Long vowel sounds /α:/, /ɔ:/, /ɜ:/

I suppose the name ‘long vowel sounds’ is pretty self-explanatory, so I’m not going to bore you with lengthy definitions. 

In this post I’m going to tell you about three long vowel sounds, /α:/, /ɔ:/, and /ɜ:/. Shall we begin?

/α:/ as in car

/α:/ is a long vowel sound generated at the back of the mouth. To make this sound, open your jaw and relax your lips while keeping your tongue flat and pulled a little bit back. In writing it can be represented by the following combinations of letters:

IELTS Listening. Flow charts

About

On IELTS, flow charts are usually used to present the stages of a certain process. The information is usually presented in the form of notes and the order of questions is consistent with the flow of the recording; that is, the answer to question 1 will come first, then there’ll be the answer to question 2, and so on.

Why it can be difficult

The main difficulty associated with this type of task is that you need to actively listen all throughout the recording, since if one answer is missed, it’s more difficult to do the following question – often test takers keep listening for the answer to question 1 when the recording deals with question 2 or 3.

What to do before listening:

Top 11 tips for IELTS Listening

I suppose you might have already done a practice Listening paper and, for one reason or another, made up your mind to explore the ways of improving your score. So, how do you go about making your results better?

Firstly, let me shatter one of the popular myths – there is actually no point in doing as many practice tests as you can get your hands on. Yes, you could score more correct answers after you’ve done a few Listening practice tests and understood the format, logic, and what you’re supposed to do. But after you’ve learned those, taking any additional practice tests is not going to help; you’ll most probably be getting about the same results. Why? Simple, if you do something several times, but in a similar way, there’s no reason you should see a different outcome; thus, to rise to a new level, you’ve got to do things differently, and there are techniques that should help.

IELTS Listening. Test format

Before beginning your preparation for IELTS Listening, let alone actually doing it, you really should find out what to expect. This article deals with the format of this paper, so let’s begin.

The Listening paper is the same for both the General and Academic modules; it consists of 4 sections (10 questions in each) with an increasing level of difficulty, and takes 30 minutes to complete. You will also be allowed 10 more minutes to transfer your answers to your Test Report Form. All the recordings are only played once, so be attentive!

Doing IELTS Reading WITHOUT reading! Skimming and scanning

If you’re familiar with the Reading Module organization and have read the article on tips for IELTS Reading, you already know that the timing in this module is pretty tight (that is, there’s not much time to do all the questions; enough, but not much). I’ve already mentioned that if you deduct the time for checking your answers and transferring them to your answer form, you’ve got just over a minute per one question – that’s right, there’s NO time for the actual reading if you’re going to answer all the questions! So, what can you do? Well, for one thing, you’ve got to move fast.

Pronunciation practice. Consonants p-b, t-d, k-g

In this article I’m going to talk about plosive consonants, which are made by creating a closure at a certain place of the vocal tract, increasing air pressure behind the closure and then releasing the air explosively. Don't worry, it just sounds scary; in reality it’s quite simple, and I'll provide videos to guide you.

IELTS Listening. Predicting answers

Strangely enough, when we listen to speech that is in our native language, we don’t hear everything, not really. Among the factors that contribute to this phenomenon is that the person we’re talking to might not pronounce some words distinctly or there may be a background noise. Besides, it’s typical of native speakers to reduce or omit some sounds, even a few of them in one word, so you can imagine what happens at the sentence level, let alone longer stretches of listening input.

So how do we manage to understand what we hear? Well, it’s all in our minds, or brains, to be more specific. Our brain is responsible for processing the information we hear, and to do this job well, it does not solely rely on what we actually hear. At times, the brain has to fill the gaps in the stream of audio input. This process is possible, among other things, because the brain stores the information related to our general knowledge, knowledge of specific subject matter, life experience, and so on.

Have you noticed that when listening to foreign speech, it’s easier to understand the things that you expect to be mentioned? Moreover, sometimes we just know what somebody else is going to say! It’s because of all that information kept in our brain, which serves as a solid foundation for further data to be built on.

Normally audio information is processed in our brain automatically, but on IElTS there are things you can do to facilitate this process, and this is where anticipation and prediction come into play.