probably going to write mechanically - which will not get you a good score. Practice and feedback is pretty important if you want to make progress. I work with individuals or groups if you have friends who would like to work with you. My students work steadily with feedback and achieve success.

14/12/2021

Is tuition for IELTS (or any test) worth the money? A professional tutor knows a lot about IELTS and can tell you if you are ready to get the score you want or what you need to learn and practise to get it. I once had a student who came for only an hour because he had no money left! He had done 18 tests !! at $350 a pop ($6,300) and no tuition and he couldn't understand why he wasn't improving his scores. If he had had a professional tutor at $60 an hour, he could have saved at least $4000 and still had 20 hours tuition - he wouldn't have needed that much. I tell my students when they are ready to try a test. We work together. Don't waste money on tests thinking that 6 is just a little more than 5, or 7 just above 6. One band level in IELTS scores is a huge jump involving a lot of learning. However, you can do it with some help.

08/11/2021

Are you struggling with IELTS Academic task 1 writing? Most of my students don't do these well at all until they change their approach. What is a graph - it is a short way of giving a lot of information with very few words. Your job is to find words for what the picture describes and make the situation clear. If you want to do some work on this contact me - share the lesson with a friend if you like - on zoom or in person. We do lots of examples, find the interesting information, look at the structure required for the writing and follow the IELTS requirements so that you can quickly improve your score on this task.

29/08/2021

This is a good one. These are native speaker mistakes that you will often see on social media - don't learn English from these mistakes.

Blogging and commenting is a lot like marketing. You’re trying to convince someone with your opinion or certain facts. You want to be taken seriously. But is that possible if your post is full of writing mistakes? This infographic lists 18 common errors and explains how you can fix them.

29/07/2021

Here is another great one from the grammar emails I receive. Lots of good grammatical points that native English speakers should learn at school. But many make mistakes with these tricky points. If you are learning English as an adult you many not have focused on this grammar. Have a look.

Here’s the grammar quiz experts claim only those with an above average IQ can ace. Just kidding; these are basic grammar mistakes that almost everyone misses. Let's see how well you do!

28/07/2021

This one is good! Thanks to 'Grammar Check'.

Even avid readers and book authors can make writing mistakes, which is why they have professional editors! Which of these 10 common errors do you struggle with the most?

22/07/2021

This is a good one for language learners and native speakers. They have left out 'PRACTICE/ PRACTISE' which is a common error. With a 'c' it is a noun (like 'advice', device') with an 's' it is a verb (like 'advise', 'devise'). So you PRACTISE your grammar or your piano. Spell checkers will mark you wrong because in America they relaxed a lot of spelling rules to fit with the pronunciation (which is the same for practice/practise. Not in the UK or in Australia where it is an error to write practice as a verb. I did a PTE practice test the other day and was marked down for writing 'practise' as a verb - (but in fact that PTE website robot marked down a lot of my perfectly correct spoken and written English!! ) I wonder what that says??

Understand the difference of the words 'Affect' and 'Effect', know how and when to use them, and find out how to differentiate 34 other commonly confused word pairs, in this infographic.