Two successful students explain what it takes to get Band 7.5 or higher in IELTS

Sometimes the inspiration you need to achieve your dreams can be found in a few simple words of wisdom, and that is exactly what we have for you today. We would like you to meet two winners of our monthly IELTS results competition, because there is a lot you can learn from their experience.

Kourosh Moini lives in Iran, he is a native Farsi speaker who got Band 7.5 in Academic IELTS. When we asked Kourosh how he scored so well, he said:

“In my experience, knowing where your strengths and weaknesses are is the best guide you can have. So the first step is to identify those and be truly honest with yourself. I achieved this simply by taking standard practice tests at home. After 3 tests, I recognized very clearly where my skills came short and needed improvements.

Then you can parcel the issues and come up with a solution. In my case, my strength is listening and my weakness was writing. So, I started searching for information on how to improve my writing skills and I found out that collocations and the ability to write in the appropriate structures are of great importance. Then, I studied this book called “Collocation in use” by Cambridge publications that helped me a lot and started watching some online courses on how to use the appropriate structure in regard to various writing questions.

I can also recommend, when practicing your reading skills, pay attention to how native authors paraphrase a concept because it is very useful. This can fix many errors in this section and it gives you the ability to imitate native authors’ styles when writing your own material.

In www.IELTS-Blog.com there are many speaking questions from actual recent IELTS tests – that can be very effective and helped me a lot to prepare for my speaking session with the help of a dear friend. Actually, Part 2 of my speaking was somehow similar to a previous test I found on IELTS-Blog.com.

Hope what I wrote helps others and wish you all the best possible results in your IELTS exams.”

Amir Ebrahimi also lives in Iran; he got Band 8.0 in General Training IELTS. When we asked him what others could do to increase their IELTS score like he did, he put together quite a few handy tips:

“Firstly, I suggest that candidates increase their connection with the language they are trying to learn. To do so, I used to listen to at least 10 podcast channels with varied accents. In addition to that, I switched my bedtime reading from Farsi to English. I also used to watch TV series with English subtitles to improve my reading comprehension and listening at the same time. All in all, you shouldn’t miss any chance to be a professional English consumer