Now that I have some time to reflect on my recent IELTS lessons, I’m putting together some resources to help prepare students. While there are a lot of good resources out there, some texts I felt didn’t cover everything I wanted or cover it in the way that I thought was best for my students. One big area where I found some good isolated exercises and ideas, but not one integrated series of lessons was in teaching Writing.
So I’m starting by putting together lessons on writing the IELTS task 1 …Continue

This is Part 3 in my series on using IELTS and TOEFL Test prep materials in general English classes, giving students practice in intensive speaking and extensive speaking. If you want to check out how I got from IELTS and TOEFL to intensive and extensive learning and read about some different reading exercises, check out part I. Part II is on Listening intensively and extensively.
The TOEFL Speaking Test mostly gives students practice in extensive speaking. Basically students are given a topic and they have to talk about it for …Continue

No, this is not a post on vocabulary retention or drilling. I’m still reflecting on my IELTS teaching and will be putting up lesson plans and suggestions, but we’re entering Writing territory and this is an area I have a lot more confidence in since I have taught academic writing for years.
This was our first week of IELTS Writing Prep. We started with Task 1 in which students must describe a graph or chart or some data in a short essay. I noticed two points that I had to …Continue

As I’ve been having some troubles putting together good lesson plans for IELTS, I thought I would post my ideas here and open myself up to critiques from other teachers and students. And if some of this helps a teacher in a similar situation, so much the better.
I put up an earlier lesson plan for teaching IELTS Speaking Part III that went well. The following class, I used this resource from Cambridge (you do have to register to download resources but it’s free).
It’s pretty good at presenting some language …Continue

I don’t know if my experience as an EFL teacher is typical, but I find myself getting suckered into teaching all sorts of stuff I’m not necessarily comfortable in. “We have a student who’s going to be taking courses in English in quantum physics and string theory, Can you help him practice his advanced theoretical physics English terms?He has no one else to turn to?”
More usually, it’s something like the IELTS. I read practice tests and the official website and all the resource books I can get my hands …Continue