IELTS Energy 1617: How to Increase Your IELTS Score in 10 Days

This is an IELTS Energy Podcast episode 1617, how to increase your IELTS score in just 10 days. 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 myscore. What should you do when you have just 10 days left before your exam? Today, get clear answers on exactly what to do the 10 days before you take IELTS to increase your score.

We're talking with a short plot twist for your glass. The beer can do more than dessert. Now new. Granini Selection Erdbeere. Fruchtig pur, as strawberry matcha latte or in spritz.

And more fruit taste? Find the whole Granini community. Hello, Lindsay. How are you? Hey there, Aubrey. I'm doing great. How are you? How's it going? Excellent.

I have a question. What's something that you could accomplish in 10 days if you worked hard at it? Wow. In 10 days? I feel like maybe we were talking about running earlier.

So I feel like maybe I could train for like maybe a 10K in 10 days if I worked hard at it, right? Starting at a baseline of fitness. Not that I would want to, and I think I would be very sore after. Yeah.

But I think I could do that. Yes, I love that. It's interesting because sometimes there'll be training programs that are like couch to 10k. Or it's kind of like, you know, 5k to 10k.

Like you need to know what's your level of fitness now to know how long it's going to take you to get there, right? Yeah. What about you? What's something you would, you could do in 10 days?

About the same. I bet I could maybe a 5k. No, I could probably do a 10k in 10 days. Yeah. I was thinking somewhere in between a 5 and a 10k, like a 7 and a half K, but I guess it's not a thing.

So it's not really a thing, but maybe it should be for me. Yeah. Well, we got a great question here from YouTube. Do you want to read it for us, Lindsay?

Yeah. Yes. So this question comes from Naruz Axanil Omidinova. Thank you for your amazing question. And all listeners over on YouTube, be sure to ask a question in the comments and we will do our best to answer on the show.

She says, Hello, Aubrey, Lindsay and Michelle. I'm very happy because you teach us reading tips in 15 days. I would say I have 10 days for my exam. Please give me advice on achieving IELTS 9 from listening and speaking in 10 days.

There we go. Such a good question. I think a lot of listeners out there are in that boat where you maybe found the podcast and you only have 10 or 15 days, or maybe you've been listening for a while, but you have 10 days left. And it's like, what should I do now?

What would be the most beneficial activities to do in this final 10 days? Yeah. Yeah, it's really, oh gosh, when you're down to 10 days, even 15 days, it matters how you spend every free moment of study time. Yes, exactly.

And many activities target both listening and speaking at the same time. So today we are going to share three things that you should be doing in the final 10 days before taking IELTS that will increase both of these scores. Okay. Excellent.

Excellent. So let's just get right into number one. I think our listeners are anxious to know. What is it? Yeah. So number one is to train with timed mixed IELTS listening sets every day.

So if you haven't yet been using, you know, official IELTS exams, maybe the Cambridge IELTS exams, maybe you're just doing like individual question sets at a time. Once you're at 10 days before your exam, you definitely need to be timing your practice and And you need to be using these official outlistening sets, right? And you don't want to do them passively, right?

Don't do a full test just to take as long as you need. You want to be using intensive corrections. There are specific things you should be doing after each listening exam. So we're starting to get more intensive.

We're starting to get more intentional and more systematized, right? What are the things, Aubrey, that we should look for? Yeah. So first of all, you should be checking every wrong answer carefully, right?

Find out why you missed it. You need to be aware of the mistakes you're making that can help you avoid repeating those mistakes on test day. So for example, spelling, right? Or distractions.

If you're noticing that you're distracted still while taking exams and the distractors that IELTS puts into the exam, right? Also, paraphrasing, right? If you're looking for keywords and you're not finding them and realizing, oh, this was a parallel expression. This was a paraphrase.

This is a mistake or something that you weren't ready for that it's good to be aware of so that now on test day, you'll know. Yeah. So again, paraphrasing numbers would be something to look at.

Accents, right? Very important. Or again, like we said before, distraction, losing focus. Exactly. Yeah. So many things that can be throwing you off that you need to be ready for, right?

Yeah. And when you hit difficult sections and maybe you got several answers wrong, replay that audio, read the transcript while listening, and really figure out why you missed those questions because the same tricks and traps and distractors are used on every IELTS exam. And the more you look into why you missed a question, the better you'll be prepared to get that question right on test day. So what would a strong routine look like, Aubrey, if we wanted to go ahead and practice this?

How much time would we spend doing each thing? I would do one timed listening test every day for the 10 days leading up to the exam and take an extra 20 to 30 minutes to review any mistakes, right? Take that time to look for the specific tricks that IELTS used to make you miss that answer, right? And then take that difficult audio, repeat the speaker aloud, shadow that audio to really make sure that next time your brain will be ready to take it in and understand and get those answers right.

I love that. Again, it's very intentional. It's very systematized. We have to be smart as we get closer to the test. What would be the second thing that we could do with those 10 days?

So the second thing you want to make sure that you are using high scoring chunks instead of memorizing full answers, of course, for speaking. You never want to memorize long scripts. You want to prepare flexible phrases that you can use for lots of different questions, lots of different topics. So

We're going to share a few of those here. You want to make sure that you are using chunks like this in the speaking practice answers that you're doing.

So here we have some examples to share with our listeners. Should I go ahead and list them? All right. Here's one. I've always been someone who blank, right?

What stands out to me is blank. I go back and forth on that. Or at the end of the day, I love that chunk, Aubrey. I think it sounds very natural. Mm-hmm.

And then the last one is that's not something I'd thought much about before, but XYZ. Exactly. So if you look at these chunks, if you have just this chunk memorized, you will be able to use it somewhere on the IELTS exam. And a lot of them are also filler phrases that will give you a second to think of how you want to answer or the vocabulary you're going to use.

But you want to memorize this chunk word for word so that you can say it without even thinking about it. so that you make sure to use the correct words, the correct grammar, this is really going to boost your scores. Yeah, exactly. I love it.

So good. All right, Aubrey, what would be the third strategy, the third thing we should be doing if we only have 10 days? Now you want to record yourself daily and fix one speaking weakness at a time. You don't want to let yourself get into this like panic mode where you're trying to improve everything all at once because you only have 10 days left.

That is actually going to slow progress. So instead, you want to focus on one skill at a time so that you're actually actively improving something. All right. So what are these skills?

I mean, for example, day one through three, what is the skill we could practice then? Yeah, you could focus on avoiding long pauses those first few days. So as you are recording your answers, listening back, do you hear any pauses or hesitation? Redo the answer, record yourself, eliminate those pauses that are pulling down your fluency score.

What about on day four through six, Lindsay? Well, you could focus on pronunciation and sentence stress, another really important key to actually raising your score. Exactly right. Your word stress, your the chunks, these thought groups that you're using, this needs to be accurate for that pronunciation score.

But imagine if you're trying to focus on eliminating all of your pauses, and also, you know, word stress, syllable stress, it would be really tough to do both at the same time. We know that it's very hard to multitask and probably nothing, like you said, it would slow progress. Nothing would improve because it'd be too weak. Yeah.

Days seven through eight, you could focus on adding examples and details. Also a really important skill to do on every part of the speaking test. Absolutely. And as you are doing that, make sure you're adding the high scoring vocabulary from your notebook that you have added to your active vocabulary.

As you're adding those details, those examples, you want to make sure that that's full of high scoring vocabulary. And at the very end, days nine through 10, do full mock speaking tests. Don't just do it once, though. Do it two or three times, right, Aubrey?

Not just once. Yes. Ideally, you want to do this with an IELTS coach, an IELTS teacher, so that you can get feedback. If not, you should have a speaking partner who is also extremely familiar with IELTS, has maybe taken it again, because it's not enough to just do it in a mirror, in a vacuum, right?

You need feedback to make sure that you're going to get the score you need. And when we do record ourselves with those mock speaking tests, I mean, what are we looking for? Yeah. So listen for any repetitive vocabulary.

If you're saying good or bad or small, something like that multiple times, that's especially bad because that's very low scoring. And there are so many high scoring ways to say words like that. So listen for anything repetitive and replace it with higher scoring options. Also look for any unnatural phrases like um or uh.

Be careful with that. I mean, some of that can sound natural and be natural, but if it's not natural, if it feels disjointed and breaks up the delivery, it's going to hurt your score. Right. If you have pauses that it's clear to the examiner that you are trying to think of something to say, can't think of the word, these long pauses, that's what's going to pull down your score.

You can have a few little ums and uhs. Native speakers do that as well. But it's all about the pause that's accompanied with it, right? So those unnatural pauses you want to eliminate.

Listen for them when you listen to your recorded audio. Are there long pauses? If so, you need to remove them. Yeah, look for the grammar mistakes that you tend to repeat all the time.

And it's amazing when we listen to ourselves speak, we notice things that we would never notice as we're just listening to ourselves in real time, right? Yes, pronunciation errors, grammar errors. Once you listen to that recording of your own speech, you're going to catch them. Or answers that are just too short.

We know that speaking part two has to be around two minutes, right, Aubrey? Exactly. Yeah, your speaking part two needs to be two minutes. Even part one, it can't just be a few words, one sentence.

You need to aim for three to five sentences. Give details. Share some good vocabulary. Make sure your answers aren't extremely short. Good. What else do we need to know here?

Yeah. Well, what's interesting is, you know, a simple improvement like extending answers from 15 seconds maybe to closer to a minute can significantly improve those fluency scores. You need to show the examiner that you have a lot that you could say. If the examiner has to stop you, cut you off, say thank you and ask the next question, that's a good thing that shows how fluent you are, that you have a lot to say.

Right. But what's interesting is there are so many things that you can do to target listening and speaking at the same time. For example, if you listen to 10 minutes of a podcast and then summarize it out loud, you could even think of an IELTS question on the topic or have AI create one. And this is going to help you practice both listening and speaking skills.

I love that idea. And then what will we do at that point, Aubrey, after that? Yeah. So this is a great strategy we're sharing here because then if you listen to the next 10 minutes of that podcast, it's going to help you keep actively building listening and speaking fluency.

So we're going to share a 10-day strategy here for podcast listening, for listening to English, what you could do each day. How much time do you think we should be spending, Lindsay, in that last 10 days? Okay. Probably a good 60 to 90 minutes, an hour to an hour and a half.

We want to be listening to natural content, right? Exactly. Yes. And then an additional 30 to 45 minutes speaking daily. So this is a great way to do it.

If you listen to 10 minutes, pause it, summarize it out loud. Don't just listen to 90 minutes and then do your speaking. Make it more interactive, right? It should be like...

10 minutes of one thing, then do some speaking, combine it together so that you're hitting both skills at once. And just to be clear, this is not about 60 to 90 minutes of a listening practice test, right, Aubrey? This is just listening to podcasts or content. Exactly.

This is in addition to those practice tests you'll be doing. You need to be spending some serious time the last 10 days before IELTS, and you need to be listening to at least an hour, ideally 90 minutes of English each day. Natural podcasts is the best, right? So this is in addition to the audio for IELTS practice exams.

Okay, perfect. So then it was, as we said, we're going to do 30 to 45 minutes of daily speaking. And then again, prioritizing the quality of the practice over the quantity, like we said, don't do low quality practice. Exactly.

And don't just listen for 90 minutes. You'll be lucky if you don't fall asleep. And then, oh, now I'll speak after, right? Splice it and keep it engaging.

Keep your brain interested. You want to be consistent, especially those last 10 days. Stay motivated, right? You will need to spend more time, really dig in, but it's very doable and you will be so much more prepared for IELTS if you follow some of these timing suggestions to amp up your practice that last 10 days.

Love it. Yeah. So for me, my takeaway here, Aubrey, is that in the last 10 days, like you don't have time to waste, but you don't want to just wake up in the morning on seven days before I say, what am I going to do today? I would sit down and write all this out and decide exactly what you're going to do each day in the next 10 days.

Absolutely. I think that's really vital. You do not want to waste any time when it's at the end like that. Exactly. And it's not the time to learn all this new vocabulary, right?

It's not the time to try to cram in all these new things. Good point. Yeah. Yeah, you've got the vocabulary. You've been adding vocabulary to your active vocabulary.

Now you want to make sure that you can use it on test day. You want to phase out looking at your notebook. You need to see what your brain can actually access, right? It's refining those skills so that you're ready to get the score you need on test day.

Yeah, super important. Another episode to go check out right now, guys, is IELTS Energy 1616. Increase your IELTS score by getting specific. So really good tips over there.

We recommend you go check it out. And don't forget to hit the follow button while you're over there. Yes. Awesome. Thanks, Lindsay. I will see you next time.

Have a great time. All right. Talk soon. Bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to IELTS Energy. Hit subscribe now and don't forget to find your estimated band score at allearsenglish.com slash myscore.