For Canadian PR you do not need to prepare for a different kind of IELTS study. You need to prepare for the IELTS as anyone would usually do. IELTS score depends on the use of English in your daily life.
As you will take General training IELTS, you will need to focus on the functional aspect of the language, like listening to news on CNN, BBC, etc., and understand what is being said and then conveying or discussing the topics of the news with your peers in English, etc.
This is how your everyday use of English should be. The best score for Canada PR is 8777, or getting 8 in the listening section, and 7 in the reading, writing, and speaking sections respectively.
How To Prepare IELTS
Self-motivation is the key to your success. Even if you do not know any functional English, if you have enough motivation and the drive to improve, you can learn even the Chinese language. English is very simple in its functionality.
With proper guidance you can do really well with time. Therefore, you need to have self-motivation, a drive to succeed, and a strict routine. This is how every successful person worked.
Managing your time
It is difficult to find time, but the finders are the keepers. You need to find time for yourself. It is a long and arduous journey to become a good user of any Language. Remember your life when you loved something and worked so much for it.
You did not care about sleep, food or drink or social interaction. You had a drive and you kept going for it. In the end you succeeded. You need to remember the same sensation and drive. In this case it is English.
So, you have to change your habits. You will ever be in the same cycle of failure, if you fail to change your past self. This is the most challenging work – changing yourself. To unlock your full potential you should check our courses here. Proper guideline awaits you. All you have to do is just register for a course. The rest will be taken care of in due times!
Find your level
The best first step is to take full advantage of mock tests. When you take a mock test, your weaknesses will show. If you have not registered for a course, and decide to work on your own, it is fine too!
So, first find a tutor who is experienced enough to help you with your weaknesses. After you have taken your mock test, take the scripts to your teacher. Your tutor will then tell you how you can get rid of your weaknesses.
Take one mock test every week and consult your tutor. After every diagnosis, you correct yourself for the rest of the week and then come back to take another mock test. This is how you keep taking mock tests and using your tutor to improve yourself.
Please, have a look at the following tips and use them as your guideline. This will really help. Remember, you have to form your own plan for your own success.
Practice listening
To become good at anything, you need a lot of repetitive practice. If you train your muscles everyday, one day you will see the change in your physique. If you practice running, you will become a good runner.
Everything starts from zero, but how you can go from zero depends on your conviction, determination, and willpower to do hard work, and make things happen. So, for listening you will have to follow the guidelines laid out here. Print a copy and keep it close.
If you have a smartphone, download the TuneIn app. This is a very good source to get your English contents from. You can choose the country accent you want to learn and adapt to by browsing through channels by regions of the world.
You can choose the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and so on. Once you have selected the region you can choose the channel you want to listen to. You can keep listening to the channel or switch to another whenever you want. It is really cool!
Use your headphones to listen to your favorite channel all day or whenever you have some time. Keep the headphone on and keep listening even when you are about to sleep, eat or go to the restroom. In short, listen to English as much as possible and get accustomed to the intonations, pronunciation, accent, etc.
You can also use YouTube, if you do want to keep listening to radio content. To watch videos and also listen to English – two birds with one stone! Watching the subtitles for new words, taking notes about who, which, what, where, when, and how regarding a particular video content will improve your hand and eye coordination and your reading speed as well.
During your mock tests, try to save time by reading ahead. In between sections, you will be asked by the recording to revise and check your answers. Use this 30 seconds to read a few questions and answer options from the next section.
Do not read more than you can remember. Underline any word/s you find important. Use the underlined words as keywords or clues to find answers from the recording. You need to focus on finding the words in the recordings.
The answers will be around the keywords. So, listen for the keywords. Underline all nouns, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc., in the question.
Do not transfer your answers during the exam time, because for this you will have extra 10 minutes. Just take notes and write down answers on your question booklet. Use the playback time to find your answers.
Practicing Reading
Reading is not just reading, you have to keep your eyes open for every little detail, the twist in words or information. Sometimes you have to deduce something from pieces of information.
Therefore, you have to practice reading critically. Read good story books, journals, online newspapers, etc. Read books written by famous writers. If you keep reading, you will eventually learn how to interpret the literature you are reading.
Patterns are your friends. Find out the various types of questions you will face during the reading exam. Study the types. Ask yourself, how do I answer them easily, if possible even without reading the whole passage? Number the questions from level 0 upward where zero stands for the easiest question type.
Do the marking for all the 40 questions at the very beginning of the exam. This will save time in the long run. Do categorizing all at once. Spend as little time as possible. Use this strategy during your mock exams.
If you need to bring a little change in your strategy you can easily do it during mock tests but during the main exam you will not have time.
Letting a question go when you feel you are stuck is a great virtue during an exam. IELTS is a very time sensitive exam. Even the loss of a few seconds can cost you dearly.
So, the moment you have an inkling that a question can be problematic, leave it so you can come back later. Answer the questions that you are sure of.
Then slowly keep working on the difficult ones by returning to them again and again. Keep cycling through them. You may not find the answer at first try but coming back after some time might give you a fresher look at the question.
If you have time to revise, then do so. See if you have made any mistakes marking the answers on your answer sheet. Be careful about common mcq misfortune – mistakenly marking an ‘a’ instead of a ‘b’ or something like that and transferring as it is on the question booklet.
If you have to write words for your answers, then check the grammar of the sentence after you have put the answers. Sometimes, you may have to change word forms, for instance, from verb to noun, etc. Your answer must match the grammar of the sentence or you do not get any number for that.
Practicing Writing
You can turn even the most common words into an amazing piece just by using expressions, logic, reasoning, and so on. Writing is a skill that you need to practice everyday.
While you listen and read, keep track of new words and how they are used in sentences. You need to read and analyze the work of good writers, look at their sentence structure, and try to copy the sentence patterns using your own words.
After you take a mock test or write a report on a topic you have read about or listened to, show the script to your tutor. S/he will mark the spelling, vocabulary, and other grammar mistakes and tell you how you can solve them.
You learn about the mistakes and correct them, and practice some more on the same topic. Keep repeating these until your tutor clears that you have overcome the mistakes you have made so far. Then move on to another topic and repeat the same process.
Keep writing on various topics and show the scripts to your tutor for diagnosis. Also, write a mock test once or twice a week. Keep doing this until the day of your actual IELTS test.
Practicing Speaking
Usually, the most terrifying test for new test takers is the Speaking test. Due to lack of use in everyday life, most test takers feel very nervous and have psychological breakdown; and due to this breakdown, even if some of them are good at English, they fail to produce results because they do not use it in an unfriendly environment and with unknown people.
You will start seeing your weakness when you take the first mock test. All kinds of problems will show and your tutor will mark them for you. You need to consume a lot of content about varieties of topics to broaden your knowledge base and experience of the world.
You can choose one particular topic of your choice and keep speaking your mind. This is like a free run without the fear of any mistakes. Just keep speaking till you are exhausted.
No need to measure your time at this point. The goal is to speak till your head feels light and you feel absolutely drained. Then move on to another topic. This is how you spend the first week.
You are now in the second week of your practice. Now, you need to start planning your speech a little by adding time limitations. You need to choose a topic and plan how you can finish your speech within 2 minutes.
This is the standard time limit for your IELTS official exam cue card. Take one minute to note down some useful points on the topic. Do this within 15 to 20 seconds. After your points are all in front of you, immediately begin speaking and try to finish the whole speech in 20 seconds, and then try for the second time.
Why? Because, the second or the third try is always better than the first try. Your voice will not be recorded within the first 60 seconds. This is given for your brainstorming and you have freedom to use this whatever way you want it to use.
Use a low enough voice so that you can hear yourself – just like muttering or whispering. Have faith and be brave and do this, you will thank me later.
When you try the first time, you will be in a hurry to finish. At the end of the first try you will be able to figure out what you have missed, so in the next try you will perform a reset of your speech and find a different approach.
This is instinctive, so you do not have to worry. Then your 120 seconds time limit will begin. Now, you have all the time in your world to speak freely and extend your points as much as possible to fit the 120 second time limit. If you could do a good job in 20 seconds, imagine what you can do within 120 seconds!
Always be in control of your speech. If you do not do so, your speech will control you. This means that you will start making no sense of your words and you are nervous and going blank in your mind. Always keep the points in front of you.
There are so many books and topics for mock practice online. Just do a search, you will find a lot!
Talk to your tutor, send him your recordings on a topic, and get corrections of your mistakes. Try again and get fixed again. This way very soon you will be able to overcome the problems you have.
Do not be afraid of correction. The more corrections you get the better your performance will be. Make conversations with strangers on Omegle platform. This will get rid of your nervousness and stage fear. You will do excellent in the final exam if you can do this! This is the best way to improve.
For your IELTS study for Canada pr, try to follow the instructions here and keep practicing them until the day of your official exam. Your hard work will never fail you!!