I am happy to tell you my way to study English and prepare IELTS test.
To be honest, I don't think that I have some excellent methods to study English. I feel that I am similar with other Chinese students who learn English.
For IELTS test, I did much work by Cambridge IElTS books 1 to 6, not only for listening and reading parts, also for writing and speaking parts. I think that most people could pay more attention to the formor ones, while they do not focus on the later ones.
About Listening
First of all, I have to say that I had listened to all tests at least 3 times in all books(1 to 5). Of course, I did the tests in the real condition like the real IELTS test.
Secondly, after the"3 times" , I listened to them again and spent much more time on section 1&2. I mean is that I tried to catch some details of the sections and wrote down some "topic words" in the vocabulary notebook. In fact, I feel it is the most significant to know the scenes, such as to rent accomodation, individual information or a tutor's presentation.
Then, during the last month,tell you the truth, I really did have no idea to do, that's why I sent the e-mail to you.
From your advice, I listend to "Headway": Pre-Intermediate, Intermediate, Upper-Intermediate and Advanced. I listend to one book each week. Moreover, I think that it is also very important to review. I mean, during the second week, I did the Intermediate book, but I also did the Pre-Intermediate book again; in the third week, I did the Upper-Intermediate book, I reviewed the Pre-Intermediate book......
(For "Headway", I just practiced the listening parts )
By the way, I also did some exercises in this website:http://www.esl-lab.com/.(I found it from your blog too)
Personally, I feel that it is a better webside to study English, especially for listening skills. Because there are many short dialogues and the topics are pretty intersting. In addition, it is good way to study oral vocabularies and some expression ways.
About reading
I totally recognize your ideas about improving reading skills. To read some articles, there are less or even merely two or three new words in the paragraphs. Besides,I read most of materials in your webside. Because there are a few new words in these reading materials, I therefore read them fast. I even feel, according to read them, I improved my reading speed.
Certainly, Cambridge IELTS books are very essential. I paied more attention to take exercises in the IELTS 3-6 and I studied the IELTS 3-5 seriously.
By the way, the all tests were in the real condition.
In my opinion, I think the sentence relations are crucial to take the reading part of IELTS test,such as causality & consequence.
About speaking
We have to say that speaking test includes so many topics, if we want to prepare all the topics which is unnecessary. While, if we just prepare the topics and questions that are mentioned in the "机经", these topics could be insufficient.
Personally, I feel that Cambridge IELTS books might be a better choose. All six books include many topics, although I just precitces all the materials from 3 to 6, I think that's enough. After I did all that already, I prepared some topics from the "机经".
When I practised speaking, I always recorded my vioce, and then, I heared them in order to find the grammatical errors and solve pronunciation problems. I feel that it is very useful to improve speaking skills by myself. Fourthermore, when I practised them, if I found some questions that were not easy to discuss, I often wrote them down, especially for the questions of part three, I tried to collect ideas as much as possible so that I have many ideas to answer new questions in the real test.
About wrting
Because I did many works about the part three of the speaking test, so I feel that I really have a great deal of ideas to discuss the topic in part two in the writing test.
Meanwhile, reading some relatively easy articles, this is also very useful to improve the writing skills, particularly for learning sentence structures and extending quatity of vocabulary I feel.
In my experience, I just wrote some simple sentences and use some linking words, maily because I must avoid the grammatical errors. Of course, I also tried to use some advanced grammas, like subordinate clauses, while I only used a very few them. I think the structure is much more significant and we could try to communicate with the examner ,not only expressing our own ideas.
That's my idea about studying English and preparing IELTS test. I hope it could be useful to you and other English leaners.
Best wishes,
XXXXX