The Language of Problems

When you are studying for IELTS, it is sensible to concentrate on language that will be most useful in the test. Here is a suggestion for you: study the language of problems. This is a very important area of language because almost every IELTS essay task will ask you to write about a problem and if you want to get a good band score in lexical resource you will need variety of language for “problems”.

In this post you will find a brief explanation of what words you need and how to learn them. There is also:

• a free download of useful vocabulary
• an interactive exercise to practise some vocabulary
• a writing exercise for IELTS essay introductions

 

What words do you need?
 

This will depend on your target band score but you will need variety in these areas:

• nouns: eg, problem, difficulty, concern, issue
• adjectives: eg, serious, major, minor, significant, insignificant
• verbs: eg, have, experience, deal with, tackle, solve, resolve

If you are aiming for band 7 or above, you will also need to be able to use these words accurately in word combinations (collocations) and it will help to learn some idiomatic phrases such as:

• be a headache for
• address a problem
• face a problem

 

How can you learn these phrases? 

There is no one answer to this question but here are one or two suggestions:

• do not try to learn too much at once: if you do, you may become confused
• do not learn words by themselves, learn them in combinations as that is how you need to use them
• try to use the phrases for yourself by using them to describe problems you know about
• use a dictionary to look at examples: examples are often much more useful than definitions

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