Tips for IELTS writing classes

Interpreting line graphs and pie charts? Speculating about the causes of issues such as traffic congestion or childhood obesity in writing? Asking for help from the accommodation officer at a college? Although IELTS writing tasks are designed to mirror situations that candidates might face while studying or living abroad, most test-takers don’t have any practice in creating such texts. As a matter of fact, most people rarely write longer texts at all; these days writing is all about posts, DMs and emails. It follows logically that when students decide to take the IELTS exam – and especially the IELTS Academic Exam – they are in desperate need of explicit training and guidance in tackling these IELTS-specific writing tasks. However, planning writing classes can be a bit of a headache. Students often view writing as a solitary activity, something that is difficult, tedious and should be assigned as homework. And of course it’s not unheard of that complex tasks which need to be done at home, end up not being done at all. Teachers aren’t saints either – speaking strictly for myself, procrastination always hits me when it comes to correcting essays. All of this serves as a motivation to make the most of the time spent with writing in the classroom.

So in this post, I’ve collected a couple of ideas for making writing classes more interactive, immersive and fun. Of course, it’s up to you and your students whether you decide to do the whole writing process from the preparation stage to the feedback stage in class, or if you just focus on writing bits and pieces together, such as introductions or topic sentences. I’ve found that the activities below work well online – using Google Docs, Jamboard, Floop, or simply the chat function- and face to face, too.

1. The burger analogy

Examiners are looking for coherent texts containing well-structured arguments that explicitly address the task. Stream of consciousness-style, rambling essays that miss the point will not earn candidates good scores. The aim of the burger analogy is to give students guidance either in structuring the whole essay or in building logical paragraphs. The idea is simple enough: create a mental connection between a process that we are (often too) familiar with, such as making a bacon cheeseburger and one that we aren’t familiar with, e.g. writing an opinion essay. It’s fun, visually attractive and therefore easy to recall in stressful situations like exams. To stick with the cheeseburger idea: explain to students that the top and the bottom buns represent the task itself – the need to refer back to the task in the introduction and the conclusion. The main pieces – bacon, cheese, meat patty – are the arguments. The condiments – mustard, ketchup, mayo – are the examples and evidence holding it all together. Hungry yet? Naturally, any other kind of analogy can fit as long as it’s easily relatable.

Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

2. Mnemonics

Similarly to the burger analogy, mnemonics reduce working memory load and are therefore easy to recall. They can be used to help students call to mind the key elements or the recommended structure of a good essay.

Here’s an example of a memory hook that I used recently: my main aim was to give my students practice in writing well-structured conclusions in class. As a model text, I used an IELTS Academic Task 2 essay about GM food, where candidates needed to consider the advantages and disadvantages of genetically engineered foods and give their own opinion. When explaining the structure of a good conclusion, I created a suitable mnemonic device, which in this case was GMO. What does it stand for?

G = General (this stands for a general, one sentence summary of the issue)

M = Main points (the main ideas listed in the essay)

O = Opinion (this refers to the candidate’s own opinion of the issue)

To include some learner training in your classes and to make the mnemonic devices even more memorable, you can also encourage your students to create some for themselves.

3. Don’t take the good for granted

IELTS courses tend to be short but labor-intensive both for teachers and students, especially when it comes to writing and correcting essays. One common procedure is to do the content and language preparation stages in class. Then students write their essays at home, which the teacher later corrects and hands back. Time permitting, this can be replaced by cycles of drafting and redrafting. However, it feels quite dissatisfying when there is little or no time left in class to reflect on students’ written work or the teacher’s feedback.

One way to make sure that students consider our comments and suggestions is to come back to the homework essays in class. Error correction tasks and games are great for this, e.g. doing a grammar auction. However, focusing solely on error correction can become a trap and can have a negative effect on us teachers, too; we begin to correct essays “on a conveyor belt”, only focusing on underlining problems. So to shift the focus away from errors, here is a really simple and yet very beneficial task: highlight one great sentence in each student’s essay and in class ask them to consider the underlined sentences in pairs and discuss what makes each sentence good. The relevant paragraphs containing the underlined sentences can be placed on the walls of the classroom and students can walk around with a partner, discussing them one-by-one. It might be the content of the sentence, its structure, the choice of words or its style that makes it worth remembering etc. This little task is easy to plan and yet gives a sense of continuity to the writing process and adds a collaborative element to the lesson. It also draws students’ attention to what examiners are looking for, i.e. grammatical or lexical range, coherence etc.

4. It’s not so easy to make mistakes after all

What happens after students are done with writing? Although teacher feedback is undoubtedly valuable in IELTS classes, we may want to incorporate some peer feedback in our lessons, too. If so, we need to give our students a reason to read their partners’ essays. Here is an idea:

When setting the writing task, ask your students to make a couple of mistakes in their essays on purpose. At lower levels, these might be spelling, vocabulary or grammar mistakes. The fun starts at higher levels: they can come up with style-related problems, an incoherent sentence or a mistake in terms of task achievement. They can include factual mistakes too, for instance in the case of IELTS Academic, Task 1 essays where candidates need to interpret a diagram. After the writing stage, students read each other’s texts and try to spot and correct the mistake. Naturally, the texts may contain unintentional mistakes too, which isn’t a problem – these give them more things to discuss and reflect on.

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash

In order to be able to make intentional mistakes, students need to consider the task carefully, think about the style of writing, how coherence and cohesion are created and so on, which is one of the main benefits of this task. The fact that it gives students a genuine reason to read each other’s writing really carefully and reflect on it is an added benefit. It also makes the class more interactive and encourages collaboration and peer feedback.

5. Let’s chat

Remember the good old days when online classes were rare as a hen’s teeth? Many of us used to be in a complicated, love-hate relationship with the photocopier in the teacher’s room and it used to be very easy to make the mistake of overloading students with tons and tons of photocopied pages. I’ve found that there is a similar temptation in connection with technology, i.e. using language learning tools, apps and websites. Many of them work really well for evaluating students’ work and for giving feedback. However, when it comes to technology (and photocopies), less is often more. This is not to say that we shouldn’t try out new things – it rather means that we should learn to exploit the tools we use to their fullest. Such a simple thing as the chat, for example, offers endless possibilities.

The chat can be really handy when we want to zoom in on some microskills in writing classes. Its greatest advantage: students can easily read and react to each other’s answers. Some might find this stressful, though, so I think it works best with tasks where there are several different correct solutions. Just a couple of ideas to get you thinking:

Students finish sentence stems in the chat and then press Enter together so that the answers appear at the same time (e.g. Complete the following sentence: “Even though globalization has a its benefits…” or “There are a number of arguments for both sides, but I believe…”)
It can be used for brainstorming ideas in the content preparation stage or the lead in (e.g. Write down as many disadvantages of living at home during one’s university years as you can think of).
Students rewrite sentences in the chat, again pressing the Enter key at the same time. There are many options here, for example:

- - They can be asked to upgrade sentences that are too simple (e.g. “This is a very important problem.”)
  - They can be asked to join several sentences into one (e.g. “This graph is about the UK. It shows the time people spend outdoors. It’s between 1999 and 2002.”)
  - They can rewrite sentences using synonyms. This offers practice in rephrasing the task in the introductory paragraphs of essays.
  - They can be asked to make the style of a sentence more appropriate (e.g. How would you say this more formally? “I want to join this course.”)

6. Picture dictation for graphs and charts

Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash

The first task of the IELTS Academic writing paper requires special vocabulary, e.g. reach a plateau, rise sharply, plummet, two-thirds, more than half etc. The aim of the following task is to give students some personalized practice in using these words.

First, give them a relatable, lifelike topic that can be turned into a pie chart, a line graph, a bar chart etc. It’s helpful to first model the task using your own example. A couple of ideas:

A bar chart representing how they used to spend their free time when they were kids and what activities they do to relax nowadays
I pie chart showing the things they would do during a zombie apocalypse (e.g. get weapons, seek refuge). Of course, you need to pick your audience for ideas like this – it tends to work very well with teens. For a group of adults, it could be the activities they spend their time with at work.
A line graph depicting the amount of time spent with friends since their birth.

Then, students draw a diagram about themselves and think of the vocabulary they could use to describe it. You might decide to scaffold this stage as needed, providing a list of vocabulary items to choose from or asking students to first write down their sentences.

This is followed by the picture dictation part: students work in pairs describing their graphs or charts to each other, using the relevant vocabulary. Their partners’ task is to draw it based on the description. Highlight that it isn’t allowed to show each other the drawings during the picture dictation stage. It’s important that the teacher monitors this stage carefully, making notes of how students use the target vocabulary. Online a shared whiteboard or Google Jamboard can be an easy way to draw.

Once the drawing part is done, students compare the diagrams with the originals. Encourage them to ask follow-up questions about their partner’s habits and compare them to their own. After this, do some feedback on language: reflect on correct and incorrect uses of the target vocabulary, offering upgrades and corrections. This task is easily adaptable to any group and can be a welcome break from serious IELTS topics.

Conclusion

A few key takeaways from this article:

Mnemonics and visuals are easy to recall and can serve as a life vest during the IELTS exam
Students can react to each other’s writing in a number of valuable ways, reflecting on content and language
Personalization is a simple but efficient way to make tasks motivating and memorable