I first started to design IELTS course plans for my school in early 2020. There used to be only ten-hour group courses on Saturday mornings, and the programme would focus on the key aspects of the four IELTS test modules: Listening, Academic Reading, Academic Writing and Speaking.
Came the pandemic and, as we all know, teaching and learning shifted suddenly to the online space. My subsequent task was therefore to re-design the programme of the ten-hour course. The listening and the reading diagnostic tests were moved to the asynchronous learning space as homework. There was no point for the students to turn up and otherwise spend an entire lesson doing those mock tests. Another change was a new addition to the range of courses. Twenty-hour group courses were introduced so that there would be room for giving the students language support towards certain task types. For example, candidates often need to use the narrative tenses to recount personal events in Speaking Part 2. Despite the focus on language in some parts of the course plan, the twenty-hour course was still structured in the same manner as the ten-hour one - training in test techniques and certain key task types in the four IELTS modules.
While the above course plans were overall successful in preparing students for IELTS, they posed certain limitations to individual learners. The most obvious challenge is conflicting learning needs within a class. In Academic Reading, some students were weaker in matching paragraph headings, whereas others needed greater support in table completion. There were also students who didn't really need work on their listening and reading skills, but they could do with intensive practice at writing and speaking. Finally, there was the issue of placing students of mixed language levels, ranging from B1 to C1, in the same class. This was beyond the scope of syllabus design, of course.
Fast forward to 2023, group courses have changed to individual courses. IDP Australia is now offering IELTS online practice (i.e. mock tests) and most students are increasingly getting more competent at listening and reading. In my local context in Italy, almost every student explicitly asks for training in writing and speaking when they come to their IELTS preparation lessons. Consequently, I've found myself embarking on a different design of the syllabus.
Rather than follow a one-size-fits-all approach, I'm able to respond to my students' learning needs in one-to-one settings. Those I've recently taught said they would like to get a higher band score in the Speaking test. Most of them were often hindered by their limited range of vocabulary.
If we look at the questions in published IELTS test papers (e.g. IELTS 17), it is easy to spot a topic-based arrangement in all three parts of the Speaking test. This has informed the way I plan my lessons - I now give my students vocabulary input by topic through gap-fill or matching tasks before we move on to recurring Task-Feedback cycles of test practice. Depending on the band score my students need to achieve, I adjust the range of lexis for any lesson so that somebody aiming for Band 6 won't be inundated by too many complex collocations or idioms targeted at Band 8. On this note, I've found some useful material and resource that enables me to realise my new syllabus design, including vocabulary banks of General English coursebooks and the multi-level English Vocabulary in Use.
For grammar, I use a cross-topic approach so that my students can apply a target structure to their responses. In Speaking Part 1, students can practise using 'used to' and 'would' to talk about habitual actions and states in the past. The same can be done with modality when students speculate about certain topics in Speaking Part 3 or provide solutions to issues in Academic Writing Task 2.
