22/12/2022
Some IELTS- related tips Tran Quoc Dat from 12A2 shares:
"Okay to start, with reading, try to figure out what kind of strategy works for you. I've heard some people preach skimming or briefing through the questions right away, but those don't feel natural to me. Personally, my reading strategy is carefully and thoroughly read through the entire passage, then look at the questions and find the answer. A good thing to keep in mind with the IELTS reading test is that the majority of the answers can be found within the passage, just written differently; it's almost always better to base your answers off of lines in the paragraphs than off logic and reasoning, at least for me.
As for listening, I can't provide much tips on this as I've never spent much time deliberately practicing it. What I will say though, is stay calm and collected. I see some people, and even myself in the past, try to frantically brief through the questions beforehand and highlight every possible word. Now, I never go pass the suggested amount of questions - the set of questions mention in the audio, like 5-10 or 31-37; this helps me focus on the current objective and focus better.
Speaking is probably the skill I spent the least number of hours on. It's interesting going into the actual test because once I was there, I was no longer thinking like when I was practicing at home. At that point, it was pure instinct, just my natural English communicative ability coming into play. I was fortunate enough to have spent a large portion of my time in the past just casually chatting in discord vc with my friends. This helped me significantly and while the conversation in the test room wasn't ideal, as in, not grammatically, lexically and cohesively perfect - I think what I lack is general communicative ability and not just a communicative ability in any language, it was sufficient and I was happy with how I did in the test. If there's anything I regret about the speaking test, it's that I didn't schedule it to be on another day and I didn't practice part 2 enough. The nerves got to me on part 2 and messing it up messed my mental state up which messed my listening test up.
And writing, probably the skill I spend the most time deliberately practicing and investing in. I don't think I can say enough about what I've learnt in writing so just go read the book that helped enlighten me on writing - The key to IELTS Writing by Pauline Cullen, fantastic book, go check out her other works too. The best thing that I got from that is to stop trying to impress the examiner and focus more on trying to explain your ideas clearly, like if you're writing to a coworker. Other than that, use a Test - Feedback - Test format to practice and keep going. I've filled up countless pages and files with essays and I still don't think it's enough. Oh yeah and also, be mindful of writer's block, it was my biggest enemy in writing. I've learnt to identify when I've had a block and just stop, breath and focus on writing just something, anything; I find this to help me a lot."
