What is the most important vocabulary for IELTS? Tough question and an important one. Most people go for topic vocabulary and I can see why. The question I ask though is this: what is the vocabulary you can use in every IELTS essay?

The answer? Well, to me it's quite easy, it's the vocab that occurs in any piece of academic writing. That means the Academic Word lLst is frankly far, far more important than any topic vocab just because you know use it whether or not the essay topic is education, the environment or entertainment.

Only 570 words? Well no. You need to learn the word families and then you get 1000s of words. So this explains my project to produce exercises on all the words in the AWL. Today posted an exercise on the nouns in list 1 with help in spelling the words. Interesting project. Can I interest people in 20 words? did my best by heading it "IELTS and academic English: 20 words you must know".

Should work. Or do I mean could work? Learn 1 word and find 5. Seems a good deal to me.