Are You Making These 3 IELTS Mistakes?

This is an IELTS Energy Podcast, episode 1574. Are you making these three IELTS mistakes? Welcome to the IELTS Energy Podcast from All Ears English. Downloaded more than 35 million times with examiner-trained IELTS whiz Aubrey Carter and Lindsay McMahon, the English adventurer. If you are stuck with a low score, our insider method will help you get the score you need

to unlock your dreams. Get your estimated band score now with our two minute quiz at allearsenglish.com slash my score. Everyone makes mistakes, but if you make these, you may be held back from your target score and therefore you're envisioned a future. Don't let this happen to you. Listen in for everything

you need to know today. You listen to this podcast because you want results on IELTS. You want to raise your score, avoid mistakes, and finally move forward with your life. But to do that, you need to know your starting point. That's why we made our free IELTS quiz. In just two minutes, you can find out your estimated band score and get free study materials that fit

your level. This is the easiest next step you can take today. Go to allearsenglish.com slash my score. That's allearsenglish.com slash my score. Hey, Aubrey, how are you? I'm great. How are you, Lindsay?

Good. So question for you. I'm curious about your study habits. All right. Have you ever taken a test without studying at all? Just walked in cold to take an exam? I remember in one of my more advanced French classes, I did not study at all. I was really busy with work and I was not getting a good grade in the class. So I was thinking I was going to have to repeat it to increase my grade

anyway. Oh, so I just didn't take the time to study, but I like took the test anyway just to see what I would get and really bombed it. Really bombed it. Okay.

Okay. Okay. I thought you were going to say you just walked into every French test with just naturally knowing. This is before I was that fluent.

I hadn't lived there yet. Okay. So I had gone as an exchange student, but I hadn't gone as a nanny in Belgium yet. So I wasn't that fluent and my grammar wasn't that great.

Like it was tough. Yeah. Yeah. The key was the immersion that you had.

Oh yeah. Once I lived there as a nanny and like had friends and it's true. that opened the, it was the key to fluency for me. The key to fluency.

So we're talking about this preparation because I think a lot of, well, this is a mistake native speakers make because they say, oh, I have to take an English test.

Okay, I'll just show up, I'll walk in. And sometimes they don't score what they need. They don't score that seven, eight, nine. They're often shocked.

They expect their need. Yes, even native speakers, right? They don't prep at all. Cause they're like, oh, I speak English fine.

I'll be able to get a high score and are surprised when their score is much lower than they would expect. In for learners.

I mean, even if you're at the C1, C2 level and you feel very confident, maybe you're like a CEO of a large company, but you still need to take the exam

and you don't learn about the exam, you probably won't get the score you need, right? Exactly, yes. It's really interesting how it's not just

a comprehension test. No, it's not. It really doesn't just test your English level. If you don't really understand the exam

and have strategies, you likely won't get the score you need. I mean, there are other exams emerging now that are more just pure a test of your English, right?

Like you don't need to learn strategies. IELTS is not that test, right? So that's more than half of what we do here is we tell you about the test.

That's huge. So Aubrey, we do have a poll to share from Spotify. What was this poll? Yes, it was from a recent episode 1554,

which was terrific tone for IELTS essays. This was part two of a three part series, semi-formal letters. And the question we asked was,

what kind of writing task one letter is most challenging for you to write and the options were informal, semi-formal or formal, what were the results? Yeah, and these results line up

with what I would expect to see. So informal 25%, semi-formal 50%, formal 25%. And that makes total sense to me because I think that's where a lot of our listeners

get tripped up both on IELTS and also out in the real world is I don't wanna be super casual, I don't wanna be super formal,

but how do I go in between? Exactly. Absolutely. Knowing when to write a semi formal letter. Who would that be to and then how to strike that tone. The freezes to use the grammar chunks. That is so tricky.

So if you miss that series, definitely scroll up and check it out. It was a three part series. We handled each of these tones in its own episode, semi formal, informal and formal.

Love it. So important. And guys, be sure to participate in our Spotify polls. If you're not watching or consuming the show on Spotify, you can do that. that way you can participate and make your voice heard. We do post polls after every episode

and then we have some key polls that we like to share with the audience, right? So get involved. Absolutely, we love seeing the results

and sharing's often the results here, so go answer the poll. All right, Aubrey, where should we start today? All right, so there are a few common mistakes

that are made by many IELTS students and these mistakes can cause you to get stuck at that band score of 6.5 even when you need a seven or higher.

So today we are going to help you avoid these mistakes. We just featured our student Chi, right? And it's a very similar storyline here where he started with a 5.5, came into our course,

learned the strategies, learned about the test, improved his English enough so he was ready and he bumped his score up to a seven, right? Exactly, in less than 90 days.

To go from 5.5 to a seven, it is possible. If you've been studying for you, you just keep not getting the scores you need. It is possible in a short amount of time if you have strategies and a system to get that seven or higher that you need.

100%. So there are essentially three mistakes we're going to feature today.