Authentic texts are an essential part of your IELTS preparation.  What are authentic texts? These are real-life examples of English in use, things like newspapers, videos, podcasts, and music.  I want you to use authentic texts for a variety of reasons which I go over in detail in this episode.

One of the major issues that students often have when it comes to IELTS speaking is reducing their nervousness enough to give a confident response with effective delivery. In this episode, I give some quick tips for reducing your nervousness for exam preparation.

This week I wanted to get into a topic that I see students struggling with in the essays that they send me and that is, using the passive voice in writing.  Some students generally overuse this point because they think it makes their writing more formal and academic, but the truth is it doesn't have that effect.  Listen to the full episode to learn what you shouldn't do and why and when you can use the passive voice.

One thing that I noticed is that the IELTS speaking marking criteria doesn't really do justice to the band descriptor for pronunciation.  It only describes pronunciation as pronunciation features which can be difficult for students to understand what they are doing wrong and what they need to do to get a 7+ band score in IELTS speaking.  Because of this, I decided to dive a little deeper into this area to help give a few quick pronunciation tips for students.

I spend quite a lot of time lurking in facebook groups or answering questions on Quora. One thing that I found is that students get really frustrated when they aren't able to get the score they want on IELTS speaking or writing tasks.

Part of this has to do with understanding the difference between social English skills and academic English skills. These are called BICS and CALP.

I get so many students who ask me which books they should be using to study.  After 13+ years in official exam preparation, I'm able to tell you exactly what tools and resources you should be using and how to use them to help get you the score that you want and need.

In this episode, I answer a listener question.  This question focuses on the time that it takes to prepare and the truth is, that this is a super common situation and question.  Due to this, I decided to formulate a detailed response.  Listen to the full episode.

In this week's episode, I respond to a student question that I received on Quora. This student asked, " How do I use "access to" in IELTS writing?"

This made me think a little bit. Firstly, I love this word. "Access to" is such a great academic word that you can use on almost any topic for the IELTS essay or for speaking tasks. So this is a great one to really know and understand how to use.

In this episode, we talk about how You need to take a metalinguistic approach to writing which means you step back and think about the language you will use and how you will approach your essay before you actually write it and we apply this to the problem/solution writing task essay prompt.

In this episode, I answer a response to a student question: “if someone speaks a bit off topic in the speaking section, will he/she be penalized? The reason I ask this is that there are no marking criteria like 'task response' in speaking section for marking compared to the writing section.”