Making IELTS Conversational Training

Challenge

My students were struggling to answer Part 2 speaking questions for the IELTS exam, a part of the exam that pushes exam takers to describe people, places, and objects for two minutes straight.

However, as a small business owner, I didn’t have the bandwith to create lessons that would only be suitable for one type of student. In wanting to create lessons that many of my students could enjoy, the following goals guided my instruction and design:

1. To help people simultaneously learn natural conversational English while preparing for the IELTS.
2. To address a pain point amongst intermediate to advanced learners who still struggle with day-to-day conversation topics, but who can’t find resources above the beginner level.
3. To give my clients a variety of ways to say the same thing which will help them on the IELTS and in real-life English conversations.

Solution

Using a task-based learning approach, I created courses that would help students practice these questions in real-life situations while also picking up natural spoken English that isn’t covered in vocabulary books.

Each lesson was compromised of a PPT, a printable activity PDF, as well as an audio recording with a native English speaker using the target language. See this recording for an example of what the recording is like.

I ended up creating two lessons to help my students:

Describing Places
Describing People

Results

Students reported that they learned more vocabulary. In particular they found the Describing Places lesson helped them enhance their vocabulary.