Developing Your IELTS Listening Skills

The common belief among students getting ready for taking IELTS or TOEFL is to listen as much as possible, as often as possible from all potential sources, in all possible dialects of English.
This approach might efficient with advanced students. Some upper-intermediate students can follow this approach too.

What about those whose command of English is at a lower level? Well, I would advise them to refrain from listening to randomly selected materials, especially if they find them too difficult and as a result, discouraging. No one wants to get discouraged, do they? Instead they should choose carefully their listening practice by making sure it is at a suitable level. An ideal listening exercise should enable learners to guess the meaning of new words from the context. Besides, they should be able to follow the main idea of the recording without difficulty. To find out the level of your English, you can either take a placement test in a language school or test your own listening comprehension skills by using recordings available on the internet. Start with listening for beginners, then move on to materials for intermediate learners, and finally those for advanced learners. It should give you an idea of your English proficiency level.

While you're at it, you should make an attempt at this IELTS quiz and see how you fare.

GMAT: The 2-at-a-time Sentence Correction Method

No one likes staring at a mass of text on the monitor of their computer adaptive test on the big day of your GMAT exam, whether it’s a reading comprehension passage or a long critical reading prompt. But one particularly area where it’s particularly daunting to see a lot of text is on sentence correction question that’s four lines long- and all four are underlined. One question could be almost as long as a short reading comprehension passage.

First, we have to break down the question into layers and eliminate accordingly. See a plural singular error in the first answer choice? See if you can spot a similar error in another answer choice- and eliminate both of them. Often, errors repeat themselves.

After that, compare the answer choices to one another two at a time. Pick which one you think sounds better, and eliminate the other one. Eventually, you’ll arrive at the correct answer- and with less stress than if you had tried to compare all 5 in your head at once.

Finally, learn to spot the common sentence correction errors- especially ones involving parallel structure, comparisons, and modifiers. These will help you get through the longer prompts much more quickly.

Remember that the GMAT is about more than getting the correct answer- it’s about getting the correct answer in enough time and without stress. The test designers know this- that’s why they use longer stimuli for sentence correction questions- for intimidation as much as difficulty. If you can break the stimulus down, compare two choices at a time, and remember common errors, you’ll have more than enough preparation to stare down those intimidating monster questions.

TOEFL iBT Independent Speaking

According to ICON+, a TOEFL Singapore specialist, most students prefer to think that independent speaking tasks are one of the easiest among the spoken tasks, when compared to integrated ones. This thought can be true so long as you know how to take advantage of that one minute that you have for each independent speaking task. Having 15 to 20 seconds of preparation time and subsequently speaking for 45 to 60 seconds can be daunting for many TOEFL IBT test takers.

Infact, most students find it rather difficult to either fill in the time given or fit in all they have to say in their TOEFL, which stands for Test Of English As A Foreign Language, independent speaking test. The key to success is splitting the response period into 3 proportional parts, each of them devoted respectively to: stating your opinion, presenting at least two reasons that would justify your stand and providing some examples. By speaking a bit faster, when you have more things to share, or slowing down, when you feel that this topic is not your cup of tea, you can take control of your time. Last but not least, make sure the pace of your speech sounds natural!

Google's New Place Search

If you're performing local searches, e.g. on google.com.sg or google.co.uk, you may have come across a new search results format, where Google Places (i.e. Google Maps) listings are merged together with organic results.

This is part of the new Place Search function recently rolled out by Google, which you can activate by clicking on the Places link or the red pin on the drop-down menu on the left. It's also automatically triggered for certain keywords under "Everything" searches.

Larry Lim, an SEO Consultant in Singapore, has written extensively about this new Google Place Search function and its impact on local SEO. Go have a read!