George Lombard

We received an acknowledgement today (from 30 January - now 17 days behind) with the following standard comment about IELTS (which was totally irrelevant to the clients in question but of significance to many others):

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT WITH REGARD TO ENGLISH REQUIREMENT


A native born English language speaker is a person whose first spoken
language is English and who is the holder of a passport of the United
Kingdom (UK), Canada, New Zealand, United States of America (USA) or the
Republic of Ireland. If you do not meet these criteria, then you will be
required to provide an IELTS test completed within the last 12 months.


If you have not yet sat or arranged to sit an IELTS test please do so as
soon as possible. To ensure your application is processed quickly, please
ensure your results are sent in as soon as you receive them - do not wait
until you are allocated a case officer. All you need to do is ensure you
quote your file number when you send your test results in.


Cheers,

George Lombard

www.austimmigration.com.au

orangestreet

Hi George,

All you need to do is ensure you quote your file number when you send your test results in.

Which file number are they talking about here ? Is this the PR file number ?

Thanks for the update.

Orangestreet

George Lombard

Dear OS,

How many file numbers do you have? :-)

I assume that this means they're asking for the CLF or OSF number as the case may be since sending something to Adelaide without such a number is like playing Russian roulette with your documentation.

Cheers,

George Lombard

www.austimmigration.com.au

rahulaustraliamein

i have IELTS Result 1 year and 10 months old..will it work?

Wendy

No, George has said in the first post it has to be less than 12 months old

lasanthar

"United Kingdom (UK), Canada, New Zealand, United States of America
(USA) or the
Republic of Ireland"

I wonder why only these countries are considered as native English
speaking countries. I can think of a whole lot of other countries where
the native tounge is English. What about the Caribbean islands
including Jamaica and the bahamas? ( I was thinking South Africa too
but then SA has other lnguages too so I guess it cannot be considred
exclusively English speaking)
Any comments?

Cheetah7

Something that I am curious of Wendy, and that is that if you do a search of IELTS on this site, some of the people have appalling spelling and yet have achieved good grades.

I do seriously wonder on the standard of IELTS in other countries, is it constant or does it differ somewhat.

Go back and have a look, it is quite interesting.

JAJ

Using IELTS tests older than 12 months is a grey area - in the past, some cases officers were flexible if it was clearly above the standard and the person was living in an English speaking country. They may, however, be stricter now.

newkiwi

In defense off all bad spellers out there i just wanted to say that i dont touch type, and dont "quality check" my posts and re-read them each time before posting. I am doing a lot of posting inbetween working after all...

Its more a case of bad typing than bad spelling...I know i probably come across as semi literate at best, but thats just because i am bad at typing.

I think I can hold a conversation in English though..



all this is light hearted, and yes i know i should be more dilligent in spelling etc

coolie

What gets me is that a lot of canadians are french canadian and dont speak english. So why include a country that has more than one official language?

JAJ

If French is your native language you may be asked for IELTS even if you are a Canadian citizen.

coolie

So it's different strokes for different folks then?!?
Why have one rule for one multi lingual country and another for a different multi lingual country?
S. Africa has english as ONE of its official languages, so why do they not allow native english speakers from south africa to skip the test?

If you ask me, I think these people are making a profit out of it. £90.00 to sit the test is heavily overpriced. Half that is still taking the mick.
I think that you should pay no more that £30 to take the test, then charge more of you have to re-sit. It could work as an extra incentive to pass.
But then these people won't make huge profits.

Cheetah7

I know what you mean. My husbands on his second go

He is using this book, and is on Unit 2, aiming to do one unit per day plus a five minute refresher of the unit he has done the previous day.

Step Up to IELTS Self-study Pack
Vanessa Jakeman, Clare McDowell

ISBN: 0521533023

I do believe www.amazon.co.uk do this book.

Whenever he makes a spelling error, he writes it out completely until he gets it right.

It is surprisingly tiring and he is needing to take breaks and it does go back to basics with adjectives, nouns etc and stuff I had forgotten myself.

He is just working his way through the book both general and academic and so far, he is finding it OK. But then again, hes at the beginning.

IELTS examiners can mark you down for not using facial expressions to communicate (so they say in the book).

Well worth the price and hopefully, hubby can score higher than an overall band score of 6 next time (fingers crossed)

Fionast

Yes but most french Candians are from Quebec and this would be clear from their application. They also need to be able to speak English and will probably start learning both from birth.

Beenish Khan

spellings can be incorrect on this site probably because we all try to
write quickly and our main aim is to convey the msg. while in test
conditions we check and recheck our spellings. Otherwise I must tell
you that IELTS ppl are very strict about spellings