Welcome to ‘Step 1 Online’ which supports the exercises in your ‘Roadmap
to IELTS Speaking Success‘  ebook. If you’ve downloaded the ebook successfully and started the programme, you have hopefully covered your walls at home with stickers to remind yourself to speak English!

We want to help you with your preparation
and aim to make this website THE place on the web for IELTS Speaking practice. We’ll be adding new content over the coming weeks including a grammar test, pronunciation help and much more!

But there’s no need to wait for practice opportunities; we already have lots of information and exercises to help you with your Speaking practice and in ‘Step 1 Online’ we’ll show you what’s available now.

The Exam

If you’re new to the IELTS Speaking exam and know very little about the format of the test, head straight for our ‘Exam’ section. You’ll find an overview of the
exam, details of what you have to do in each section and lots of tips about how to perform at your best in each part. You’ll also find a video showing a full IELTS Speaking test to give you a clear idea of what it’s all about. We’ll be using the ‘Exam’ section in Step 2.
>> Visit the Exam section

Your Questions Answered (FAQs)

Our regularly-updated FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) section is aimed at making the IELTS Speaking exam as clear as possible. You’ll find information about the exam, tips for effective preparation, help finding tutors and much, much more. In fact, if you have a question about the exam or about your studies why not send it in to us now? We’ll try to answer it and feature it on the website when we next update the FAQs section. Useful for Step 2.
>> Visit the FAQs section

IELTS Vocabulary

Learn IELTS topic vocabulary the easy way, in the context of IELTS-style Speaking tasks. We have a list of lessons containing topic vocabulary presented in the style of IELTS sample answers. When you’ve completed each lesson, you can try using the vocabulary in an IELTS-style practice test. You’ll find lessons on common topics such as education, work, sport and food, each one with lots of common ‘chunks’ or set expressions – extremely useful for the exam! We’ll be looking at this section in Step 5 and Step 7.
>> Visit the Vocabulary section

5-Minute Functions

The ‘Roadmap to IELTS Speaking Success’ ebook makes frequent reference to the importance of learning set expressions or ‘chunks’. Functions are one category of set expressions that can help you improve your level of fluency and give you a basis from which to identify areas for grammar revision. Our ‘5-minute Functions’ section contains video lessons teaching some of the common functional expressions you’ll need in the Speaking exam. We’ll be using these videos in Step 6 and Step 7.
>> Visit the 5-Minute Functions section

Practice Tests

We have a growing number of recordings featuring students who have tried our free, online practice tests. These recordings are very useful learning opportunities if you’re preparing for the IELTS Speaking exam. Use them to practise answering IELTS-style questions and get feedback from your friends. Listen to the recordings of other students and decide which of the speakers are better in each of the IELTS assessment criteria: Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource , Grammatical Range and Accuracy, Pronunciation. We’ll be using this section in Step 6.
>> Visit the Practice Tests section

IELTS Language Lab

The ‘IELTS Language Lab’ contains downloadable lessons with feedback on student recordings. A teacher assesses the student’s performace based on the IELTS assessment criteria. These lessons are excellent opportunities to develop your own use of English; you’ll get the chance to listen to advanced students attempting the test and you’ll hear the kind of mistakes often made at advanced level. We use this section in Step 3 and Step 6.
>> Visit the IELTS Language Lab section

IELTS Speaking Task Sheets

Each week we publish a printable task sheet that includes the latest unit from the website. Teachers are invited to use the task sheet in class with their students (feel free to photocopy). Students can use it for Speaking practice in face-to-face meetups or online with speaking partners through social networks like our Facebook Page. The Speaking Task Sheets will be very useful in Step 9.
>> Visit the IELTS Speaking Task Sheets section

Splendid Expressions

Would you like to be able to understand the everyday expressions used by native speakers of English? Do you need to speak and express yourself more confidently, in the knowledge that you’ve taken your language to the next level? Every day (Monday-Friday) we publish a ‘Splendid Expressions’ quiz, our three-stage approach to learning idiomatic expressions. You’ll find this section useful when looking at vocabulary in Step 5.
>> Visit the Splendid Expressions page

Look out for the Step 2 email

In 4 days time we’ll send you the second of our emails when we look at the answers to the Speaking Quiz from Step 2.