Long or short vowels

The first example popping to our heads is the funny difference between the pronunciation of “sheep” and “ship” as in: Have you ever traveled by ship/sheep?

What should I do?

Well when you practice pronunciation, make sure you check the phonetic symbols too (i.e. symbols which appear between two forward slashes). Symbols that carry the colon symbol (:) must be pronounced longer.

Homophones

These words have the same sound but different spellings. The words “meet” and “meat”, for instance, are homophones. Their pronunciations are exactly the same. Interestingly, IELTS loves these words and such words are really common in the listening section. Here are some more examples:

• week – weak
• wait – weight
• way – weigh
• sale -sail
• sweet -suite
• hear – here
• sea – see

How to deal with these words

There are 2 techniques you need to follow:

1. Prediction: During the 30-second gap before starting each section, look over the questions, look at the gaps and predict what kind of word is needed for each part: noun? verb? etc.
2. At the end of the test, when transferring your answers onto the answer sheet, do check to see if the word you have written really matches the sentence and therefore it makes absolute sense.

Capitonyms

Words that when begin with a capital letter, their meaning changes. For example the word “Turkey” means the country near the Mediterranean sea while “turkey” is the bird whose meat is very popular for Thanksgiving. More examples:

• China (the country) – china (as in porcelain)
• March (the month) – march (to walk)
• Polish (the nationality) – polish (to make things like shoes shiny)

What to do: Although wrong capitalization is not penalized in IELTS listening, it is best to avoid making such mistakes.