by Les Zsoldos

Created on: February 15, 2007   Last Updated: May 02, 2007

Here are a few tips to help you improve on the IELTS exam. Many of the speakers on the listening section have Australian and British accents, so familiarize yourself with those. Make sure that your spelling is correct. Always remember to capitalize proper nouns. Review past exams to get a good idea of the format of the exam. Devote proper time to the study of the four sections: speaking, listening, reading and writing. In the speaking section, ask for clarification if you do not understand a question correctly, and if you're not sure of the answer, say that you're not sure but think it could be this or that. In other words, make sure that you give an answer. For example, to the question "What was the most important event in your country's history?", you might answer, "I'm not sure which is the most important event in my country's history, but it could be the Battle of...". This is far better than the answer "I don't know". Improve your listening and speaking skills by interacting with native speakers as much as possible and improve your reading and writing skills by practising them regularly. Use the techniques of skimming and scanning for reading and make sure that your writing is organized, has well-supported arguments, and a good variety of sentence structure . If you do all this, you should see an improvement in your score.

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