Written by Mr. Stephen Holyoak of The Education University of Hong Kong

It is very important that when preparing students for the IELTS test, teachers make a clear distinction between the requirements of the test and advice from the teacher. The former is made available by IELTS in official websites and publications, including public band descriptors. The latter refers, of course, to teachers’ perceptions of what their students need to do in order to succeed in the exam.

This clear separation is not intended to downplay the value of teacher input – our students will need it to do well. But without the distinction, it is unlikely that an institution or teaching team will be able to present a uniform message. Students invariably notice this and become confused and sometimes distrustful.

A couple of examples from my own experience:

1. IELTS descriptors require writing to be COHERENT and indicate that this can be achieved by a logical presentation of information and appropriate paragraphing. Teachers will need to elaborate on this fairly basic information by showing students how to structure an essay and components of the essay such as the body paragraph. Most of what they teach is likely to be uncontroversial ….. yet at every step they should remind their students that it is their advice and that IELTS is silent on such matters. Good writers do not subscribe to a single model of writing and unsurprisingly, teachers have different ideas about what should be included in an introduction, conclusion and topic sentence. We can accept this, and so can our students, providing different views are presented as such and not as IELTS law.
2. The IELTS Reading Test consists of 3 texts and 40 questions which must be answered in an hour. From this we can calculate that candidates have 90 seconds for each question. That much IELTS says and no more. Teachers will need to provide their students with strategies for coping with this time pressure. However, the strategies must be offered as advice. I teach a skimming technique for questions requiring the main idea of paragraphs and a scanning technique (with no pre-reading of the text) for all other question types. But I recognize that these approaches have evolved from my own experiences of doing official specimen papers, and that they are further based on my personal skill sets which may be different to those of my students. I point this out to them and recommend that they try out my strategies to see if they work for them.

Every institution offering its students IELTS instruction wrestles with this issue at one time or another. Some attempt to present a united front by insisting teachers adhere to some previously agreed curriculum. This, however, seems to lead to more problems than it solves.  On the other hand, the ‘this is from IELTS & this is from me’ approach has the merit of simplicity and does eliminate angst among teachers and students alike.

Stephen Holyoak obtained a Masters in Applied Linguistics from the University of Southampton, UK. He has taught English at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, the Higher Colleges of Technology in Dubai and Sharjah, UAE, and here in Hong Kong at both Lingnan University and, for the last 9 years, EdUHK.