IELTS Glossary: Key Terms Explained

A mock test is a full practice test taken under the same timing, section order and question format as the real IELTS.

It isn't official and it doesn't give you a certificate. Its job is to estimate your band range and show where you lose time, and in which skill. Read the result as a map for your preparation: the section scores tell you where to spend your next weeks, and the question types you keep getting wrong tell you what to practise.

A band score is the unit IELTS reports results in: a score from 0 to 9, in half bands.

Each of the four skills (Listening, Reading, Writing, Speaking) gets its own band score, and the overall band score is their average rounded to the nearest half or whole band. An average of 6.25 becomes 6.5, for example, while 6.125 becomes 6.0. Results are generally accepted for two years.

Academic and General Training are the two versions of IELTS; they differ only in Reading and Writing Task 1.

Academic is for university and academic applications, General Training for immigration and work. Listening and Speaking are identical in both. In Academic Writing Task 1 you summarise a graph or a process; in General Training you write a letter.

Band descriptors are the official criteria that set out the performance expected at each band.

Writing and Speaking are each marked against four criteria, and every criterion has its own description for each band from 0 to 9. Your score is the average of the four, so a weakness in a single criterion pulls your band down. The quickest way to improve is to know which criterion you're losing marks on.

The two-way discussion is Part 3 of IELTS Speaking: a 4–5-minute exchange with the examiner about abstract and general issues.

It takes the topic of your Part 2 talk into wider, social territory. The questions ask for opinions, comparisons and predictions rather than personal experience. That's why it's the most demanding part of the test: the examiner is listening for answers you can justify, not just longer ones.

The cue card (or task card) is the card you're given in Speaking Part 2: it shows a topic, usually three prompts and a final 'and explain…' line.

Once you have it, you get 1 minute to prepare and can make notes; then you're expected to speak for 1–2 minutes without interruption. Skipping prompts on the card weakens your talk, and stopping long before the time is up gives the examiner less of your English to assess. Speaking has no separate content or task-coverage score: your talk is assessed against the four official criteria (Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, Pronunciation).

The long turn is Speaking Part 2, in which you speak on your own, without interruption, for 1–2 minutes.

That's where the name comes from: the rest of the test is question and answer, but here the floor is yours. The examiner doesn't step in, so this is where your fluency and your ability to give a topic a clear structure are measured.

Task Achievement is the Writing Task 1 criterion that measures how fully you complete the task you've been set.

In Academic Task 1 it covers picking out the main trends in the graph and reporting them accurately; in General Training it covers dealing with every point the letter asks for. Falling short of the word count, missing a required point or adding your own interpretation of the data all cost marks on this criterion.

Task Response is the Writing Task 2 criterion that measures how directly and fully you answer the question.

Task Achievement belongs to Task 1 and Task Response to Task 2; they're often confused, but they aren't the same criterion. You need to address every part of the question, take a clear position and hold it from start to finish. An essay that drifts off topic or answers only half the question scores low on this criterion, however good its language, and because the Writing band is the average of the four criteria, that pulls the Writing band down too.

Coherence and Cohesion is the Writing criterion that measures how logically your ideas progress and how well your sentences are linked.

Coherence is about the flow of ideas; cohesion is about linking words, pronouns and referencing. Overusing linking words costs marks just as underusing them does: what counts is whether the links feel natural. In Speaking, the matching criterion is Fluency and Coherence.

Lexical Resource is the criterion that measures the range of your vocabulary and how appropriately you use it.

What's assessed isn't knowing difficult words but using the right word in the right context. Words picked from a thesaurus that don't fit the context lower your score rather than raise it. It's one of the four criteria in both Writing and Speaking.

Memorised language means blocks of pre-learnt sentences pasted into an answer regardless of the question, and it's penalised in marking.

Examiners don't count memorised sentences that haven't been tied to the question towards your word count. Phrases that organise your writing — a framework for the introduction, linking expressions — are expected and accepted; what's penalised is memorised content.

Not Given is the Reading answer for a statement that the passage neither confirms nor contradicts.

It's most often confused with False: False means the passage clearly contradicts the statement, while Not Given means the passage says nothing about it. Filling the gap with your own general knowledge is how a Not Given turns into a wrong False.

Skimming is reading quickly for the general idea of a text; scanning is searching it for a specific piece of information.

With 60 minutes for three passages and 40 questions, reading every passage from start to finish isn't enough. Skimming tells you what each paragraph is about; scanning finds the line that matches the question.

Paraphrase is the way a question's wording reappears in the text in different words, and it's one of the main things that make IELTS demanding.

Searching the text for the exact word in the question often leads to the wrong answer, because the test uses synonyms on purpose. The reliable approach is to look for the meaning, not the word.

A distractor is a detail in Listening that sounds like the right answer but is then corrected or rejected by the speaker.

A common pattern in the recordings: a number or a name is given, and straight away a correction follows ('sorry, I mean…'). Candidates who write down the first thing they hear lose the mark. Because each recording is played only once, you need to note the final version.

Summary completion is a Reading question type in which you fill the gaps in a summary of part of the passage.

The missing word is usually taken word for word from the passage, and the word limit is strict: an answer that goes over the limit scores nothing, even if it's correct. The safest start is to work out what kind of word the gap needs (a noun, a verb, a number).