IELTS Bands for Listening and Speaking

[mubashir9819]

Hi All

This forum has really been helpful to me and have helped me understand lots of issues. Keep up the good work.

A friend of mine has been granted ILR a year ago and is now getting ready to apply for British Citizenship. He is preparing for IELTS (He has done it before in 2002 when he first came to UK).
I have read on Internet that the Home Office looks at Listening and Speaking band and ignore the Reading, Writing and Overall bands. Also the bands should be above 4.0 for Listening and Speaking and it does not matter what bands you get in the other parts of IELTS. You can get band '1' in Reading and Writing and this will not have any effect in your citizenship application.

The issue is that these comments on Internet were posted in 2012-2013. I cannot find any of the above comments in recent post i.e. 2014.
My question is, is the above statement still valid or have the Home Office changed the criteria.

Thanks

Syed

[bubulinea]

Hello there,

when I did my language test in June (B1 level), I was told exactly the same by my test provider. However, I couldn't find any official statement from the Home office that it's true and my solicitor wouldn't confirm that either, so I thought it a bit of a gamble to rely on it.

[mubashir9819]

Thanks for the reply.

Thats what I am trying to find out in this forum if it is true or not. If it is, can it be verified from any Home Office official statements?

[WR1]

There's tons of information on the official gov website. Go to the gov website and search for information on the KOLL requirements. All you will see is English Speaking & Listening. Even the application forms state this.

If it states English Speaking and Listening, then that is all you need. Reading and writing are not stated therefore not required. Home Office won't even consider the reading and writing scores as they are not part of the requirements.

There are some exams such as IELTS which the way they are structured is that you need to sit all four elements to take the test. However, other exams such as ESOL, you can choose just to do the Speaking and Listening elements only, and this has been widely accepted by Home Office for both ILR and BC applications.

[mubashir9819]

Thanks WR1

This helps a lot.

[Hubba]

The minimum required IELTS score is 4.0, which is equivalent to B1 on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).

source: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... r_2014.pdf - page 12

In the 1st page of such document they do say the following, but only for settlement purposes:

Where a test examines all four components (speaking, listening, reading and writing) you do not need to pass the
reading and writing components, you only need to evidence passing the speaking and listening components.

It's probably the same for Nationality purposes, but you can send them an email asking about it.