Page 321 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

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Part V: What Kind of Class Will I Have?
IELTS (International English
Language Testing System)
This exam started in the 1980s and is becoming increasingly well known. As the name suggests, there is a very international feel to this exam. There are a variety of accents and styles of writing in most of the papers.
IELTS is for people who:
✓ Want to emigrate to Canada, Australia, the UK or New Zealand.
✓ Professional people, especially those in the medical field, who want to practise in the UK, USA or Australia.
✓ Want to attend university or higher education courses in New Zealand, USA, Australia, Canada, UK, and South Africa.
✓ Want to undertake work experience programmes in an English-speaking country.
Once students have taken the exam, the result is usually valid for two years depending on who needs it. Language skills can fluctuate a great deal over this period of time, so in a situation where competition is intense a university is entitled to set more stringent entrance criteria. However, this is fairly rare.
The exam results are given in bands of 0 through to 9. So, 0 means that the candidate didn’t do the test and a 9 means that the candidate is an expert English user.
It isn’t usually worth taking the exam unless you can achieve a band 5.5 score at least. However UK universities sometimes ask for a score as high as 7.5, and in the USA some academic institutions ask for 8.5.
Students tend to improve by 0.5 to 1.0 on average in three months of study
if they are in an English speaking country and need six months of study otherwise. For example, students who begin an IELTS course with a score of 6.0 (based on pre-course testing) typically achieve 6.5 or 7.0 by the end of the course.
Fortunately you can take IELTS more frequently than most other exams, so students can repeat the exam within weeks if they have a bad day and mess it up. It costs approximately £100 to take the exam each time.
Although IELTS is generally considered to be for higher education, the exam has two versions. One is the Academic exam and the other is the General English version. Most students need the Academic version but emigrants and work experience candidates who are applying for internships take General English.