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spyrothedrago25 · Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 13

I have been asked by my uni in Korea to teach a short intensive IELTS prep course starting in early July. I think I will be on the speaking and writing components of the course. Are there any IELTS teachers / examiners out there who could give me any tips on how teach this course / what to expect? Any information that you give would be very helpful as I have no experience teaching this kind of graded course so far.

Thanks for the input guys!

kaw · Posted: Tue May 22, 2007 5:51 am Post subject:

I'd say that the first thing you need to know is the current level of the students and the band (a scale from 1-9) they need. If they are let's say under Intermediate level then getting anything above a 5 is unlikely.
Being university students they'll most probably be looking at sitting the academic exam - (for further study ec) as opposed to General - (immigration/work related).

Try to make sure there is some sort of 'placement exam' in place - it'll make your life a lot easier if you're teaching a class who are at roughly the same level. Lower levels are unlikely to understand the material in the first place.
As for preparation material - our intensive courses basically just consists of a number of resources from different books as well as teacher made stuff and a lot from the various internet sites.
Some helpful sites would be ielts.org - it will give you a better understanding of the exam and what is involved and keltic.co.uk - an online bookshop that sells a lot of IELTS materials.

I've taught several intensive courses and the main comment from students is that it is hard work. We have also recently started running a one day course aimed at people who have already taken the test and didn't get what they needed and want to focus purely on how to answer the questions. Haven't taught on this one yet.......

Good luck

JDYoung · Joined: 21 Apr 2003 Posts: 157 Location: Dongbei

If the students don't have intermediate or above general English already then there is little point in them preparing for IELTS as most universities demand a band of 5.5 at least and probably 6 or better. In an intensive course you don't have time to teach grammar and vocabulary. You have to concentrate on the types of questions they will get in the reading module and the two types of writing they will have to do in the writing component. The writing component especially demands very specific types of writing. If you're teaching the writing component you will need to assign lots of homework and spend a LOT of time marking essays and reports. Good luck.

Afra · Joined: 02 Feb 2003 Posts: 389

Exam technique is what you need to focus on. I work in the Gulf and Task 1 writing is a big problem for our students as they are not required to interpret a graph until they do IELTS: it doesn't seem to be part of their school or college education. However, this is not true of other countries where the students may have more problems writing discursive essays.
Speaking requires lots of practice for the monologue part, they must speak for 2 minutes and should use the preparation time usefully. This was a problem for my Korean students in the UK because they were very loath to voice an opinion on anything, especially when the tape recorder was running! IELTS/UCLES produces an excellent preparation booklet with a CD of speaking tests with scores and the rationale. There is a Korean student on the copy I have, can't remember the year offhand, which would give you a basis for comparison.

kaw · Posted: Wed May 23, 2007 8:40 am Post subject:

Your nearest BritishCouncil.(where your students may have to sit their exam anyway) should have an exam preparation pack you can buy - or even better - get the students to buy.
I'd suggest encouraging your students to read as much as possible about pretty much every subject under the sun.
Like Afra, I'm in the Gulf and one of the biggest problems I've found with my students is their lack of ideas about.........well......pretty much everything.
Possible (very broad) topics to think about - enviroment, town planning, transport, media - advertising, tv, newspaper etc, technology - developments in, social issues - education, crime, developing countries, disabilities etc..... These are topics that often come up in the writing and speaking exams.
In the speaking exam - and this may sound daft - but what they say - does not have to be true. As long as what is said it related to the question asked it is better to say something completely false than run out of things to say when telling the truth.

eslstudies · Joined: 17 Dec 2006 Posts: 1061 Location: East of Aden

The IELTS website has a lot of useful stuff.
http://www.ielts.org/
China has masses of cloned IELTS guide and test books available cheaply. I'd be surprised if Korean English language bookstores didn't also. You don"t "teach" IELTS as such, but coach techniques. And students with poor English will never pass anyway.

tedkarma · Posted: Wed May 23, 2007 1:34 pm Post subject:

There is an excellent writing textbook call "Ready to Write" that has very good chapters on describing data - the explaining a chart writing task - and also chapters on expressing your opinion AND comparing and contrasting.

The three together can pretty much solve the writing part of IELTS - and the ability to do those tasks helps immeasurably with the verbal tasks - and good writing skills help with all grammar challenges . . . and so on.

Anyway, I've used it as the basis for IELTS classes and had quite good success with it. I was teaching at a place that prepared people to study overseas at the time and we had a very good success rate.

You need other material too but it is a good foundation.

spyrothedrago25 · Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 13

Thanks so much for all your support. When it is confirmed that I will take this course I'll be sure to take on board of all your advice. Once again thanks for all your help!