Hi Colleagues, I'd be thankful if you could share with me your ideas regarding teaching writing
skills for IELTS academic applicants (I'm teaching some aiming
for a band score
of 7).
Thank you.
Candle Sham
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Comments
patrisius
Hi Candle,
Expose your students to models of good essays that qualify for band 7. Have them notice the features of the essays that make them good. These can include their rhetorical organizations, their choice of words, naturalness of expressions, and coherence/clarity. Then you can have them write the same topics as those essays, telling them to use the models as their referential frameworks.
Good luck.
Patrisius
kate wong
IELTS students need a wide vocabulary and need to be abreast of world issues, such as 'the environment', 'education' etc. Therefore, whilst teaching the necessary skills for writing, encourage students to read widely, build their vocabulary and develop their ideas on such themes.
There are several very good books which deal specifically with skill building for IELTS such as 'Insight into IELTS' (CEP) and 'On Course for IELTS' (OUP), which offer training for both writing tasks. Other good courses at Upper Intermediate or Advanced level (e.g. The New Headway English Course: OUP) also have sections which deal with the features of discourse needed in good writing.
Among other things, we teach our students sentence structure, paragraph structure, cohesive devices, and overall essay structure using contextualized examples as a basis. For Task one, we teach the types of phrases which are frequently used to describe and interpret graphs, charts, etc.
I believe it is better to analyse texts written by native speakers rather than use essays written by IELTS candidates, as these will give an accurate model as opposed to one which will contain errors of expression and grammar which prospective candidates may not recognize. However, reading essays which have already been assessed does give prospective candidates an idea of what they have to achieve.
Above all, encourage students to love writing, to write for a purpose and an audience, to write to communicate their thoughts, feelings and ideas without being afraid of corrections. Let them write... and then fix it, preferably as a group, co-operatively.
Finally, there is no escape from timed practice IELTS style!
Barahmand
Academic writing tasks include graph interpretation and essay writing. They require two different approaches. To teach students to interpret graphs and present a good written report, it is important to first make sure they do understand the basics of research data presentation. A lot of students fail to write good reports because they do not have any information regarding research findings. i find that giving students a brief background on the most common research methods like survey, experiments, or correlations helps. Next I tell my students a little about graphical presentation of data. I tell them about the different types of graphs and what kind of data they present. Once they understand that all research involves variables, they find it easier to understand the graphs. i always tell them to first discover the aim of the research the findings of which are displayed in the graph. Keeping this aim in mind, I ask them to say how far the research was able to achieve it. In doing so, I tell them to note one or two striking findings, a couple of trends and the similarities and differences between groups.
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Rania Jabr