Why blog?

As I am sure you know, the IELTS test has separate sections for each of the four skills that are important for living languages, including English. The final band grade is the average of the individual band scores for listening, reading, writing and speaking.

Whilst it is important to practice for the format of each part of the test, some language criteria are important across all, and explicitly assessed in the writing and speaking components. These are

• for writing:
• task achievement or response 
• coherence and cohesion
• lexical range (appropriate use of vocabulary)
• grammatical range and accuracy
   
• for speaking
• fluency and coherence
• lexical range 
• grammatical range and accuracy 
• pronunciation
   

The two common elements here are lexical range, the ability to appropriately use a wide vocabulary, and grammatical range and accuracy, which I think is self-explanatory. Naturally, before we can use the vocabulary and the grammar of a language, we need to be able to understand both. This is why  IELTS and language teachers in general emphasise the importance of reading and listening, which is where we see, and where our brains learn, words and grammar in practice. The official website for the TOEFL exam, for example, explicitly tells potential test takers that "The more you listen, the more you will understand vocabulary and expressions," and that "Reading is the best way to improve your vocabulary" (TOEFL Tips, 2018).

Regular blogging that involves written responses to what is read or listened to not only provides valuable practice in the three skills of reading, listening and writing, but can help strengthen the global areas of task achievement, fluency, coherence and cohesion, lexical range, and grammatical range, all of which help your language learning generally, and your IELTS performance specifically. 

The statistics that the IELTS organisation keeps also consistently show that writing is the skill that scores the lowest grade in tests across all user profiles.

This is why we have a class blog.