In the latest in her series of blog posts designed to help you prepare your students for IELTS, Pauline Cullen, author of The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS, offers more advice on the writing paper.
In our webinar about improving your writing score in the IELTS test, we had several questions about how to express your opinion in writing task 2. Several people wanted to know if they should only do this in the conclusion at the end, or if they should write their opinion in the introduction.
There are two keys points to raise here. Firstly, there is no set way to write an essay. It can be approached in many ways, with your own personal view being stated either in the introduction or in the conclusion. The second important point to make is that your ‘position’ needs to be made clear throughout your writing if you are seeking to score a band 7 or more. The public version of the Band descriptors for Task Achievement says that a Band 7 essay ‘presents a clear position throughout their response.’
How can you teach your students how to do this?
• Teach your students different ways to make their position clear within their essay. For example, they can use adverbs or adverbial phrases (e.g. in general, unfortunately, surprisingly, etc.); modal verbs (e.g. can, may etc.); verbs such as ‘seem’, or phrases such as ‘It is likely’.
• Train your students to be aware of the writer’s opinion or position each time they read an article or passage. Which words or phrases help them to decide the writer’s opinion of the topic they are writing about?
• Encourage your students to read widely. Not only will it help them to develop reading skills but it will also give them ideas to talk about. Encourage your students to form and express their opinions by asking, “What do I think about that?” whenever they read an article on a current topic.
• Before doing a writing task, you could use the writing task question as the basis for a class debate. Divide the class into two and ask one half of the class to argue ‘For’ the topic and the other half to argue ‘Against’. They can then use the ideas from the debate to write up a plan for their answer. Writing a plan in pairs or groups is a good idea if your students are still at the early stages of learning how to write an essay.
Missed Pauline’s webinar on the IELTS writing paper? Don’t worry – you can watch the recording here.
Read the other posts in this series: