Lee Peterson's Blog: How Tony overcame all challenges and got Band 7 in IELTS

Tony’s first language is Spanish, and he lives in Venezuela. When Tony started his IELTS preparation, things looked tough because he only had 9 weeks until the exam, he learned English 15 years ago and hasn’t ever been to any English-speaking country. However all these obstacles didn’t stop him from getting Band 7 in the exam! As one of our students and a winner of IELTS results competition, here is what Tony shared about his exam preparation:

“My real challenge was preparation time, I had barely two to three months to prepare for the test with not much free time available due to my busy life. So I needed a reference material because it was my first IELTS attempt and I needed a score of 6 in all components of the test for immigration purposes, so I decided to get IELTS Success Formula, it was a wise decision, I got an overall band score of 7.

My advice is to practice every day to improve your listening and reading skills, but the first and most important step is to familiarize yourself with all the type of questions of the test, IELTS is not actually very difficult, but it is a demanding, very technical and tricky test.

For Listening, I trained my ears listening to BBC podcasts first thing in the morning almost every day for about 2 months, and practiced with many IELTS Practice Tests.

For Reading, timing is important, there isn’t enough time to think carefully about each answer, so I had to read a lot and practice a lot under real test conditions, I found a lot of helpful exercises in IELTS Success Formula.

For Writing, again, time is your worst enemy, my advice is to read a lot of essays, and then begin practicing writing under real test conditions, http://www.IELTS-Blog.com is a great source of information and I found a lot of examples to practice for the Writing part of the test.

For Speaking, I did not have the opportunity to practice for this part of the test, and I got a 7 in Speaking which is amazing, considering the fact that I learned English 15 years ago, and I have never been in any English-speaking country, but, again, my advice is to check IELTS-Blog.com and IELTS Success Formula, they both have a lot of useful advice and exercises for this part of the test.

On the test day try to be calm and make eye contact with the examiner, speak with confidence, and consider the speaking test as a friendly conversation.”