although i teach IELTS, i do have a problem with it as certainly from the 'speaking' pov, you have to think in a certain way to get a good score.

However, as it is examined externally and the Chinese have no influence on the outcome, it can at least be seen to be impartial and honest when compared to other exams here. (cheating is next to impossible)

BUT - and this is a big 'but'  - speaking to CELTA trainers from all over the world, with MANY years of experience teaching English, the IETLS score from China is seen as 1 point below the rest of the world: a '7' from China is the same as a '6' from another country.

I also teach IELTS, and in fact you don't pass or fail, its an assessment of your English skills, so you get a band score, 0 ~ 9. All depends on grade you need/want to gain admittance (usually) to overseas colleges/Uni's. Anywhere between 6 ~ 7.5 is acceptable for many places.

I also at times teach TOEFUL ( more for USA market) & find that a more difficult test to gain a good score.

passing the ielts should not be a problem

you need about 6 uncommon vocabulary and a couple of idioms

forget a word and then describe it (a paraphrase for an 8 score)

use 'numerous' instead of many

use 'approximately' instead of about

use urban, suburb and rural

use population and census for your hometown or the school studies( the city were your study, population)

now you have 6 words and a 6 score

use have a crack at - for idiom for something you want to try.

say your early riser in a sentence about your habits regarding a topic

now you have 2 idioms and a 7 score

now forget a word in part 2 and describe it , darn i forgot the word its something you do like prayer or relaxing, oh now i remember" meditation." now your have the paraphase and an 8 score,

good luck

i have grade 2 high school students pass speaking with a 6 that have never had a foreign teacher before, and these are lazy spoiled rich kids, if i had real students that want to learn, they would all get a seven.
check ielts-yasi.englishlab.net for Chris Green's website for the latest part 1 and part 2 changes for your students.

the above information assumes your grammar and pronunciation are good already. grammar mistakes count off after 2 minor ones, even natives can slip and use bad grammar but no more than 2 mistakes.

If it is for immigration then it depends based on country how much is a pass mark. For Australia, I think it is 7 in each band (it was 4-5 years ago). For Canada, if you score above 6 or 6.5 then you get 4 points for each band (total you can score 16 points for immigration). IELTS General test is bit easier than IELTS academic. For immigration purpose GT is required. For speaking band, I have feeling that it depends on examiner too. Once I had Indian teacher evaluating my communication skills, so most of the talk was centered around science and teacher so I scored 8.5. Next time, I had British teacher, my talk somehow centered around Obama, D.L, and China. I scored only 7.5. I was kind of hard to believe for such downgrade. I asked people at British Council and hinted that it might be the combination of teacher and topic i choose to speak my score changed. I don't know if that is true or not.

My feeling is that it is better to stick with the way on how we feel easy to use words and communicate (writing and speaking) rather than to try to use quite difficult or complex word and try to impress. Simple is beautiful.

Suppose you are immigrating and once you pass the exam and get the permission to immigrate, you never need to prove validity of IELTS.

I'm not sure about passing IELTS, but you can change Frenchier accent with loads of practice:

http://www.americanaccent.com/faq.html

British Native speakers at:

http://www.focusenglish.com/dialogues/conversation.html

Use GOOG for more links on 'changing your accent!

Dr Monkey - as indicated above, IELTS isn't a pass/fail thing - it's a relative score. Whether you 'pass' or 'fail' will depend on what score you need, based on what you're trying to do with it! Academic? Tourism? Immigration? etc etc. And, when it comes to the academic (ie, studying somewhere), which course and which institute. Many places will have English courses, and the IELTS score for those are pretty low (I've even seen 4.0!!!)

To definitively answer one of your questions - no, your mark will not be questioned by a 'zealous immigration officer'. Basically, they're not allowed to (in the countries you're likely to be using your score for).

Next definitive answer: over 400,000 people have done an IELTS test in China... so, yes, some have 'passed' Not all of them are Chinese. (I doubt that any of the 400,000 got a 9.0 though!)

Some examiners will, naturally, have an accent. They're not all native English speakers (who have accents anyway). So, yes, there may be 'communication issues'. if you feel you have received a score somewhat lower than you feel you should have, and it's due to mis-communications by the examiner, you can put in an appeal (and pay for it). If your appeal is upheld, you'll get your money back. However, if you're basing it on accents, then you'd better hope that it's a pretty bad accent (which is unlikely, given the monitoring that happens with examiners!!!)

What's "Engluage"?

To give you some thoughts for your upcoming test... if your speaking is similar to your writing, you won't do too bad (better than most Chinese - if that's any encouragement )

However, watch your basic grammar! From the public band descriptors, a 6 in grammar is by having pretty good basic grammar (some mistakes are ok), but also have a few accurate complex structures (not just compound). So, relative clauses, passives, hypotheticals, and other sub-ordinate clauses).

Vocab is pretty easy (from what I've read of yours).  Less common idioms for a higher score ("on the other hand", "every coin has 2 sides", etc are extremely common, and thus wouldn't help!)

Accuracy is more important than being clever! Lots of special stuff will be meaningless if you haven't got a grasp of the basics!

And, above all, answer the question! There's no point having awesome grammar and vocabulary, if you're not even on the same page as what you're supposed to be doing! If you're off-topic (eg, instead of describing the important stuff in the graph, you suggest ridiculous things about what might happen in the future), then you're awesome 7.0 will plummet down to a 5.0 very fasy!

Get the public band descriptors (from the IELTS website - above link), and you'll see that 6.0 isn't that hard!