Scoring an 8 on an IELTS test and being privileged to skip all English examinations at school are just part of the reward for Zhang Ruoqi's top-notch English skills.

Zhang Ruoqi is dubbed a language prodigy in Xiamen city, Fujian province. [Photo/ fjsen.com]

The 14-year-old ninth-grade student at Xiamen No 1 Middle School is now planning to publish her 240,000-word English notes from her global travels.

“She is so way ahead of her classmates that I allowed her to skip all homework, and she can automatically get full marks on her exams without taking any of them,” said Wu Danling, an English teacher.

Zhang’s excellence in English is not just a natural gift, as her mother reveals that she pulled out all the stops for her to learn it in an authentic environment, such as taking her on overseas tours during vacations, throwing English textbooks and novels at her, and even instructing her to memorize a whole dictionary.

Zhang took the IELTS test for the first time when she was 12, and scored 7 out of 9. She got an 8 last year, an accomplishment that fewer than 100 out of some 300,000 IELTS candidates in China can achieve every year.

Her language sense was formed based on vocabulary she picked up from reading books rather than studying grammar in detail, according to Zhang.