Интервью брала Ольга Кустова, ведущий методист по английскому языку Центра группы германских языков издательства «Просвещение»
настроение: enthusiastic
ключевые слова: IELTS, helping students,
good IELTS materials, exam tips
город: Cambridge, England
Olga: I know you’ve written a series of books helping students to prepare for the IELTS exam. Can you tell us a bit more about them?
Mary: Yes, there are two books in the series: Mission IELTS 1 and Mission IELTS 2. They’re both published by Express Publishing, and in fact, I’m just one of the authors. Both of the books are co-authored by myself and Bob Obee, who has written several other books for Express. But, it might be better for me explain to you a little about the IELTS exam before I tell you about the books.
Olga: Fine, but before that, could you say something about your involvement in IELTS and why you wrote the books?
Mary: Several years ago I used to work for Cambridge Assessment, the exam board that produces the Cambridge Main Suite exams (KET, PET, FCE, CAE, CPE). It also along with two other organisations produces IELTS, and at one stage my job there involved working on the production of IELTS. Then I’ve worked as a teacher in several international settings, such as Hong Kong and Italy. Many students in these places want to take this exam and so I became involved in getting them ready to do this. This experience gave me a clear idea of what the exam expects of students and what they need to be able to do to get a good score on it. It was the same for Bob. And we both thought that we wanted to produce materials which provided students with more help than many other IELTS materials do. Many IELTS materials just help students with exam technique, and we were sure that students needed much more than that — they actually need help with their language proficiency, their language skills, their confidence, their ability to find additional learning resources etc. We were keen to put all our ideas together in our own materials.