Welcome to the course "IELTS writing made simpler."
Who's this?
That's me.
My name is Barry Leach and I have been a university teacher in Istanbul, Turkey for 14 years.
I was also a teacher for many years in high schools and middle schools. At university
I taught IELTS and I've also taught TOEFL.
And my specialty is in academic writing, so you are in great hands.
Now, this course is for students whose English is at intermediate level and above.
Now, if your English is not quite there, then this is not the course for you.
You should spend time bringing your English up by going to English courses, reading grammar books and
reading books and things like that.
Because if you take an IELTS exam, let's say tomorrow, and you only get a score of four, how can you
change that four into a seven if your English is not at the right level?
So this course, yes, it does teach you some grammar and it does teach you some vocabulary.
It teaches you lots and lots of techniques, but it's not an English course.
OK, I can take your level...
Let's say you took an exam tomorrow and in writing you got five and a half,
then there shouldn't really be a problem in bringing that up to a seven
perhaps -- your English is at the right standard. A good IELTS course will teach you the tactics that
you need and the strategies you need to pass.
IELTS is not a language course as such.
So anybody who promises you that if you take their course, you will get a seven or eight or nine --
Well, that's not true because if you start at the same level as this man.
Tarzan, then it doesn't matter how many courses he takes in IELTS, he will always be Tarzan and will
never have good English.
OK, now I'm sure you're not Tarzan, OK, but you see what I mean.
You need a good level of English to be able to achieve a seven or more.
And like I said, you do a course instead of this.
Or if you want, if your English is nearly there, then you can be doing an English course at the same
time as doing this
IELTS writing course and you should read storybooks and I'll talk about that more later.
The lectures in this course concern:
.
So which sections should you do?
..
.
Now, the title of this course is "IELTS Writing Made Simpler," not "IELTS Writing Made Simple" because
it's not simple at all.
In fact, sometimes it can be a little difficult, but I promise you that this course will help.
It will become much simpler for you
the more you go on. Now, you should have a study plan, OK?
It's not enough just to watch these videos and say, "Yyeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh yeah.
I understand." You need a study plan, OK?
You need to set out your goals and you'll find lots of practice questions on the Internet, particularly
at this site:
So make a note of that.
OK, it says it's for academic writing samples for task one, but also on that site, you'll find them
for task 2 and for the general writing task as well.
OK, so you could find lots of practice questions and do them and you should do them under exam conditions.
Maybe not at the beginning if you're new to IELTS, but certainly you should do many of them under exam
conditions before you do the real exam.
And you'll need somebody to grade or check your work, so when you write an answer to an essay, then
you need somebody that you can trust to go through your work, give you feedback, and tell you what you
need to improve on.
Now, you must this must be an experienced teacher or an online service that you can trust.
Now, what do I mean when I say online service, you can trust?
Well, you never know who is taking your money.
It could be a teacher with no IELTS experience, or an English teacher whose native language is not English.
Maybe their English level isn't good enough.
Maybe it's a site that is operated by a student who took IELTS last year.
What do they know about it?
OK, so if you are at a school that does IELTS, teaches IELTS, then perhaps you can find a teacher
there who can help you.
I'm sure if you wash their car once a week, something like that, maybe they'll take a look at your
essays.
So that should be your study plan.
And if you put this into place, then you can succeed.
Right.
So let's start the course.