Believe it or not, ever since I have landed in Canada the number of people who told me my English – is really good is very high. I never considered it that way ever! I was always shy to speak even when spoken to in English. Just lack of self-confidence and we are working on it! One of the biggest milestones while applying for immigration to Canada is the IELTS exam. Its a language exam, yes, but there is a format that you have to follow in order to ace it. Attempting IELTS might seem a little intimidating for some, and not so much for others. I will share a few resources and some tips which I used to prepare for IELTS exam.

If you are applying for student visa, you will be taking IELTS Academics. The difference between IELTS General and Academics is the writing exam, rest of it stays the same. I have not attempted Academics so I am not the person to talk about it. For my General exam, I went to crash course of one month at IDP Islamabad. At that time they were located in F7 Markaz. It helped with understanding how to take the exam but I did not score as much as I wanted to. The next time when I took my exam, I decided to prepare for it using the available IELTS books in market and Youtube.

Study Material

The book I studied from was Barron’s IELTS Practice Exam book. It had all the practice exams in it and also included a CD/DVD to help you prepare for your Listening exam. You can find it at Saeed Book Bank in Islamabad or other old book stores. The book was recommended by IDP instructor so I followed it and not the Cambridge book series.

Youtube can be your best friend to learn anything at all! I was recommended these channels by a friend and they REALLY helped me. You can follow E2 IELTS for your writing, reading and listening exam. You can also follow this channel for speaking as well. However, I followed another channel to prepare for my speaking exam as well. The instructor on E2 IELTS that I was following was Jay and Jay really helped me prepare for my exam.

For Speaking exam, I was following Manjita Osta on Youtube. She has great instructional videos and tips for the exam and will really help you prepare for your IELTS. For me speaking exam was intimidating when I appeared for it the first time, the second time, I went with the mindset that I had to get it done and I did.

Booking the Exam

In Pakistan, you can book your exam from British Council or IDP. I have booked my exam both times with IDP, so I will recommend the same. If you take the computer based exam, you will have your results within one week. With paper-based exam, it takes about 15 days to get the results.

That’s all for now on how you can prepare for your IELTS. This is certainly an important milestone in processing your application for immigration to Canada. You can read about the process in detail here. Keep practicing all the exercises from the book and the videos and you will be able to score really well!