A working English tutor.
I'm Adam J. Smith. I teach IELTS Speaking, Writing, and Reading, one to one, online, in proper British English.
Most of my students are working professionals preparing for an academic or immigration application, or returning to IELTS after a previous attempt didn't go where they'd hoped. Lessons run Monday to Friday, 12:00 to 21:00 Indochina Time (UTC+7). For students in Europe, that's morning through early afternoon. For students in South and East Asia, it's evening.
Before teaching full-time I worked as a writer. Co-author of Keto Dive (2026) with Krzysztof Miszczuk, articles in Revolve Magazine, and a forthcoming book in the Ultimate Guide to IELTS series. Keto Dive has its own home at ketodive.life.
How I came to teach IELTS.
I started teaching general English in 2023. Most of my early students were preparing for IELTS, and most of what they needed wasn't more vocabulary. It was a clearer understanding of what the band descriptors actually reward, and which patterns in their own speech were costing them marks.
So I started developing my own materials: exercise sets organised against the descriptors, structured around the errors that appear predictably across speakers of the same first languages. I cross-referenced them against corpus data, organised everything by band score, and turned the whole lot into systematic teaching material. That material is now the basis for the Grammar chapter of the Ultimate Guide to IELTS Speaking, which I'm currently finishing.
What a lesson looks like.
Fifty minutes, one to one, on Zoom. We work to your goals.
Each session ends with a written report, what we covered, where you're strong, where the next session should go, and a targeted exercise to do before we meet again.
We start with a free twenty-five-minute introduction, so you can see how I work before committing to anything. Your first lesson is then £9: a full assessment of where your band actually sits, with a written report and targeted homework to take away. From there we agree a plan and get to work.
I'm direct. I'll tell you when something needs work. The students who get the most out of lessons with me are the ones who want to be told the truth.
The shape of a session.
Underneath the logistics, every lesson runs the same three stages, as a loop, not a list. Each session is built from what the last one exposed.
It's the feedback loop that does the work. A one-off lesson teaches; a sequence of them compounds.
Grammar & vocabulary
We open on the structures, vocabulary and strategies that target your band, the same material the Learn pages are drawn from, taught against what the descriptors actually reward.
Speaking practice
IELTS-styled tasks, scored live against the four criteria, so you hear where the marks are won and lost while there's still time to change it.
Targeted homework
A personalised set, writing, reading, gap-fills, built around the exact gaps that surfaced, with roughly an hour's work before we next meet.
Then it feeds back. Each session ends with a written report and concrete advice on what to fix, which becomes the starting point of the next. That returning loop is the part a static exercise site can't give you.
What realistic progress looks like.
Improvement is measured in months, not days. In my experience a band level takes somewhere between three and six months of steady work, at a lesson or two a week. The most common request I get is for a week of practice before the test, and it is also the least effective, because a band is built from habits, and habits take time to change.
Two students, to show what that looks like over a longer haul. A software engineer from Russia came to me at Band 5.5 and was tested by IELTS at 8.5 around fourteen months later. A lawyer from Turkey arrived at a rusty Band 5 and reached Band 8 within a year; she sat her first speaking mock without a single error, applied for the job she had been aiming at, and got it.
Both worked hard between lessons, and that is the point: nothing here is a guarantee, and your result depends on the work you put in. What I provide is the honest assessment, the targeted plan, and someone catching the exact things holding your band down, week after week, until they are fixed.
Start with a free introduction.
Send a Writing task; get it back marked in detail.
Your first lesson is £9: a full assessment of where your band sits against the four criteria, including a Writing task you send in advance, marked in detail and returned as a written report, and a plan agreed. The detailed marking comes to you in writing; the lesson time itself goes mostly on speaking. Regular lessons are £20 for fifty minutes, one to one, in proper British English.