Why 70% of people fail to clear IELTS writing and how to succeed in it.
Anita* cleared her throat as she sat to take the IELTS test. “It is just a stupid language test”, she said to herself. But that is the same thing that she said when she attended the test the previous month. And the month before that. And the month before that.
Born in India, she had coasted through some of the most unforgiving exams and was poised to get a Permanent Resident status in Canada. But then, after her 28 birthday, she had hit a road block. Her career as a doctor would not take her anywhere unless she proved her English language ability through a test like the IELTS or TOEFL.
When she came to attend my classes, she was on the brink of tears. She had tried everything. Solving previous year’s question papers, finding the most probable questions, writing one essay after another, learning 10 words a day.
Her last scores for Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing were as follows:
Listening: 7
Speaking: 7
Reading: 7
Writing: 5
Overall score: 6.5
Here are her scores from the penultimate test:
Listening: 7.5
Speaking: 7
Reading: 7
Writing: 5
Overall score: 6.5
So, what went wrong in her case?
When I talked with her, I realised that she had indeed tried a lot. But there were some things odd about her. Her emphasis was always on “solving” the questions. Sure, she did a lot of work on it. But is it the right approach to an IELTS test? Yes, if you look at previous year’s question bank, you might see a recurring pattern. But, how can you be sure that your answer is the ‘right’ one? A major part of IELTS writing is the essay. A typical essay question would look like this: “Do you think that children now read far less than the previous generation? Explain why this is so. 250 words.
Unlike any objective test (I believe that good language tests can never be completely objective), answers in subjective test should be different, unique. Countless candidates have missed this point. An easy way to get a score of, say, 6, is to learn some template sentences and phrases that you can use in any essay. But, this strategy will backfire when you need a fairly good score like IELTS 7. Here is the bottom part of the answer-sheet of IELTS.
“Memorised” means that the candidate has memorised large parts and phrases and made a template which can be used in any essay.
Another area where candidates lose a ton of their scores is “Lexical Resource”. Lexical Resource is, roughly, the vocabulary used in essays. One of the frequent tips given by ‘experienced’ IELTS candidates is that people should increase their vocabulary as much as possible. The next thing that they do is to head towards the nearest bookseller for the most comprehensive dictionary that they can get their hands on.
But, vocabulary enrichment does not work that way. The words are of no use if you can’t use it in their correct context. Let us take the words ‘faith’ and ‘belief’. Are they the same? Well almost. But not the same. Take this example:
“People did not restore their faith on the politician after his downfall.”
Now think of this same sentence with the word ‘belief’:
‘People did not restore their belief on the politician after his downfall.
Do they sound the same? Are they both correct?
This is the problem of learning a vocabulary list. It does not show a proper context. How do you get the correct context? By reading a lot. Day in and day out. There is no other way, no other ‘shortcut to success’, ‘no tips to crack the IELTS’. You got to read everyday. This also will have another outcome. Your grammatical accuracy will improve. Your use of collocations would also improve. Bingo.
So, the only way to improve your writing score is to improve your reading. Even when you have a good score in reading. The reading score will only reflect your reading ability. The reading that I recommend here is ‘broad reading’ which is nothing but reading ‘out of syllabus’ text. Read articles. Read long texts which have nothing to do with your ‘field’. With that your vocabulary will increase substainally. Without much effort on your part. But, it is not going to happen in a day or two.
As for Anita* she did have a ‘lived happily ever after in Canada’ story ending. But that was after six months of training.
*Name changed for obvious reasons.
