I’m often asked this too:
“What should I do if my IELTS student isn’t doing any homework?”
To which my go to answer is this:
Have a conversation with them about the PSYCHOLOGICAL impacts of not doing homework.
This is because I find that whenever we are doing a course but don’t do our homework along the way, just the sheer lack of confidence (and guilt) as a result of it tends to lead to self-sabotage further down the line (e.g. in an exam situation).
In other words, besides gaining automaticity in ‘the thing’, practice is also important to help us become confident in our ability thereof, and make us feel that we have EARNED our mastery of it…
IELTS is especially NOT for the faint of heart, and in 99% of the cases CANNOT be aced without doing homework.
(So much so that my onboarding conversation with a prospective student would always emphasize that the expectation was that for every HOUR spent in class, they’d do an HOUR PLUS alone too).
What do YOU do when your IELTS students (repeatedly) don’t do homework?
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Hi. I’m Fatime. I’m an IELTS Teacher Trainer, helping CELTA-qualified English language teachers become better at teaching SKILLS, as opposed to just testing them.
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