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!