My name is Stephen, I'm an English teacher.

I'm from Dublin in Ireland and I've been teaching

English for more or less 10 years now.

I spent one year in Italy teaching English and

for the last 8 years I've been at English in Dublin,

here in the city centre of Dublin.

For the last 4 or 5 years now I've been working on

the Cambridge exams - the First Certificate and the CAE

and also the IELTS exam. I've also qualified as

a Cambridge speaking examiner.

In my opinion, studying for an exam...

okay exams are not everything, really it is just a piece of paper

but having an exam in 6 months time or 4 months, it's

a target, it's a motivation, it can inspire you to study more,

it can give you focus, which I think is very valuable.

Also, when you've paid money for an exam - they're expensive

exams - if you pay money you're going to be much more

motivated than if you don't. Another good reason is that

generally if you're studying in a class with other people

who are studying for exams it's quite nice because you have

this bond, this connection with other people.

Sometimes that's a nervous energy or whatever but

you're in the same boat so I think it increases the atmosphere

of the class. Another reason is obviously the piece of paper.

If you come to Ireland and you're here for one year

would you like to go back with a lot of stories about the good

time that you had? Perfect, that's amazing. But you could

also have that and a piece of paper to show: look, I had a good

time in Ireland and I used my time to receive an extra qualification.

I think those would be the main reasons - it's really just to motivate,

to inspire you and even if you don't pass the exam or don't

get the mark you wanted your English will have improved

much more than if you were studying for no other reason than

just because you wanted to. Sometimes the fear of the exam is

what's going to make you study, when that fear has gone, the

television becomes much more tempting and your friends

and everything else. Your fear is a good motivation in that sense.

Interviewer: If a student chose to come to your IELTS preparation

class, what can they expect to have in the 3 hours per day

that they get? - My idea for an IELTS class is all about practice

so, for example, in my class I try to do an awful lot of practice

on writing, so I like to divide up my 3 hours between

writing, the reading section, the speaking section and the

listening section, so everyday we're looking at writing: how can

we improve it? What can we do, are there any tricks we can use

to move from a 6 to a 6.5? - having a look at the graphs,

the bar charts, the line charts, the tables. How do we choose

the information that we want? What vocabulary can we use?

Having a look at the writing part 2, what phrases are nice for

introductions? How do we make a conclusion? How do we

develop our ideas in part 1? How many ideas do we need?

Having a look at all these questions and having a look at it

together and then basically practicing that, using that. We do

writing competitions every week to see how much it's

coming together. With the reading section we're looking at

the different types of question that will come up in the exam.

How do you handle that question? What do you look for?

I'm looking at the students thinking: well it took this person

25 minutes to do the task. How can I reduce

that time to 20? How can we get it down to 18 which

is probably the target. In the speaking tests we're looking at

how we can prepare ourselves for the part 2 where we have

to speak for 2 minutes. How can we develop our ideas?

How can we get ideas about subjects that we don't

know much about? Often in the IELTS you have to talk about

a subject you don't have many opinions about. We had one

student who had to talk about gardens. How do you get opinions

about gardens, how do you explain yourself when you don't know anything.

So really, with the class what we're trying to show you what

the exam looks like, show you how to do better in the exam

and cover everything that you will expect in the exam, so that

at the very least when you take the exam, nothing will surprise you,

everything that comes up you will have seen before 100 times,

you will expect it, you will know what's coming and you'll be able to

do the best that you can do in the IELTS.

(c) English in Dublin 2009