The IELTS test is used to assess every other skill in the exam. When taking the skills of Reading, Listening, Writing, and Speaking, you must use a variety of words with proper pronunciation and spelling.

Your vocabulary for IELTS accounts for approximately 20 – 30% of your points. This reason alone should motivate you to begin developing a robust vocabulary that will assist you in improving your band score.

Look Up for Unfamiliar Words

Many people recommend reading books, magazines, and watching TV shows to learn new words, but it’s also important to look up academic terms you don’t understand. Many people have the habit of avoiding difficult and unfamiliar words, believing that they will not be needed in their lives or exams. However, make a habit of looking up vocabulary words that you are unfamiliar with, especially if they are difficult to read, spell, or write.

Maintain an IELTS Writing Vocabulary Notebook

Having a notebook to write down all new academic words and their meanings may appear archaic, but it may help you understand those words better. In addition, when the exam is approaching, you can use the book to review the written words. That is a far superior option to scrambling for resources with new words right before the exam.

Practice, but Don’t Go Overboard

So, once you’ve brought a notebook or found an app to help you learn new words, the only thing left to do is practice them in real life. In the case of speaking ability, you can choose any topic or question from the most recent exam. Then, using the IELTS vocabulary list you’ve recently created, try to speak about the topic for 1 to 2 minutes.

Next, in the case of IELTS writing vocabulary, you should avoid exaggerating sentences because you can use a single but sophisticated word. This is an excellent way to improve your vocabulary for IELTS advanced.

Apps for Vocabulary Building

Nowadays, everyone has a smartphone, and there are a plethora of apps on the play store and app stores that can help us improve our language skills. To begin, we recommend that you use the vocabulary builder app, which includes exercises, meanings, and synonyms in addition to word understanding.

Use YouTube to Help You Understand

We all use YouTube for entertainment, so it should come as no surprise that there are hundreds of channels on the platform that teach English. And every such channel also discusses various academic words and how a word is pronounced, used in a phrase or sentence with examples.

It is difficult to learn 2000 rich words that are essential for your IELTS writing vocabulary, and you may end up memorizing those words. In the end, it may be pointless to memorize words if you are unable to use them correctly when speaking or writing.

Maintain a Dictionary

Keeping a small pocket-sized dictionary with you is a popular method of learning vocabulary for the IELTS test. If you have never spent time learning new vocabulary words in this manner, you can start now. You can use your dictionary to learn words in two ways.

  • To begin, you can refer to it whenever you come across a new word and look up its definition in the dictionary.
  • Second, you can begin learning the words from the first to the last page of your dictionary in order.

Watch Videos and Listen to Audios

Listening to others use a new word is the best way to learn how to use it yourself. As a result, you can watch TV shows, News channels, Movies, YouTube videos, Group Discussions, talk shows, and so on. You can also listen to audio files such as podcasts, songs, radio stations, and so on.

Understand Idioms and Connectives

It would be effective to use idiomatic language and sentence connectors while speaking on a topic. Connectives should be used in ielts writing task 1 vocabulary, while idioms should be avoided because they are used in informal writing. As a result, students taking IELTS general training may use them when writing a letter. However, only use them when necessary and avoid including them if possible.

Newspapers Should be Read

Reading is the best habit for learning new words and improving your vocabulary for IELTS speaking. You can read articles on a daily or weekly basis if you subscribe to a daily or weekly newspaper online or offline.

While reading articles, underline academic words that you are unfamiliar with and pay close attention if you learn of a new way to use a word. This will assist you in writing on various IELTS topics. Then, look up the definition of the word in your dictionary and write it down in your notebook. Learn the words listed and review them once or twice a week.

Understand but Do not Always Memorize

Phone numbers are intended to be memorized, but not words, because a single word may have several distinct meanings. Simply put, we can use the same word in different contexts to mean different things. 

The reason while memorizing a word is simple, the same word may not always have a single strict meaning. So the best way to understand this is to learn about homophones, which are words that have the same spelling and pronunciation but different meanings.