Intro Class. IELTS Goals. Making Sense of the Assessment Criteria | Teacher’s Notes

This part is available in the paid version of the course. You can follow this link to buy the whole course:

t.me/IELTSNaturallyBot⁠

Our IELTS goals

Finish the statements so they’re true for you:

I decided to do this course because…

My exam date is…

I need a score of… overall.

I’m not planning to take IELTS soon but I’d like to work on my…

The section I’m worried about the most is… because…

I’m really looking forward to…

Here’s what I think will help me reach my IELTS goal:…

Here are some things that might get in the way: …

One of the subgoals of this course is to help Ss see their IELTS preparation more as a fun, enriching experience and less as torture and drudgery. As Ss give their answers, try to amplify the positive parts and reassure them where you can.

For example, they’ll probably say that they’re scared of Writing - at this point, you can confidently say that it’s okay to feel this way at the beginning and that it’s true even for advanced candidates; tell them that on this course you’re going to help them reframe writing and see it as something interesting and cool.

Accept all answers, but try to guide them gently towards realistic-sounding suggestions, especially for the latter two questions. For example, if they say that they’re going to study the whole day on the weekends, ask them whether they’ve blocked out downtime on weekdays and warn them about academic burnout. It may also be a good idea at this point to tell them not to engage with any IELTS sources on the internet that have not been approved and recommended by you.

Give them a trusted list of IELTS podcasts to listen to and explain how anything else they find on the internet may be a waste of time, and potentially hurt their score.

These are my top picks: My IELTS Classroom Podcast

https://blog.myieltsclassroom.com/category/podcast/⁠

Success with IELTS Podcast

https://successwithielts.com/podcast⁠

If your Ss are feeling fatalistic (sometimes at the beginning of the course Ss say things like - if I don’t get an 8.5, I’m a failure!), you may want to tell them about how the same candidates sometimes receive drastically different scores on different dates in different test centres. You may suggest that they subscribe to Arina Fadeeva on Telegram / Instagram so that they can learn more about actual recent experiences of other test takers and stay abreast of the new topics and changes: @ieltswithtutoraf (Telegram).

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