Irina Lutsenko

I used to be very old-school. I used to own phones that could only make calls and send messages. I used to think that smartphones were just toys. That was until January 2017, when I got a new phone - a smartphone, which has completely transformed the way I work. Please give it up for my current phone - BlackBerry PRIV ! What has changed? First and foremost, PRIV comes with a physical keyboard , thanks to which I have started writing consistently. The physical keyboard, which is a full QWERTY keyboard, is so convenient that I can easily type long texts. I have never written so much in my entire life, even though I have a blog which dates back to May 2013. Writing used to require a lot of discipline because I had to sit in front of the computer and focus. I now enjoy the freedom of writing in any place and at any time - on the metro (sitting at off-peak times or standing in the rush hour), at an airport (killing time waiting for my flight), on the plane (when there is abso...

Remember last week I wrote a post about how I tried walking in my student’s shoes and wrote an essay I gave him for homework? Well, the student did his homework (which I didn’t have a shadow of a doubt he would). In this post, I want to share it with you. First, let me introduce the student. His name is Nikita Videnkov , he is a 21-year old engineering student, who has been having one-to-one classes with me for about 3-4 years. His primary purpose is to improve his language skills, but he is also thinking of taking IELTS, so we do IELTS format tasks on a regular basis. Second, to those of you who aren’t my students I have to explain that my homework worded “ write an essay ” is usually followed by homework worded “ rewrite your essay .” I believe that writing is 90% rewriting and make my students rewrite their work. Third, let me give you some context. We were discussing the article called “ Phoney war ” (New Scientist, 25 January 2017), which deals with end-to-end encrypti...

I have a question to all the teachers out there: how often do you write essays in English? I mean essays in IELTS / TOEFL / GRE or any similar format. Please message me, I’d love some kind of statistics. I have to confess, I don’t * . But I make my students write a lot. Which might be a little unfair, don’t you think? That’s what I thought when I was on a bus from my home town back to St Petersburg yesterday (a 4-hour journey). I had nothing to do, so my mind began to wander until suddenly it stumbled upon the essay topic I gave my student on Thursday. We were discussing the article called “ Phoney War ” (New Scientist, 25 January 2017). The article deals with the questions of end-to-end encryption and its importance in the ‘privacy of communications vs. public security’ debate. As a follow-up task, I came up with an essay topic for my student (a very diligent, Advanced level student who is going to take IELTS in the future). Anyway, my mind stumbled upon this topic and starte...

With language, it’s use it or lose it . Language skills, speaking in particular, go rusty in a flash. Teachers are not an exception here; let’s face it, teachers’ speaking skills deteriorate too (for a variety reasons that I won’t go into now). Sitting around and complaining is a tempting, but counterproductive approach to solving this problem. In this post, I am going to talk about the solution my colleague and I came up with to stop our speaking skills from going rusty. … It all started on a gloomy, hopeless, rainy November afternoon from Dasha’s message. The message went like this, “How about starting our very own speaking club? We could meet once a week (Skype, of course) and just talk about stuff. What do you say?” I jumped in excitement and immediately replied, “ I’m in! ” We discussed the possible time and scheduled a session for Sunday 10 am. You are now probably wondering who the hell Dasha is. Dasha, officially known as Daria Maslovskaya, is a top-notch English teache...

This post is inspired by the guest post Nadya Borisova wrote for me  “Academic IELTS without a degree in linguistics” ( Part 1  and  Part 2 ). She wrote the whole thing, while I got to comment and edit. Editing is a critical, yet underestimated part of writing. In this post, I want to give this part the attention it deserves and talk about how Nadya and I collaborated on editing her post. The guest post idea Being a teacher, I write about exams and language learning from a teacher perspective (naturally). I claim to know the right thing to do and demand that my students do what I say. But my students don’t always do what I demand or recommend. One reason could be that, as a teacher, I am not always able to put myself in my students’ shoes and adequately assess their needs. Additionally, to be brutally honest, IELTS 9 (my score) is out of reach for most students, so my success story might not be particularly inspiring. Most test takers or potential test takers ...

Writing and Speaking. Resources. This is the second part of the guest post by my student Nadya Borisova.  I hope you enjoy it as much as the first part .  Now let’s talk about the active parts: Writing and Speaking. Writing Here comes the tough one. Last time I got 7.0 for Writing. I used Irina’s help, and I can’t stress it enough, you need a look from another person to tell you what you do right and wrong. In Task 1 the hardest thing for me was to decide what’s important and what’s not. I practiced a lot with Irina, and now I feel more comfortable with distinguishing meaningful information from the less important on the graph or pie chart. The best tip I got for Task 2 is the way you brainstorm ideas. Sometimes I got a topic and I was stuck as I didn’t know what to say. IELTS essay questions are in a formal style, so I tried to think about my arguments and reasons academically, which is, of course, not easy. But then I read about “the cafe techniqu...

Background. Preparation time.  Listening and Reading. This is a guest post from my student Nadya Borisova. Enjoy! Hi there, my name is Nadya Borisova , and I’d like to share my experience in getting 8.0 in IELTS Academic as well as my list of top-5 resources for preparation. My first attempt was in 2014. At that time, I wanted a clear understanding of my level. So I tried a mock IELTS test with no preparation at all, got Overall 5.0, and decided to get better results in a real one. The second test followed two years later. 2014 Listening 7.0 Reading 8.0 Writing 6.5 Speaking 6.5 Overall Band 7.0 2016 Listening 9.0 Reading 9.0 Writing 7.0 Speaking 7.5 Overall Band 8.0 My background Two years ago I worked as an IT recruiter, now I’m a copywriter. I don’t have a university degree in languages, nor did I go to the school focused on English language. I went to an ordinary school with two hours of English a week. Most of the learning af...