Book Recommendation - IELTS Advantage: Writing Skills

Two colleagues of mine (teachers I worked with) have written a book for IELTS students!  I look forward to it in September and I am sure it will be a great success.  More important that the success, I'm sure it will help IELTS students everywhere in one area specific area; advanced writing skills.

IELTS Advantage: Writing Skills is published by Delta Publishing and will be available in September 2011.  I will try to give lots more information about this book in the next few months but at the moment I know Richard and Lewis would really appreciate it (they would be grateful) if you showed your support and 'liked' their book on Facebook.

Here are the links:

Delta Publishing website page for IELTS Advantage: Writing Skills

Facebook page for IELTS Advantage: Writing Skills by Richard Brown & Lewis Richards

Well done guys!

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!

Does Testing Help You Learn?

What do you think about exams and tests?  Please post your ideas and opinions below.

Many of you who follow this blog probably took IELTS or FCE or one of the other Cambridge exams.  Or perhaps you did the North American testing; TOEFL or TOEIC.

A lot of people learn English because it is the international language and if they want to work for the big companies (and even some of the smaller ones) they need to have English.   And how do we measure this English?... with the tests.

As a teacher, I have a love/hate relationship with these tests (yes, another love/hate relationship, just like with tenses).  The good thing for the teacher is that students preparing for a test are generally, generally well-motivated (not always).  The bad thing for a teacher is that it is sometimes difficult to keep learning fun when an important exam is ahead.

If I think as a learner (of Spanish), I feel that I need exams to motivate and guide me.  I am not taking a language course at the moment so if I really want to improve my Spanish I will need to have an exam to prepare for.  The exam will have specific points about language that it will test (think IELTS Writing Part 1: Graphs and Tables) and that means I know what I need to focus on.

But a big problem is that testing is generally stressful, can be expensive, and the English it tests can sometimes be very inauthentic, in other words, not like the English you will hear on TV or find in a native-speaking conversation.

Another problem is that we are not all good at taking tests or exams.  I will admit that I am not good at standardized tests.  I hated them at university and I actually failed some of them (there, my big secret is out in the open!).  I was also really bad at predicting if I did well in a university exam or not.  I remember there were a few times when I finished an exam and I thought that I had done very well (I hadn’t) but there were also a couple of exams that I thought I had completely failed (I passed very well, in fact).

So when I come out of an exam and then I am told that I failed it, does that mean I didn’t learn anything?  Did I learn anything from those courses?  Apparently, not enough.

What do you think about exams and tests?  I look forward to your opinions so don’t be shy. :-)