Tools and books I actually recommend, not an affiliate dump
Vocabulary and spaced repetition
Anki. The one I’d point most C1 students toward, and the one I use myself when building materials. It’s free, open-source, and runs on spaced repetition, each card resurfaces right before you’re statistically about to forget it, rather than on a fixed schedule. The real value for advanced learners is in how you build the cards, not the algorithm. Don’t just put a word on the front and a definition on the back; that tests recognition, not production. Better: put a gapped sentence on the front (“The negotiation nearly ___ down over the pricing clause”) and the target collocation on the back (“broke”), so you’re practising retrieval in context, the same way you’d actually need the word in conversation. The interface is genuinely dated and the setup takes an evening to get comfortable with. Worth it specifically because nothing else lets you customise card structure this precisely.
Memrise. Trades Anki’s total flexibility for native-speaker video clips and a much smoother onboarding. If Anki’s blank slate is off-putting, or you want to hear collocations spoken naturally rather than just read them, this is the better starting point. The trade-off is that you’re working within their pre-built decks rather than encoding your own specific gaps, so it’s weaker for the highly individual “why do I keep getting this exact word wrong” problem Anki solves well.
Clozemaster. Narrower than the other two, and useful for exactly one thing: drilling vocabulary entirely through fill-in-the-blank sentences pulled from real corpora, which forces contextual recall rather than isolated word-matching. Good as a daily ten-minute supplement alongside Anki, not a replacement, since you can’t build your own cards to target your specific weak spots.
More on why spaced repetition actually works: Master Your Cambridge C1 Advanced Vocabulary.
Course materials
I teach from Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press materials specifically, not because of brand loyalty, but because both publish directly against the exam boards and CEFR levels I’m actually teaching to. That matters more than it sounds: a lot of cheaper or generic materials teach “general English” that doesn’t map cleanly onto what IELTS, Cambridge exams, or CEFR levels actually assess, so you end up practising skills that don’t transfer to the thing you’re being marked on.
Oxford University Press materials tend to be strongest for general and business English, level-appropriate grammar and vocabulary built around real communicative tasks rather than isolated drills.
Cambridge University Press matters for more than just CAE and CPE prep: Cambridge Assessment English is one of the three organisations that actually administers IELTS itself, alongside the British Council and IDP. So their materials aren’t just “Cambridge exam” prep in the narrow sense, they’re written by people directly involved in setting and marking IELTS too, which makes them a solid choice regardless of which of the two exams you’re actually sitting.
Free resources from me
The free IELTS Speaking Checklist, six things that quietly cap a Band 6, and how to fix each one.
A downloadable lesson plan on debugging your syntax, a root-cause approach to fixing recurring errors.
A downloadable lesson plan on academic hedging and viva defence, for postgraduate students facing a live thesis defence or panel.
A downloadable lesson plan on spotting and fixing corporate jargon, plain English versus padded English.
A downloadable lesson plan on using AI as a rehearsal partner, without letting it replace your own effort.
A downloadable lesson plan on building your own WRAP, a structured plan for exam and meeting nerves.
A downloadable lesson plan on tactical vagueness in negotiation, modal distance and strategic hedging.
A downloadable lesson plan on fronting and inversion, for teachers or self-study students who want a structured way to practise it.
A downloadable lesson plan on semantic prosody, the hidden charge certain words carry, and how to check for it.
A downloadable lesson plan on weak forms and connected speech, including a repeatable dictation-comparison exercise.
A downloadable lesson plan on ACE at Work, a practical framework for using English under real professional pressure.
A downloadable lesson plan on ACE in Exams, the same framework applied to speaking test composure and real-time construction.
A downloadable guided reflection on ACE in Life, a quiet exercise on finding meaning in the difficulty of learning itself.
A downloadable lesson plan on the definite article and country names, why it’s ‘the Bahamas’ but never ‘Taiwan’.
A downloadable lesson plan on True, False, or Not Given, the IELTS Reading trap that has nothing to do with vocabulary.
A downloadable lesson plan on Matching Headings, why the right answer never sounds like the paragraph.
A downloadable lesson plan on Sentence Completion and the Word Limit, the answer that’s correct, exact, and still wrong.
The blog, where I write about the actual mechanics of fluency, exam prep, and the occasional detour into the history of English itself.