10 Ways to Get Higher Marks on the IELTS Letter Writing Task

These tips came from this web site which has a lot of FREE information on IELTS

http://www.goodluckielts.com/IELTS-letter-writing-tips.html

IELTS Letter Writing Tips -
10 Ways to Get Higher Marks on the IELTS Letter Writing Task

1. Identify the type of letter you are being asked to write. Is it a formal, semi-formal or informal letter? The entire tone of your letter is based on your answer to this question. Adjust your style and choice of words according to the type of letter you have been asked to write.

2. Open and close the letter correctly. Remember that each type of letter requires a different opening and closing. The chart below will help you remember this:

Style	Characteristics	Opening	Ending
Formal	To someone you have not met, whose name you don't know	Dear Sir / Madam	Yours faithfully
Semi- formal	To someone you may or may not have met, whose last name you know & use	Dear Mr Brown, Dear Ms Stone	Yours sincerely
Informal	To someone you know well, whose first name you know and use	Dear John Dear Anita	Best regards Warm wishes

3. Open a formal and semi-formal letter with a formal sentence. Don't try to be friendly, as you do not know the person you are writing to. Get right down to business and indicate the reason you are writing, as shown below:

Dear Sir / Madam,
I am writing to inquire about / I am writing in connection with...

Dear Mr Jones,
I am writing to inform you ... / I am writing in connection with...

4. Open an informal letter with a general, friendly paragraph. With friends whom we know, we care about the whole person. We have a broader relationship in the context of which this communication is taking place. So it is best to acknowledge that friendship first, before getting down to the reason for your letter. In fact, the first paragraph could be purely friendly small talk, unrelated to the reason for your writing. Look at the example below:

Dear Jane

I hope you and your family are all well. It was such a pleasure to see you again last summer. We sure had a great time catching up with each other after so many years. You have always been a cherished friend, no matter how much of a gap there has been since we met.

Anyway, the reason I'm writing is that I have some good news - I am getting married this summer...

5. Identify the main purpose of the letter. Are you asking for help, apologizing, inviting someone, complaining or thanking someone? Learn appropriate and polite expressions that will support what you need to say.

6. Learn and use standard written phrases. Students sometimes struggle to finish their writing in time. This happens when you are trying to write every sentence from scratch. The fact is, in conventional letter writing in English, we use a number of standard expressions and phrases and add on to them the specific information we wish to communicate. By learning how to use these expressions, you will find the letter writing task much easier and will never have to fight for time.

7. Make sure you write at least 150 words. Practice writing letters till you know what 150 words feels like and looks like. You will lose marks if you write less. You will not lose marks if you write more; the only restriction on writing more is in terms of time, not the number of words.

8. Learn the correct spelling of commonly used words. It is surprising how many IELTS students make a mistake when spelling words such as "sincerely", "faithfully", "in connection with" and so on. You can prevent yourself from losing marks by learning the correct spelling of these words and expressions which you are highly likely to use on your exam.

9. Stay on topic. In order to complete your letter within 20 minutes or less, practice writing letters where you stick to the point. The General IELTS Task 1 does require you to make up a bit of a story to complete your letter, but don't make your story so complicated that you run out of time.

10. Include all three bulleted points. If you exclude even one of the points given to you in the question prompt, you will lose valuable marks. Practice writing letters that include the three points and go back and check that you have included them in each practice exercise you do.

FREE PODCASTS

I have found an really top class site for you to practice listening skills.
It has examples of IELTS speaking situations, with follow-up comments by an examiner, and it even has transcripts if you care to become a subscriber. I think even to be a subscriber is free, but to listen and check out the examiners' comments certainly is free.

The people who speak are students, and the questions and tasks they are doing are from real exams- IELTS, TOEFL, SAT, etc, so it is genuine.

A great site for students, and a perfect site for teachers looking for authentic speaking skill examples.

CLICK ON THE Splendid Speaking Logo to be taken to some great speaking exercises.

For my teacher friends, I want to recommend an excellent place to get some great resources for teaching kids, teenagers and even adults.




Its called
eslkingdom.com

Click the LOGO


Here is the link to their catalogue of everything that is included in their program.

When I was in Tay Ninh, I introduced the ESL KINGDOM curriculum to 2 schools there, and they have been using it to teach kids very successfully. In fact it is so successful, that they have discontinued using the “normal” text books and use only Esl Kingdom curriculum, which requires NO BOOKS- That’s right- NO BOOKS.

If you check it out, you will see you need to register, and you can take a look at some of the lessons, but if you want access to all the lessons it costs about $25 for a full year-It is very much worth it. There are over 50 complete lessons for kids, and each one can last for about 2 hours, with flash cards, speaking exercises, listening, reading, writing, and activities like cross word puzzles and word searches, plus many visual exercises for students as well. And all themed and level graded.


As I said before, 2 schools I know of adopted this curriculum, and at only $25 for a full year, it is the cheapest curriculum they ever had, and they don’t need to stock books.

It has certainly been a success, and the students are talking very confidently after taking this course.

Take a look-you WILL be very surprised.

In case you are wondering, I am not connected to Esl Kingdom, so there’s nothing in it for me if you decide to join them-its just that they are so good, I want to share this with you.

PRONUNCIATION:

The single most difficult task in learning English is- you guessed it- PRO NUN CIA TION.

Here is a link to a pronunciation series of exercises from the BBC- Try them out- there are quite a lot of videos on this problem area, and also some funny ones. Give it a try.
Click on the picture of the man who is wondering what his students is saying.

Good luck, and happy studies

Please tell your friends about our blog- Everything is FREE!

TIps for IELTS speaking

IELTS SPEAKING TIPS

Speaking tips (Advice from a student)

Speaking is a weakness of analytic learners (who learn English from books and tapes). Moreover, in countries where English is not a first language, improving your speaking in English is really difficult. Therefore, I don’t have much experience in practicing speaking. Here are some tips that I got from my teachers and some suggestions that I think they might be helpful for you.

Pronunciation is the most important feature in speaking. If you speak correctly, academically and interestingly, but no one understands what you are talking about, you certainly lose your points.

One of my teachers, who is fluent in 5 languages, shares his experience that pronunciation is the key of learning a language. It might be true since native English speakers can pronounce a unfamiliar word correctly but don’t know how to spell it. Because English is a combination of many languages, there are no totally general rules for pronunciation. As a result, you must remember everything.

So how to pronounce the words correctly?

- Firstly, listen and learn what native English speaker said. As I mentioned, listening can help you in speaking. You can correct yourself in basic words if you listen a lot. Moreover, listening can also help you to learn how to stress important words, how to speak naturally and even how to organize your speech.

- Secondly, if you learn a new word, you must know how to pronounce it first. Typically, when people want to learn new words, they revise these words again and again, and write it down so many times. But now, to improve your speaking and listening, you must hear electronic dictionary pronouncing and repeat after it again and again.

- Thirdly, make sentences with new vocabulary. Everybody might know how to pronounce words correctly, but when they combine them all together, they cannot pronounce correctly anymore, or even if they do, their sentence may sound unnatural. The reason is they lack of intonation. Listening might solve this problem.

- Fourthly, practice pronunciation every week (3-4 times a week) by reading out loud a short passage. At first, you practice to pronounce all the words in that passage correctly. Then read the whole passage slowly and correctly (pay attention to ending sound).

Afterward, increase reading speed in each sentence (’read’ here means you must speak out the words, not read in your mind). If you speak quickly but start to pronounce wrongly, that means you reach your limit, don’t speak faster than that. And finally, you read the whole passage again at normal speed, or may be a bit faster than normal a little bit, but you MUST include intonation.

To find material for practicing this exercise, you can visit this website: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com. There are hundreds of short news and audio files spoken by a native speaker. I guarantee if you practice this kind of exercise gradually, you pronunciation will improve a lot. (Note: this is the exercise of my teacher, who speaks 5 languages, as I mentioned before)

Now, to prepare for IELTS Speaking test, you should practice some more exercises:

- Pick a topic and stand in front of mirror to practice speaking test. You should go through all three parts of the real speaking test. Standing in front of mirror will help you improve your body language and also your pronunciation. You might find it strange that mirror can correct your pronunciation. In fact, there are some vowels and consonants that you can’t pronounce correctly if you don’t know how to do that (not just simply remember the pronunciation).

- Try to speak naturally. You are advised to speak fast with intonation (the previous reading exercise will certainly help you). You should learn and apply some verb phrases, idioms and slang expressions. This is not the key part of speaking test, but it is better if you know, not only for your test but also for you speaking skill. If you want to get 7.0, you must master pronunciation, accuracy and intonation.

Important tip #1

When you practice in speaking, you must pay attention to the ending sound. But when you take the real test, don’t do that, because it will affect your fluency. In the real test, it is the time you show examiner what you got, not the time you can show them how good you can correct yourself. Using experience you gained from practicing to prove your speaking skill.

Important tip #2

Another wonderful way to practice speaking is to speak English in your dream. If you never do that, you do it now. I have already spoken English in my dreams even before my teacher advice me to do so. I just watch cartoons in English, films in English and listen to songs in English. As a result, I naturally dream in English. Actually, I can control my dreams, lol, it is very interesting, try to do that. By doing that, I can think quickly in my mind, but I still have problems when speaking my ideas out. So, you must do 2 previous exercises in order to improve speaking.

Just for fun, here is a link to a video I posted about prepositions. Can you guess who write the song, who played it and who is singing it?
Hint-he's a teacher you know!

CLICK THE DOG to be taken to the video.

MORE FREE IELTS MATERIALS

Here is another site where you can get FREE IELTS material. There are about 3 or 4 pages of links, AND there are a couple that will take you to a site where you have to pay.

Just look for the FREE ones and click the links-plenty there!
Good luck and happy IELTS study!

CLICK on the sign

Are you starting to wonder why you pay to go to a centre to study IELTS when you can get lots of study material for FREE?

IELTS FOR FREE

Here is a link to a series of really good IELTS lectures by the
 "Queen of IELTS", Margot Politis.

Simply click on the IELTS Logo to be taken to the site.
(I thank one of our more IT clever students for showing me how to do that) Magic!
You will notice there are a lot of Videos to watch, so take your time.

There are also links to lots and lots of other English learning possibilities, and the best part is-They are all FREE.

                                 Would YOU wear a bikini if you looked like these lovely ladies?

CLICK on the FAT lady to hear and see a silly video I made about a BIKINI.

Its great pronunciation practice and funny too!

Have a nice day.

FREE IELTS and GENERAL ENGLISH

As promised, here is a link to a strange, but interesting man giving FREE English lessons
You will see he has a lot of English lessons and the best part is-They are all FREE.

Please enjoy. You may have to copy and paste the link-Good luck!

 

CLICK ON THE PICTURE OF DUNCAN TO GO DIRECTLY TO HIS LESSONS


Because these are videos, you may play them as many times as you wish, which is great for repeating and listening

In my next blog entry, I will give a link to a huge number of IELTS lessons, also for free.
ENJOY.

Check my blog regularly for updates-I intend updating it at least once a week-Lots of good English learning material coming up.

For those of you who know me, I will be starting some teaching at LANGUAGE LINK in Hanoi next week. Maybe I will see some of you there!

Welcome

Hello my friends.
For a long time now I have been thinking about how to keep in contact with my students and friends.
When our class is finished, we often say good bye and its sad that we never seem to keep contact for long after that.
Now I have discovered the world of blogging, I hope we can keep in touch, and I will send you a message, (if you want), every time there is a new post, exercise or story to tell.
I will also give you links to special English study materials that I think may help you, and I will only recommend the FREE ones that I know work well. 
So there is a whole world of FREE English lessons to be had by keeping in touch with me.
Of course, I will also be available for lessons at paid rates if you wish, via Skype, but I know so many Vietnamese students can't really afford that, so I intend to offer plenty of good links to very useful lessons that will always be free.

I suggest you check this blog at least once a week, even if I dont send you a message, as I intend to update it
regularly. So please put this link in your favourites so you can come to see me whenever you wish.
http://skyteacherray.blogspot.com/

That's all for now, but in my next post, I will talk about a question many people are asking;"Whatever happened to our teacher Ray".

Have a nice day, and I hope we can continue our friendship by this blog, and of course in person.