Vocabulary
The words that come up whenever the topic is schools, universities or studying. With a practice exercise.
IELTS vocabulary for education is worth learning early, because education is one of the topics that appears most often across all four papers. It comes up in Task 2 essays, in Section 3 of the listening test, and in Part 3 of the speaking test.
The words below are grouped the way examiners would expect you to use them. Learning ten at a time and putting each one into a sentence about your own life works far better than reading the whole list once.
The words
Six groups. Learn one group at a time rather than the whole page.
Boarding school — students live, eat and sleep there during term.
Private school — parents pay fees.
State school — free, paid for by the government.
Co-educational — boys and girls study together.
Single-sex school — only boys, or only girls.
Public school means different things in different countries. In the United States it is a free government school. In Britain it is an expensive private one. Avoid it unless you are sure which meaning your reader expects.
Primary education — the first years of school.
Secondary education — the later school years.
Tertiary education, also called higher education — universities and colleges. This is the first level that is not compulsory, which means you do not have to attend.
A certificate — given for a short course.
A diploma — given for a course shorter than a degree.
A degree — given by a university after a long course.
A master's — study beyond a degree.
A doctorate — the highest level.
To play truant — to be absent from class without permission.
To be expelled — to be permanently removed from a school.
To be suspended — to be removed for a short time.
A mature student — someone who starts study later in life.
To enrol — to join a course.
To graduate — to complete a degree.
A curriculum — the subjects a school teaches.
An assignment — a piece of work you hand in.
A dissertation — a long written project at the end of a degree.
Method
Six ways these words earn marks rather than just filling space.
Tertiary education is more precise than school after eighteen. Precision is assessed under Lexical Resource, and it is worth more than long words used loosely.
Educate, education, educational, educator. Being able to move between forms lets you rewrite a sentence rather than repeating it.
You enrol on a course, sit an exam, award a degree, drop out of university. Wrong pairings are noticed even when every word is a real word.
A word used in the wrong place lowers your band. If you are not certain of the meaning, use a simpler word you are sure of.
Should university be free? Should schools teach practical subjects? Is homework useful? These recur, and having the vocabulary ready saves thinking time.
Research is clear that a word learned inside a sentence about your own life is remembered far better than a word learned from a list.
Practice
Choose the word that fits each sentence.
Read the whole sentence before you choose. Several options will be real words, and often more than one will nearly fit.
The test is precision: which word means exactly what the sentence needs?
1A school where students live during term is a ______ school.
Boarding. Students live, eat and sleep at the school during term. A private school charges fees but students usually go home each day.
2University and college study is called ______ education.
Tertiary. Also called higher education. It is the first level that is not compulsory, which means you are not required by law to attend.
3A student who misses class without permission is said to ______.
Play truant. To be suspended means the school removes you for a short period, which is a punishment rather than an absence you chose.
4Which qualification is the highest?
A doctorate. The order is certificate, diploma, degree, master's, doctorate.
5Why should you be careful with the phrase public school?
It means opposite things. In the United States a public school is free and government-funded. In Britain it is an expensive private school. Use state school or private school instead.
6You ______ on a course, and later you ______ from university.
Enrol / graduate. These are the standard collocations. Using the right pairing matters as much as knowing the individual words.
That is a collocation problem rather than a vocabulary one, and it is very hard to spot in your own writing because every word looks correct on its own.
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Recognising a word in a multiple choice is not the same as producing it accurately under time in an essay.
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Enough to discuss schools, universities, subjects and qualifications precisely. Around thirty well-understood words is worth far more than three hundred half-remembered ones.
It depends on the country. In the United States it is a free government school; in Britain it is an expensive private one. Use state school or private school to avoid confusion.
Yes, one of the most common. It appears in Task 2 essays, Section 3 of the listening test, and Part 3 of the speaking test.
Learn ten words at a time, and write your own sentence for each. Long lists learned quickly are forgotten quickly, and words become confused with each other.
Yes. Lexical Resource assesses precision as well as range, so an ambitious word used slightly wrongly scores lower than a simple word used correctly.
Full membership
Technique takes most candidates to about Band 6.5. Past that, the limit is usually the range of language you can use accurately, and knowing where you stand is the first step.
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