For the past few days, I have been trying to come up with a study plan to help organise my IELTS preparation. Read on and learn how to create your own IELTS study plan that is tailor-made for your very own study needs.

 

Before I started creating a study plan, I used some free online demos (which can be found here) to get a rough idea on what kinds of problems I am likely to run into in an actual IELTS test. The way I did it was very simple — I simply made a note every time I:

• saw a vocabulary that I don’t understand;
• encountered difficulty in composing a sentence;
• had problems with understanding a speaker and
• failed to locate the answer source from the given information.

Then, I counted the time of myself running into these problems and decided which one I should work on. As you may have noticed, these are the problems that are likely to cause a candidate to freeze and stop writing during language tests. As time is of the essence in IELTS, I would like to make sure that I can avoid all these hiccups in the actual test.

Creating your own study plan becomes very simple once you know what you are good and bad at. Realising that I am weak at composing sentences, I decide to spend the most time on it while making sure I also work on other areas regularly. Now my study plan looks like this:

Why just one week, you ask? Well, the reason is simple. All study plans should be flexible, and flexibility is very important when there are many areas of revision to cover — for example, you might solve one problem earlier than you had expected, and it would be unwise to not make changes to your study plan. Assess your progress every week and make changes accordingly.