IELTS Energy 1612: Score Stories Part 1: Frankie's Overall 8 on IELTS

This is an IELTS Energy Podcast, Episode 1612, Score Stories, Part 1, Frankie's Overall 8 on IELTS. Welcome to the IELTS Energy Podcast from All Ears English. Downloaded more than 35 million times with examiner-trained IELTS whiz Aubrey Carter and Michelle Kaplan, the New York radio girl. 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 forward slash my score. If you've found your IELTS motivation withering in the summer heat, we have a solution for you. Today, you'll hear from Frankie, who scored an overall eight on IELTS. He'll share his strategies that helped him get this score so you can boost both your scores and your motivation this summer.

I'll see you next time. Search for All Ears English Business English wherever you listen and listen to Aubrey, Michelle and Lindsay three days a week. See you there.

Michelle, how are you today? I'm doing well, Aubrey. How are you? Excellent. Have you ever had a hard time staying motivated for something? Oh, of course.

I think it happens to everybody, right? You're tired, you lose interest, you feel like you've plateaued, right? Yeah. Oh my gosh. We've all been there, right?

This is very normal. And especially for IELTS, if you have struggled to stay motivated for IELTS, you're not alone, right? Maybe your goal is to study an hour a day and you're lucky. If you do that once a week, you're not alone.

We hear this a lot from students. And we are here today to give you the boost that you need. Yeah, exactly, Aubrey. So one of the best ways that you can renew your motivation for IELTS is to actually hear student success stories.

So knowing that other IELTS students got the score they needed and hearing how they did it can be super motivating. Exactly. So today you're going to hear from Frankie and how he scored overall eight. He'll share three tips that will help you get the score you need.

Let's hear the episode. Welcome, Frankie, to the podcast. Everyone out there listening, we have this very special, exciting surprise. Frankie, you just got some amazing IELTS scores.

I don't want to bury the lead. Can you just tell us right off the bat, what were your IELTS scores? I got eight in total. Amazing. Yeah. For the breakdown, I got 8.5 for my reading and listening.

and eight for my speaking and seven for my writing. Amazing. Congratulations, first of all. An overall eight is always so exciting. And these 8.5s on some individual tests, amazing.

So I'm excited to dive into how you got these scores, some strategies you can share with our listeners. But first, can you share with us, just introduce yourself, where do you live? Why were you taking the IELTS exam?

I'm Frankie and I'm from Hong Kong. So actually, it's not my first time to do the IELTS. Like I did two IELTS tests before. So like when I got into the uni and also when I did my, when I got admitted myself to a master degree.

So I only got like seven, like I think seven total in the previous two tests. So like recently I want to move to Australia with my partner. So I'm like, okay, I have to do a test. So very exciting.

So the goal is to move to Australia, which fantastic. I know a lot of our listeners are also hoping one day to immigrate to move to Australia. A lot of our IELTS students, I would love to live in Australia. I just want to visit Australia, but I could totally live there.

That's exciting. Yep. Okay. I haven't taken exam for a long time. So I was like, oh, I mean, when you do exam, right, you need techniques. So I'm like, so I was Googling like IELTS,

test preparations. So I found the podcast and then I listened to the podcast by Arby and the others. So I was like, oh, it's amazing. So I did the three keys.

Yes. Okay. So when you first took the IELTS exam, you took it a couple of times, couldn't get higher than overall seven. You had not yet gone through our course three keys IELTS, right?

And then when you were studying again for the exam, you found the podcast, you found our course. So let's talk about how did that make a difference? Let's go some specific exams at first. Let's talk about speaking.

What made a difference? What did you learn? What strategies can you share with our listeners that you learned in Three Keys IELTS that could help them?

For speaking, I forgot what questions I had done before in the previous two times. So I think it's important to do this course because it would let me know, okay, what kind of questions I would expect in the exam. So I would not be

Panic, right? I mean, when I... In examination. So it was really important, I mean, to get familiar with those questions first. And also, like, I mean, the techniques I knew in those...

In the three key courses, I was like... they're not really difficult tips or techniques, but like, it's easy to remember. So when I went through, in the exam, right, I just, I just keep reminding myself, okay, just calm down and then like, just follow the steps, like what I've learned before. And then,

Okay, I love that. So would you say that a lot of it was just being able to go in confident knowing like, I have the strategies, I know what to expect. I feel like that's the case with the speaking exam that a lot of it is your level of confidence and how stressed out you are affects your performance a lot. Did you feel confident going into the speaking exam?

Yeah, I felt more confident because I was like, OK, I knew that there would be another questions. OK, that would be like a ending questions. OK, I know like this question will be general. So like I think all these will help me to be more confident to not to panic.

Right. Because like in an exam, I mean, people get panicked really easily. Yeah, so you were able to learn enough about the speaking exam and what exactly would happen next and what questions to expect that you didn't have that anxiety that students would have not really knowing exactly what the test will be like for sure. Okay, let's talk about listening and reading.

These were extremely high scores for you to score 8.5s. Can you think of any specific strategies that you learned that really seemed to help on test day?

Yeah. Let's talk about the reading first. When I did the reading exam, I went through the questions first. So I knew what I needed to get when I was reading an article.

So I knew I need to focus on these things. So these are the techniques, right? I mean, they're not really difficult techniques, but you need to know before you go to the exam center. Yeah, so reading the questions first, finding those keywords instead of starting by just reading the whole passage.

We've said that here on the podcast. We definitely hit that hard in the course. This is a mistake a lot of students make to just see it as a comprehension exam, read the entire passage when you don't have time to do that, right? You have to really look at the questions, target keywords, know what you're looking for in the passage.

You feel like that helped you get this high of a score? Yeah. yeah, like a topic sentence, I mean, I think you've meant, you guys mentioned a lot. And also like, I keep reminding myself like not to try to understand every single word because like, I think that's a trap, right?

Because like, okay, that's something I'm not familiar with. And then, But just don't spend time on trying to understand it too much and then just look for keywords, which are crucial, right? Yes.

I love that you brought that up because you're exactly right. That's an IELTS trap that there will be unfamiliar words in these reading passages, but they're almost never the key to getting the answer correctly. So you had learned this. You knew too.

You can almost totally ignore those words and you're still going to be able to find the answer, right? Yeah. And also for the listening part, I remember there were four parts in the listening exam.

And for the second part, I lost track because it was about a trip to the UK. And then it mentioned a lot of places. I even don't know how to pronounce those words. So I lost track.

And I just... tell myself, okay, at that time, I told myself, okay, don't, if you, if I miss like just one question, right, just skip it and then just go to the other one.

Okay. That's such a good point. Yes. This happens to students a lot where you lose track in the audio. Suddenly you realize suddenly I have missed an answer or two.

And then the key is to not panic, to just figure out where you are in the answers. Don't stress about the ones you've missed. You can write something later and get back on track so that you hear the rest of the answers. Right?

Yeah. Because you still scored an 8.5. So this is a really good point. I'm glad you're pointing this out that you can get lost in the audio. You can lose track of where you are.

And if you don't let that panic you, if you stick to the strategies and just calmly find where you are, you could miss just one question and still score an 8.5. Amazing. I think that's one of the things like you, you,

you talk about, right, in one of the podcasts. I can't remember which one it is, but I think that's the kind of technique, right? I remember, like, when I... Yes.

I mean, exactly. Yes, because we have to expect for things like that to happen, right? We need to be prepared for the worst. That happens to a lot of students that we – and I love you kind of pointed out you knew exactly why that happened.

It's audio about the UK, and they start naming towns or counties you're unfamiliar with, right? They're saying Manchester, Essex, Sussex, Surrey, and it would be sort of like I don't – know these words, I'm not familiar with these words, and it might be harder to track the audio. But you had the strategies and you knew to just stay calm.

And you had read the questions ahead of time. So you knew what to listen for to get back on track. You've heard us share vital strategies here on the IELTS Energy Podcast that will help you get the score you need. Do you want to know what score you would get if you used these strategies on the IELTS exam today?

We have created a free IELTS quiz that will tell you what you would likely score on IELTS. You can take the quiz, get your predicted score, and we'll also give you free IELTS materials appropriate for your level to help you improve your score. Go to allearsenglish.com slash myscore for our free IELTS quiz. That's allearsenglish.com slash M-Y-S-C-O-R-E.

I love that. Okay, awesome. What about writing? You scored a seven on writing, which is difficult to do. A lot of students are trying to get that seven on writing and they take IELTS multiple times and they can't quite get it.

They're scoring sixes, 6.5s. So what tips can you give? What did you learn in the course that helped you score that seven on writing? Writing is always my weakest paper, I would say.

You're not alone. It's hard. It's difficult. Not only in hours. And also, like, other, like, exams I took before. And when I was in secondary school or, like, primary school, it's always my weakest part.

So, actually, I spent quite a lot of time on preparing the writing task. And Amber, like, you taught us, I mean, to manage your time really, really well. Because, like, I'm a really slow writer. So, like,

And I remember you told us, I mean, to spend like 20 minutes on part one. Yes. 40 minutes for part two. And I remember those like linking words, linking sentences, phrases.

So it helped a lot because like I didn't have to spend time on like, I mean, creating a structure. because like and it's really challenging I mean like I mean to to write a lot of words right within like 60 minutes especially like for a topic like I'm a not thief in the middle with

So, like, I remember, like, you taught us, I mean, to proofread it. And I'm, like, I'm glad that I did it because I find quite a few typos. Oh, yes. Yeah, because, like, when I'm working, right, usually I use Microsoft Word, and usually they will highlight it, right, underline the typo, right?

It has a spell check for you. You don't have that on test day, right? And it doesn't exist in the iOS exam, so... Exactly. I love this. I love that you're talking about time management because we do talk quite a bit about that in the course because this can be if someone gets sort of lost on task one and takes much longer than the 20 minutes.

If you don't have a feel for how long it's going to take you to write those essays, you could run out of time and never even get to task two. That would be worst case scenario. So you have to really practice writing your essays, timing yourself so that you can confidently know on test day, I can write these essays in the time that I have, right? Yeah.

I'm writing those courses, right? In the three keys course, it always restricts the number of words. I mean, students can put it back. So I'm like, oh, yeah, because...

time management is always important in this task. So like in the real exam, right, I tell myself, okay, not to write too much, especially a task one, otherwise I won't have time for task two. So like it allows me to have, it allowed me to have some time, I mean, to do the proofreading, which was important because I got typos.

Right, that you were able to catch. That's such a good point that if you write too much, You're going to run out of time. You won't have time to proofread.

You're likely adding extra ideas and not supporting them in task two, or you're spending too much time on task one. So yes, in Three Keys IELTS, we make you limit your essays because you have to do this on test day. You just don't have time, right? So 150 to 200 words for task one, 250 to 300 words for task two.

That's all you need. IELTS examiners aren't counting words. It doesn't really matter as far as your score. It matters for time management. You only have time to write a certain amount and still be able to proofread.

And it is vital. Like you said, you caught a bunch of typos. You maybe would have scored a five on your grammar if you hadn't caught all of those misspelled words.

Um, or there may have been punctuation errors. There may be other things that you had caught that boosted your score and allowed you to get that overall seven that may have made all the difference.

Awesome. Well, congratulations again. Amazing scores and overall eight. So exciting. 8.5s. It sounds like you really applied all of the strategies you learned in Three Keys IELTS.

So you were able to be confident on test day, knowing you were going to get the score you needed. And now you can move on with your goals. What's your timeframe as far as when do you plan? When are you hoping to move to Australia?

Yeah. probably after a year so like um but i don't have like a fixed date yet so like i need to discuss with my partner so like yes but i think like i mean um like getting a good score i mean which allows me to get a visa easily and also maybe it's easier for me to land a job there so like yeah i think that will help a lot there awesome very exciting good luck on all of your endeavors we're so excited for you and thank you for joining us today on the podcast

Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Frankie. Bye-bye. Such amazing tips. I really love that even though Frankie lost track of the listening audio, he didn't let this throw him off.

He had strategies. He knew to stay calm, skip the questions he missed, move on to the next one he heard, and was still able to get an amazing score on IELTS Listening.

Yeah, exactly. And so we also recently recorded an episode about this. So if you missed it, just be sure to check it out. So it is IELTS Energy 1587. What if I get lost on IELTS listening?

So that's a really good one. Yes, this is so vital. This happens often that you just realize you've missed a couple of questions, you got distracted, or you just were listening and missed some key words. You need strategies to make sure this doesn't affect your score, that doesn't throw you off.

So check that one out. And stay tuned for part two of this series, where we are going to share how Ama also scored an overall eight and her tips. So Michelle, I will see you there. I'm excited for everyone to meet Ama.

Yes. Enjoy, guys. Thanks for listening to IELTS Energy. Hit subscribe now and don't forget to find your estimated band score at allearsenglish.com slash myscore.

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