EXTRA - Warming Up (a tip for IELTS and other exams)

My father helping me to get ready for the
Brighton Marathon last year (2010).

I was reading another blog recently and it talked about ‘warming up’. As a runner, I certainly understand the need for warming up – you need to get your body ready for the physical activity of running. When I was doing martial arts as a teenager, we probably spent the first 10 minutes of every hour session warming up. It’s very important.

It’s also very important for mental preparation as well. You need to warm up for your big language event: the IELTS exam, or FCE, or CAE or whatever. One of the suggestions that Aaron Myers gave was to use his travel to an interview to listen to a Turkish audio lesson. For the day of your big event, you don’t want to focus on anything new so choose a piece of listening that you are familiar with (a podcast you have listened to a few times already, for example).

This warming up is necessary to ‘switch on’ your English and get your mind ready for the task.

If you have an English exam soon, good luck!