Knowledge Base

MTS announces new covid-secure IELTS test venues in Belfast, Brighton, Glasgow, Swindon, Torquay, Watford and Wolverhampton, adding to its existing UK and Ireland test centre network.

How regular, short study sessions can transform your English learning progress, illustrated through the story of Katie and her Japanese lessons.

Having fun with portmanteau words You’ve probably seen lots of portmanteau words in English. But what are portmanteau words? Are they all slang words? And how can analysing them help ESL learners? Read on to find out more about this particularly joyful aspect of English word play, the source of many contemporary new words.

One of the things about language learning is that there’s always things you can do to get better: to move up from beginner, to intermediate, to advanced, to proficient. Even native speakers are alw

Following the closure of the University of Surrey's IELTS operations in June 2019, MTS is pleased to announce that it was successful in winning a competitive tender recently put out by the British

In my last blog post, I looked at variations in everyday English used in the workplace in Britain and America. In this blog post, I look at differences in the kind of idiomatic English used on both sides of the Atlantic. When you’re studying English, your teacher may well give you some useful phrases that we use in more informal situations, such as the expression, “it’s raining cats and dogs”, which means that it’s raining very heavily. Well, this is an idiom. An idiom is a phrase that doesn’t literally mean what it says. So in the case above, there are no actual cats and dogs falling from the sky. Idioms are of course quite culturally specific, so some of them just don’t translate well between English speaking countries. Let’s look at some of the funnier ones from Britain and America. How many do you know?

“The English and the Americans are two peoples divided by a common language.”

So, your test date is approaching, and as the time you’ve got left ticks down, your panic levels go up.

It’s something that linguists, neurologists, speech therapists, programmers and language learners have been researching for ages. Just how do we learn a language and, in particular, vocabulary?

Have you ever wondered why your classmate, friend, or colleague can hear something once in a new language and remember how to say it perfectly the next time, but for you, the word has gone *poof* l

There are several ways you can prepare for your IELTS speaking test.

Back in 2013, it was predicted that online tests would come to replace paper exams within a decade.