IELTS result

Received my IELTS result today. I'm glad that it's good enough for my migration plans and application for nursing overseas. However, in order to register as a nurse overseas, I would need my current employer's reference. This would be tricky as I have yet to be confirmed at my current job. In addition, I still need a lot of support from my colleagues given my limited nursing experience. As an ex-lecturer put it, once people know you have an opportunity to leave, they may react in surprising ways -- sometimes positive and frequently negative. She suggested thinking of a life-choices excuse to reduce negative reactions.

My IELTS overall band score is 8, in a range of lowest 0 to highest 9. The various components are: listening 8.5, reading 9, writing 7.5 and speaking 7.5. Except for a brief lapse in attention during the listening test, I found reading and listening tests easy. For the writing test, I found it slightly challenging as speed is not my forte and I am losing touch with the occasionally-used vocabulary. I had fun during the speaking test. However, I wasn't sure if my casual conversational style -- frequent use of partial phrases instead of full sentences -- would affect my results. Thus, I am quite pleased with my results. [Note: "Quite" here refers to "very", as in the British usage of the word.]

Another thing is that my IELTS results contrast with the evaluations of my English standard by an ex-nursing lecturer [Note: different person from the above ex-lecturer] who graded my nursing essays. She commented that I have a poor standard of English. Granted that in a bad emotional state, I wrote off-topic in my first essay submission to her. However, my subsequent essays were also judged to be poor to average by her. My self-justifying rationale is that my writing style is not what she likes. My writing is heavily influenced by the traditional English style of long descriptive sentences. E.g. Agatha Christie's mystery fiction. In addition, she prefers the use of simple generic vocabulary, whereas I was trained to use precise vocabulary, where available, over generic words. Thus, I gave up expecting good grades on essays submitted to her. My hypothesis was that like the evaluation of Art, the evaluation of English is very subjective unless one is professionally trained as evaluators in that field. Considering that the only preparation I did was to tune-in to BBC radio (British Broadcasting Corporation) regularly one week before the IELTS test, I consider the IELTS evaluation indicative of my usual standard of English. Perhaps this is just my self-serving bias.