Course name: IELTS 4.5                                      

Course material: Mindset for IELTS – Book 1

Course length: 12 weeks (4 meetings/ week) = 120 hours

Vietnamese/ Native Teachers:: 36 meetings (108 periods) / 12 meetings (30 periods)

LISTENING

Content focus and objectives:

• Familiarise students with a standard IELTS listening test  (4 sections);
• maximise learners’ development of vocabulary through listening input and in relation to specific topics in the program;  
• develop skills for approaching sections 1 and 2 of the listening test effectively;

Expected outcome at exit level:

• Task: Students required to complete a standard IELTS listening test with a minimum of 16/40 correct answers.
• Focused question types: note completion, map labelling, multiple choice, short-answered question, sentence completion, matching & classification task;

SPEAKING

Content focus and objectives:

• continue to refine learners’ conversational skills and confidence in using English for communication in daily life situations;
• strongly focus on students’ ability to give an extended answer with acceptable fluency for questions in part 1 of the IELTS speaking test;
• familiarise learners with responding to a monologue task (IELTS speaking part 2) focusing on generating and organizing ideas and presenting ideas within the given time limit;
• acquire sufficient vocabulary for planned speaking tasks in relation to the following 10 topics: family, hometown (city), education, employment, food, drinks and health, leisure time, media, fame and natural world
• have a good awareness of general criteria and aspects of speaking performance: fluency, accuracy and coherence in speaking and how each language component can contribute to the achievement of these aspects. 

Expected outcome at exit level:

• be able to give extended responses to questions about himself/ herself (part 1 questions) and engage in social conversations with confidence;
• be able to perform a monologue speaking task (cue card) within a limited time (2 minutes);
• be able to employ key vocabulary accumulated through the course accurately to perform speaking tasks (part 1+2) with clarity and good control of word stress;
• be able to paraphrase at basic level in meaning expression and show a certain extent of flexibility in language using;
• show a good control and accuracy in using simple and compound structures as well as effort to use complex structures but with frequent errors;
• show a basic level of control of intonation, sentence stress and chunking

READING

Content focus and objectives:

• Familiarise students with standard IELTS reading articles (4-page reading article with multiple tasks provided)
• Provide guidance on how to approach a reading passage step-by-step, identify location of answers for each question group and how to write the answer properly;
• Expand key vocabulary pool for each of the 8 topics covered in the coursebook

Key task types: (1) Provide further practice with reading tasks that students have been introduced to in PRE-IELTS level in longer and more complicated passages: Multiple choice, Sentence Completion, True False Not Given, Short-answer questions; (2) Introduce students to new reading tasks including Matching Information, Matching Sentence Ending, Matching Heading, Matching Features, Summary Completion, Yes No Not Given, Table Completion (Supplement), Flow Chart Completion (Supplement) and Diagram Completion (Supplement)

Key reading skills and strategies: (1) Provide further practice with basic reading skills: skimming for main idea of the paragraph and the whole text,, scanning-reading for specific information, guessing meaning and understanding instructions, identifying key words from a reading text, summarising key information; (2) Apply new techniques for advanced Reading: Identifying paraphrasing and synonyms, locating the correct part of the text containing the answer, scanning for technical terms, detecting traps of adverbs of degree and frequency and keyword repetition, dealing with unchronological order task types, identifying the writer views, 

Expected performance at exit level:

Students are required to read 3 academic passages and with a total of 40 questions. In order to pass the reading module, students are expected to correctly answer at least 17 out of 40 questions.

WRITING

Course Objectives

TASK 1

Content focus:

- be able to write a report on a diagram (about 100-120 words). 

-  organize a standard report but the format may be inappropriate in some places.

- be able to organize information from diagrams but the organization may be faulty in some places (e.g., no clear overview, lack of key features related to data, no data extracted to support descriptions, or too much focus on detail)

Language focus:

- use language for describing trends, percentages, fractions and rankings but errors related to these are frequent and noticeable

- be able to use simple and compound sentences to describe trends. Complex sentences are often seriously inaccurate. 

- use basic comparative structures to compare and contrast data. Errors are frequent and noticeable, though.

- use some cohesive devices though there are often overuse, underuse, or inaccuracy

TASK 2

Content focus:

- be able to write an argumentative essay (about 200 words) that partially answers the essay question. 

- be aware of the standard essay format but the format may be inappropriate in some places (e.g., inappropriate paragraphing, no conclusion drawn after discussion)

- present some main ideas but these ideas may not be developed fully. 

Language focus:

- be aware of diversifying vocabulary use but only able to use a limited range of vocabulary

- focus on producing correct word forms but commit errors that seriously affect the reader’s understanding of the content

- use simple and compound sentences in writing appropriately. Complex sentences are often inaccurate

- use fundamental cohesive devices, but there are often inaccuracy, overuse, or underuse