IELTS Essential Words, by Lin Lougheed, Ed.D

While this book is not completely unique in its approach to aiding candidates for the IELTS in their vocabulary, it does succeed wonderfully well at what it does, and I found this book to be an enjoyable one to read and one I can warmly recommend to those seeking to improve their competence in the English language through self-study. This book would even be useful for teachers to use in their classes, though it appears to be aimed for the reader to use the exercises in this book, which include all four sections of the IELTS in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, to improve their general vocabulary use. Of particular interest, I found the dictionary of 600 essential words to be useful, and also found the word families sprinkled generously throughout this book as being immensely helpful in helping readers gain a grasp of word creation and the different forms that related words can take in different parts of speech, which itself is of service to those looking to better their lexical resource component for their IELTS score. As that ought to be of general interest to those studying for the IELTS, this book is certainly a helpful part of self-study for such candidates.

In terms of its contents, this book is almost 350 pages long and is divided mostly into topical units which contain several subheadings and various exercises within them that cover all parts of the IELTS exam. The book begins, appropriately, with an introduction that discusses the importance of vocabulary to the IELTS, gives a self-study contract to the reader to demonstrate their own commitment to mastering English, contains self-study activities, and also tells the reader how to use this book. After that, the author includes ten units, each of which has three separate subtopics within the larger topics, and exercises based on those topics that assist the reader in answering questions for different parts of the IELTS exam. These topics include: the natural world (1), leisure time (2), transportation (3), culture (4), health (5), tourism (6), business (7), society (8), education (9), and technology/inventions (10). Some of the subtopics included I found to be particularly intriguing and relevant, including ones on the plant life of the Taklimakan Deset, the uses of leisure time, the future of self-driving cars, the origins of writing, nurse migration, learning vacations, wheelchair accessibility issues, homeschooling and learning styles and educating the gifted, and so on. After these units comes an appendix, namely the 600-word list of essential vocabulary for the IELTS, an answer key which includes sample writings, and audioscripts for the listening exercises.

In helping students prepare for the IELTS, there are a variety of approaches that a book can take in seeking to present its contents. A book can focus, as this book does, on one element of the IELTS that is helpful for all sections of the test, since English vocabulary is essential in reading, writing, speaking, and listening alike. Without having good lexical resource in the English language, one cannot communicate in English nor understand what others are seeking to communicate. Other books could focus on elements of the test that are less uniformly helpful, such as seeking to develop paragraphs in the writing section, or could focus on one of the four sections of the test in particular. Sometimes, books that seek to help the reader with vocabulary can be or at least seem to be a bit too disorganized for proper use because the book does not make it clear the connections between the exercises it offers and the structure of the IELTS as a whole. Fortunately, this book has enough cohesion and enough similar elements within its various units that the reader is able to approach the different subject matter of the book without being lost in the thicket of wondering where the general knowledge the book gives through discussing particular topics will be of most use on the exam.