Learning IELTS Vocabulary – The Why, what and how?
Preparing for IELTS? Then, you need to start boosting your vocabulary for IELTS! In this blog, I’ll explain why vocabulary is so important, tell you what kind of words you need to learn and suggest the best ways to learn it.
Let’s go! First things first…
Why do I need to build my vocabulary for IELTS?
A basic principle of language testing is often overlooked when test takers and teachers are scrambling around for shortcuts and tricks and hacks. The principle is this:
The better your language level, the better your score.
This is true of all skills; reading, writing, listening and speaking. Let’s use reading as an example though. Research suggests that, in order to understand a text, a reader needs to know between 95-98% of the words in it. That’s a LOT of words! Think about the last IELTS Reading text you saw. Did you know this much?
If you’re studying at an intermediate level in a General English course, for instance, most of the reading you’re doing is ‘graded’. In other words, it’s been edited to be easier to understand for a learner at that level. With that editing, intermediate learners should be able to understand the text without too much difficulty.
When it comes to IELTS, the texts are mostly at a C1/C2 level (i.e advanced). Learners at this level should generally know between 8000 and 16000 words. So, if you’ve got a B1 level vocabulary, it’s unlikely that you’re going to understand enough of a C1 text to be able to answer the questions.
Don’t be disheartened! It doesn’t mean you’ll NEVER be able to understand – it just means you need to factor vocabulary growth into your test preparation.
For the other skills, the same basic principle applies; the more language you know, the better your score will be.
So that covers the Why, let’s look at the What.
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What vocabulary do I need to know?
This is where things get interesting. If you were preparing for the OET, you’d be focussing on building vocabulary around health and medical matters. For IELTS, however, there are so many topics you might encounter: health, science, environment, education, space…
With that in mind, there are three key areas that you need to consider when building your vocabulary for an IELTS exam:
High-frequency words
Firstly, you need to get across the most frequent words in English. You can find over 2000 of these in the General Service List or the New General Service List. The good news is that you probably already know most of these. Words like the, good, bad, idea are in the top 2000. And if want to check, you can grab the word list from the Vocabulary section of our IELTS course on E2Language.com.
Academic Words
The other important place to look for your vocabulary is to the academic field. And again, luckily, some absolute legend (Averil Coxhead) compiled the most useful 570 of these into the Academic Word List, which you can also find in the E2 IELTS Vocabulary section. The list contains words that commonly appear in academic texts, such as research, theory, initial, acquire and valid.
Technical / Topic-Specific words
The 2000 most frequent words in English plus the Academic Wordlist account for around 85% of most IELTS reading texts. The other 15% is made up of what we’ll call technical or topic-specific words. If you were reading a text about animals, for example, this might include words like habitat, predators, livestock, foraging and captive. Learning this kind of language involves either extensive reading on your part, careful curation by your teacher or, ideally, a combination of both. In other words, to learn this kind of language, you need to be consuming a lot of English input.
That’s right. Learning vocabulary involves more than simply downloading a word list. This brings us to the big question….
How can I learn new vocabulary?
While it’s nice to have, a list of words prepared by someone else isn’t going to do much to boost your vocabulary. What you need, according to vocabulary guru Paul Nation, is deliberate learning and incidental learning.
Deliberate learning
This is what happens when you’re totally focused on learning vocabulary. You might be looking up a meaning, writing out a translation, preparing an example sentence, practicing the spelling or pronunciation. Deliberate vocabulary learning is an important part of vocabulary boosting. In any good IELTS course, you’ll spend a fair bit of time on this.
Incidental learning
This is what happens when you’re focusing on something else besides learning vocabulary. Perhaps you’re reading the newspaper, listening to a podcast, watching a movie, doing a practice IELTS test or chatting with a friend – and you just happen to bump into a word you’ve met before. The more you ‘bump into’ these words in different contexts (i.e. not just on a word list!), the stronger your understanding of them will be.
Check out our 10 tips for IELTS vocabulary learning
Watch the full video to learn more about how to incorporate deliberate and incidental learning with our G.R.O.W method.
A helping hand
To help you kickstart your vocabulary mission, download Topic 1 from our IELTS Topic Toolkit. Topic 1 is all about animals.
It includes:
✔︎ a list of topic-specific vocabulary
✔︎ topic-based questions for part 1, 2 and 3 of IELTS Speaking
✔︎ related Task 2 essay questions
✔︎ a sample Task 2 essay
plus
✔︎ a list of resources to help you explore the vocabulary and the topic ‘in the wild’.
Come along to our live classes and make use of our huge library of resources in our IELTS preparation course and G.R.O.W your vocabulary for IELTS with E2.
By Alex Austen
Koto says:
Hi Team,
I took some many time of Ielts, but I think my English is not enough to get the score which I want.
I watch a E2 learning videos on youtube and i would like to imrpove my English. However, i checked the time of the classes are not ok for me, which because I am living in another country.
Also, I watched a video said there is a E2 school can help to build up vocabulary.
After i tried many time of Ielts and I am thinking to go for PTE, but I believe the most important for any tests is improve my English indeed.
Please reply me in Email.
Thank you,
K
olivia says:
Hi! The best way for us to contact you if EMAIL is better! PLEASE write up a ticket here at the HELP DESK: https://help.e2language.com/support/tickets/new T
hat way our support team can help guide you and suggest the best way to proceed forward!
You are welcome to share the same explanation you left here! This will allow us to keep track of our conversation with you 🙂
Olivia, & The E2 Team
Muhammad Zohaib says:
Hi team,
Can you please share with me vocabulary building, easy writing,listening, reading and speaking materials for IELTS academic.
E2Language Team says:
Hi Muhammad,
Sure! You can sign up for a free or paid account here: https://www.e2language.com/Course/IELTS/Academic. If you have any further questions, please email us at: [email protected].
Maree from your E2 team.
Abu says:
Where can i get the 2000 most frequent words in English plus the Academic Wordlist?
E2Language Team says:
Hello Abu, I have found the General Service List here: https://www.eapfoundation.com/vocab/general/gsl/alphabetical/ but it is located in many places online. You can also find our Academic word list here: https://help.e2language.com/en/support/solutions/articles/28000014151-academic-word-list.
Best wishes,
Maree from your E2 Team
Sachin Verma says:
I’m wanting to learn these things to my onn… That’s why I’m improving my vocabulary.
Amandeep Kaur says:
Hey ……. How to improve your vocabulary?
Navaneethan Selvarajan says:
I’m wanting to learn these things to my on… That’s why I’m improving my vocabulary.
Nahid Rana says:
I really enjoy learning with Alex & Jay..Both of them make learning much easier than the others.
shahad says:
hi
I want to ask about most common topics and I need it , to learn how I should answer .
can you send to me
thanks
E2Language Team says:
Hello Shahad, thank you for your comment. I see you have an IELTS Academic Express account. This means you now have access to our full set of topic toolkits with the most common topics! Just log in, click on IELTS Academic course, then on General and Academic Vocabulary, then on IELTS Topic Toolkits! Reach out to our support team at [email protected] if you need help.
Bharani says:
I signed up but I haven’t received any mail of vocabulary
E2Language Team says:
Hi there, please send us an email about this and we will help you out! [email protected].
Maree from your E2 team.
Shihab Ahmed says:
I would like to take the test next month
E2Language Team says:
Hi there,
If you would like some assistance with your preparation, please check out our packages: https://www.e2language.com/Course/IELTS/Academic. Send us an email if you have any questions: [email protected]
Best wishes,
Maree from your E2 team
Amandeep Kaur says:
Hey guys….. I want to learn High level English.
Please help me guys.
I want to go to Canada and I need a 8.5 bands in IELTS.
E2Language Team says:
Hi Amandeep,
We recommend you choose a package with practice questions, live classes, assessments and private tutorials! You can view all our packages here for IELTS General: https://www.e2language.com/Course/IELTS/General and here for IELTS Academic: https://www.e2language.com/Course/IELTS/Academic.
All the best,
Maree from your E2 team
Ashish Limbani says:
I have signed up for PDF, but didn’t receive any. Please share pdf on [email protected]
Siobhan MacDonald says:
Hi there, thank you for reaching out. It might take a little while for it to reach your inbox. We hope you get it soon!