For a test in April or May, it seems that you have got plenty of time, and it provides you a lot of ways to enhance and advance your knowledge of English language. I believe that the best way to improve your English is to get engaged with it. This specially works for writing and speaking modules where you have to produce English material in a short period of time.

Internet has been always a brilliant tool for me to acquire knowledge about everything I am in need of. I recommend you to try the glorious site of www.bbc.com. BBC has a developed a special page on English language. Although I cannot remember the exact URL of that page now, you can easily find it out by spending a short time surfing BBC and looking for the obvious keyword of “language”. But I only recommend this – surfing internet websites – as a supplementary way, not the main way. I believe that still the best way to get acquaintance with English is to use commercially available books on several topics, ranging from vocabulary building to pure grammar practices. For vocabulary building one nice volume is the “English Vocabulary in Use” series by Michael McCarthy and Felicity O’Dell. The series consist of elementary, intermediate, and advanced books. But even the intermediate book is not just filled with just ordinary word! “English Grammar in Use” is another book from same publishing, Cambridge University Press, which has been proven to be useful. You also google-search the internet for the first opening pages of these two books which are available at the respective publisher’s website.

The main advantage of going solo in learning a new material like English is that it takes much less time (and money!) to become familiar with some aspects of the language. On the contrary side, be aware that institutes play the most important role in becoming engaged with the language which is presumably not possible with individual study. I recommend you to, just for forcing yourself to study and not depriving of some fresh material thought in the regular classes, attend a ordinary class to steady your pace. But do not leave aside the individual reading of books, internet material or maybe some magazines like the Economist and Times, both are of moderate price and easy to obtain. This way you easily come up with lots of words and languages structures pierced in your own mind, without the need of your conscious struggle.

Sticking to English material, or subjects which have English as an important part of them, like adventure computer games, and, in the computer field, reading “readme” files and application “help” documents was what I did to improve my English as I did not attend any classes, unfortunately. But I do not really praise this method, because it lacks many things required in a thorough knowledge of a language as I cited above.

To put it in a nutshell, I repeat that from my point of view it is the best practice to try both a regular class and self-reading of useful books, two of which I mentioned above.

I took the academic module in my own IELTS, as I wanted my grade for academic purposes. The two modules, academic and general, differ only in reading and writing modules and the academic module is somewhat harder than its counterpart. The other two modules of listening and speaking are exactly similar in both academic and general tests.