About 关于

Deen Cox 关于 Deen Cox · 雅思专家与作家

IELTS Specialist. Author. Curriculum developer. Over a decade preparing candidates for the Speaking and Writing papers. Anti-template, criteria-led, built for the learners I actually teach.

Deen Cox

IELTS Specialist. Author of the IELTS Series. Based in Beijing. What follows explains how the books came to be, and why they're built the way they are.

Deen Cox is an IELTS Specialist, author and curriculum developer based in Beijing, with over a decade of experience preparing candidates for the Speaking and Writing papers. His teaching rests on a single conviction: that the rote-learning and template-memorisation (模板背诵) dominating the Chinese test-preparation market are the very things that trap able candidates at Band 6 — and that the way through is a generative, examiner-anchored method rather than another set of scripts to recite.

He has co-authored IELTS study guides with Mike Wattie, a former IELTS Examiner, across all four skills of the exam — Listening, Reading, Writing, and Speaking. That partnership gave him an unusually precise, criteria-level grasp of how each paper is actually assessed, and it is this examiner's-eye view of the band descriptors that underpins every strategy in the books.

Crucially, his method was forged not in theory but in live, exam-style conditions. Across ten years of conducting mock interviews, recording and dissecting candidate answers, and measuring them against the official band descriptors, he has come to specialise in the precise weaknesses that hold Chinese learners back — particularly in the two productive skills, Speaking and Writing. From L1-transfer grammar errors and flat sentence stress to circular logic and memorised phrasing, he has catalogued the exact patterns examiners penalise. The fourteen frameworks at the heart of the IELTS Series — A-R-E, P.P.F.E., F-E-E-L, SCORE, OPAL, QSCAN, BLUEPRINT, PEEC, LINK, SWAP, MIX, PRIME, TREND and COMPARE — are the distilled result of that decade of close observation, built to dismantle those weaknesses one by one.

Credentials 资质与认证

Everything below can be checked. Certificate numbers are given so that you do not have to take my word for any of it.

IELTS Teacher Training Program — IDP Education IDP 雅思教师培训认证

I completed IDP Education’s IELTS Teacher Training Program in both of the papers I teach. IDP Education is a co-owner of IELTS, so this is training in how the papers are assessed, taken directly from one of the bodies that owns the exam.

  • ◆ Understanding the Assessment Criteria — Speaking
    Certificate 56ef-caa8-6c78-6adc
  • ◆ Understanding the Assessment Criteria — Writing (current for the computer-delivered test)
    Certificate b4cf-a70b-01e6-5a6d

The programme carries English Australia CPD Framework endorsement (40 CPD points) and NEAS Quality Endorsement.

  • ◆ IELTS Exam Preparation Specialist Certification — Global Language Institute, London
  • ◆ TEFL Certification, 150 hours — Global Language Institute, London

The books

I've authored twelve sole-authored titles and co-authored four bilingual Chinese–English IELTS textbooks with Mike Wattie. The five books on this site are the core of the current teaching system:

  • ◆ IELTS Speaking Mastery: The Complete Band 7+ Guide (298 pages)
  • ◆ IELTS Speaking: The Teacher's Guide (104 pages, licensed only)
  • ◆ IELTS Speaking: The Practice Workbook (252 pages)
  • ◆ IELTS Academic Writing: Complete Band 7+ Guide (221 pages)
  • ◆ IELTS Writing: Complete Vocabulary Guide (140 pages)

Working philosophy

I prefer working with older and adult learners — the ones who can be honest about where they're stuck and who show up prepared to work. My teaching is anti-rote-memorisation and criteria-led. Every framework I teach traces back to the official Band Descriptors; nothing is hand-waved. And I don't teach anything I haven't seen work in the room.

People sometimes ask whether any of this is inside information. It isn't. The band descriptors are published by the IELTS partners, the assessment criteria are published, and anyone can download both. Every briefing on this site carries the official link, because the point is that you check it rather than take my word for it.

What is actually scarce was never access. It is whether anyone reads that public material properly and turns it into something a Chinese candidate can execute in an exam room. Not secret knowledge — unread knowledge.

常有人问这些是不是「内部消息」。不是。评分标准由雅思三方机构公开发布，评分细则同样公开，任何人都能下载。本站每一篇简报都附官方链接，就是希望你自己核对，而不是相信我。
真正稀缺的从来不是渠道，而是有没有人把这些公开材料读透，再把它翻译成一个中国考生在考场里真正能执行的步骤。不是内部消息，是没人去读的公开材料。

Beyond IELTS

The IELTS Series is one strand of a broader body of work. Outside of test preparation I also write and speak on philosophy — Eastern traditions in particular, alongside Stoicism and existential thought — and on questions of character, meaning, and self-cultivation in mid-life. Those catalogues sit under the same author name; further titles and a dedicated home for that work are in preparation.

If you'd like to work together — as a student, as a teaching institution, or as a publishing partner — get in touch. Every enquiry receives a personal reply within 24 hours.