In the first of a series of blog posts designed to help you prepare your students for IELTS, Pauline Cullen, author of The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS, shares some insights into the writing tests.
When I ran some teacher workshops in China recently, some very interesting points were raised. I wanted to share my responses to these as well as try to dispel a few myths that seem to persist about the IELTS test.
The first of these concerns the writing test. One teacher told me that she advised her students to write as much as possible in the writing test. Her belief was that the examiner would have several band 6 writing tasks in front of him or her and would be more impressed by the longer response and so the longer response would be awarded a higher band
There are several problems with this advice.
The first relates to how the IELTS writing tasks are assessed. The teacher mentioned above assumed that the tests are marked in the same way as when she marks her own class tests. To do that, she would compare her students’ writing test answers to each other, which would allow her to rank the papers and then award a score.
However, the IELTS writing tests are not assessed in this way. The writing tests are not ranked or compared in any way. Instead, a trained assessor reads each candidate’s response to the task and assesses it based on very clear criteria. There is no ranking and no limit to the number of Band 6 or 7 (etc.) scores that are handed out. Try to picture the examiner as simply measuring the writing task in front of them against an exact scale. Each one is measured completely separately and a score is assigned. Other examiners also check the scores, so you can be assured that the scores awarded are very reliable.
Another important point about a student ‘writing as much as possible’ in the writing test is that this will be going against the test instructions. Therefore, a student may produce an answer that does not meet the criteria that the examiner will use to assess their answer. The instructions for each writing task very clearly state how much time should be taken for each part and how many words should be written. These instructions are based on what is necessary to answer the question fully and completely.
If a student produces an answer that is much longer, then it is possible that they will take more than the allocated time and also make mistakes in some important areas. For example, ideas may be repetitive, may lack coherence and it’s likely that they will not have enough time to check the accuracy of their answer. More importantly, if a student writes a very long answer to writing task 1, they may not have the full 40 minutes needed to produce a well-organised and complete answer to writing task 2.
The best advice that you can give your students for the IELTS writing test is to follow all of the instructions to the question. These tell students to write ‘at least 150 words’ for writing task 1 and ‘at least 250 words’ for writing task 2.
I would also advise students to use the time given for each writing task to:
1) plan and organize their ideas
, making sure they are relevant to the task
2) write their answer
3) check their answer for accuracy and to make sure they are not repeating the same ideas, or the same vocabulary and structures.
Read the other posts in this series:
Help with IELTS #3: tips for the Academic Reading test