Free IELTS Preparation: Legal Tests, Materials and Tools

You can prepare for IELTS on a minimal budget. The key is to use reliable free sources and avoid wasting time on dubious websites and pirated files. This approach works equally well for test takers in India, Pakistan, Nigeria and the Philippines.

Official free materials

• Practice tests on the test organisers' websites (British Council, IDP, ielts.org): all four sections with answers.
• Sample questions for each task type on ielts.org.
• Assessment criteria for Writing and Speaking (band descriptors) as a PDF on ielts.org. This is the most underrated free resource: your band score is based directly on these descriptors — Task Achievement / Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy for Writing, and Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, Pronunciation for Speaking.
• Familiarisation test for the computer-delivered IELTS interface on the organisers' websites.

Free materials by skill

Listening: educational podcasts and lectures with transcripts; news programmes with a range of accents.

Reading: popular science magazines and science sections in major English-language publications. Read for 20–30 minutes a day and summarise the main idea in one sentence. This helps you practise True / False / Not Given and Yes / No / Not Given tasks.

Writing: you can find Task 1 and Task 2 topics for practice anywhere, but check your writing against the official criteria. We show how to do this in the article “IELTS Writing Assessment Criteria”.

Speaking: use the voice recorder on your phone. Answer questions from Part 1, Part 2 (cue card) and Part 3 in the article “IELTS Speaking Topics” and listen back to your recordings.

How to use answer keys correctly

Answer keys are useful only if you work with them properly:

1. Complete the test in full without looking at the answers.
2. Mark the incorrect answers, but do not look at the correct ones yet.
3. Try to find the answer yourself: listen to the recording again or re-read the passage.
4. Only then open the key and transcript and locate where the answer was.
5. Record the reason for the mistake in an error log.

If you simply check your answers and calculate your band score, the mock test will be wasted with almost no benefit.

What to avoid

• Pirated PDF collections. They often lack audio, contain errors in the answers, and the files themselves may be unsafe. For a list of legal textbooks, see the article “Best Textbooks for IELTS Preparation”.
• Websites with low-quality copied tests: incorrect difficulty gives a false IELTS band forecast.
• “Banks of ready-made answers” for Writing and Speaking — memorised answers lower your score.

Where free resources reach their limit

Free materials are usually enough for Listening and Reading. Two things are harder to get for free:

• a full mock test in the computer-delivered test interface with strict timing and conversion to band scores;
• feedback on Writing and Speaking against the four assessment criteria.

For this we offer a full mock test for a few dollars and guides for each section from $5. But you can start for free: with this article and the article “Self-Study Preparation for IELTS”.