Irina Lutsenko

Always do what you are afraid to do. Ralph Waldo Emerson Like most people, I am afraid of public speaking. I don’t know about most people, but my fear caused me to take public speaking courses. I took one online at edx.org and two at University of New Haven as part of my Fulbright FLTA program . Inspired by the courses I have taken, I designed and taught my own "Introduction to public speaking" course. In this post, I want to describe my course and share three incredible speeches made by my students. The participants of the course were nine brave advanced learners of English. The course consisted of 6 classes meeting weekly from 17 March to 21 April. The participants had to make a speech each class. All the speeches had to be prepared at home. Class 1. Introductory speech. This speech was self-explanatory - people had to introduce themselves . My main goal was to let people get the taste of speaking in front of an audience. I also wanted them to meet each...

IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 poses the biggest difficulty to everyone, including those who have excellent English skills. The reason might be that most people don’t often describe graphs in English or even in their native language. I know all the test takers want a simple model to follow. More often than not, they go online and end up trying to follow questionable models. I want to put a stop to this. In this post, I want to share my sample answer and my six-step guide to describing IELTS line graphs. Disclaimer While I believe my guide is a good model to follow, you have to keep in mind that: 1) This is one possible approach, not the only one possible approach; 2) Each line graph is different, so the approach might have to be modified for some line graphs; 3) My overall IELTS score is 9, but my writing score is 8.5, so my sample answer might not be absolutely perfect. Here is the task and the line graph I will be describing. It is based on a task from Cambridge IELTS 7. The...