hello there I had students my name is Ben and you probably know me from podcasts
from videos and in this video, this Facebook live class we are going to be looking at
some tasks two questions and how to build coherent strong cohesive paragraphs and
all the information that I'm going to share with you now is also the
information that's going to be incorporated of some of the information
is going to be incorporated into the new Sentence Guide course for 2018 I'll just
give you a brief overview so well actually let's just jump into it and as
we go through the questions I'll explain about what's happening with the 20 the
new 2018 course because I have an ex-examiner and she recently did her
training with IELTS examiners, well she's not an ex-examiner so she's a
current IELTS examiner and she's recently been retrained by the IELTS
examiners and she had a few questions as to where to put your opinion and all this kind
of stuff and what what's necessary to get over a band eight and
all this and yeah I'll share some of this information as we go through some
of the questions so let's have a look at IELTS writing task 2 now the best way to
approach this is to first dissect the question have a look what type of
question it is and really determine what the examiner needs from you because as
we know there's four requirements
four criteria with the IELTS writing task there is grammatical arrange and accuracy task
response lexical resource and cohesion and
coherence and in order to fully get like a band 8 a 7 a band 9 in order to fully
fulfill the requirements what we need to do is first when we look at the question
is really ascertain really determine what the examiner wants now if you get
an essay correction from ieltspodcast.com I will give you the question about
international marketing okay and I give this question on purpose because this is
a really it happens literally like 80% of the essay corrections that
I do or the essays I receive they all fall for the same mistake because the
question talks about international marketing and lot of students confuse
this with international trade globalization and different issues and
write the whole essay about these different issues okay so they are not
going to get points for task response so this is why it's critical that it's
really important that you understand what the examiner is wanting from you so this is
the first step we look at the question and we really get it sort of like clear
in our minds what the examiner wants from us and we can do this in various ways
we can maybe categorize the question from a solution discussion whichever and
we can also underline some of the key words my personal strategy which I teach
in the course is that we look at the question we classify it and then we make
a plan that corresponds to the question and then we double triple check that
plan with the question to make sure that we are still on task response that is
still going to get the full points now this is really important and I'll just
give you an analogy okay it's like if we make the wrong plan or we get the
wrong idea at the very beginning like if we're starting a journey and we start
off on the wrong road and then we just keep on going on that run road we're
going to end up in a different location wildly different from where we started
okay so this is why it's critical we get full comprehension that we fully
understand what the question wants from us from the very beginning
now so we analyze the question make a rough plan of some ideas that we can
respond to some of the examples okay and then we were to look at the question
again and from from there we're going to just check does that plan correspond and
then we'll start organizing our ideas for the paragraphs okay now this may
seem like a process that is way too long to do under exam conditions and you
would be right in thinking that this is why you need to practice this process
quite a few times okay you need to and don't you don't even have to write the
essay the whole complete essay all you have to do is first of all just
concentrate on this part of the writing process so you can get maybe 10 20
questions and just practice your idea formation skills and your question
interpretation skills yeah it's like when we're playing cricket or football
we don't every time we want to improve when we're playing football or cricket
we don't have a whole match we just isolate that specific skill for example
it might be taking penalties or tackling
we isolate the skill and then we
practice it over and over again then when we have
the whole game the whole match we incorporate that skill micro skill into
our whole game this is exactly what we'll be doing with IELTS we dissect it
and we get good at each different stage and then on the exam or when we're
writing the whole entire essay we put all these little micro skills that we
got we put them all together so as I said we look at the question we analyze
the question categorize it try and understand what the examiner wants make
a rough plan double-check with the question and then we're going to
organize these ideas into a coherent paragraph and the reason why I want to
continue with planning the paragraph before even considering the introduction
is because once we get our paragraphs clear in our mind we know how we want to
structure it what we're going to use what we want to talk about or claim or
argument our position once we have this crystal clear now we know what to put
into the introduction okay if we just start off with the introduction straight
away then maybe new ideas might pop into our mind when were writing a paragraph
or when we're planning a paragraph and now we have to go back and alter the
introduction so this is like it's going to cost you time it's going to be messy
so this is why get a really good plan get your ideas solid fleshed out
developed your whole argument developed and now you know what to include in your
introduction and by the way the introduction we're just going to touch
on these small topics that we're going to develop further into further detail
in our paragraphs so and we get a question and it might be
here let's see so here's a typical question plagiarism is an
ever-increasing problem in universities some people think that plagiarism should
be dealt with using technology while others think that it is the role of the
academic institutions two discuss both sides and give your opinion now can you
see how but these things I've got like two ideas dissecting the question as I'm
reading it so the main topic here is the plagiarism so some people think that it
should be dealt with technology this is going to be paragraph one while others
think that it is the role of academic institutions paragraph two so I've got
it clear in my mind now where or what the question wants I must admit this was
a slightly easier question from a typical it's not my birthday but hey anyway so
we've got these two ideas now what are we going to do well one is plagiarism we
should be dealt with technology this is a core idea for paragraph one now a
listing that is the role of academic institutions this is a core idea for
paragraph two not ideas these are mandated from the question we must
follow these these points in the question we can't talk about plagiarism
in Peru because it doesn't there's nothing about that in the question but
there is about plagiarism but the main core of each paragraph paragraph one and
body paragraph two has been decided by the question and this is how we're going
to get points for task response because our questions correspond sorry how
paragraphs our ideas correspond to the question so paragraph one some people
think that plagiarism should be dealt with using technology okay
now now how can we develop this argument
well we can make a position to say oh you just explained it okay so you can say
yeah this is good it's faster it's cheaper and it's possibly even more
accurate okay so just three ideas of why I should
be in favor okay why I could be in favor of this argument it should be dealt with
using technology while others think that is so anyway let's just focus paragraph
one so it's faster and could be cheaper and it could be more accurate just
handing it all over to technology and so I've got some ideas and I could put that
into a few sentences yeah and each sentence after the main thesis
statement sentence we're going to put supporting sentences okay and then we're
going to give the reasons so the three reasons I just gave faster more accurate
and cheaper okay so this is the rough idea we introduced about using technology
maybe it's becoming more widespread then we build up this paragraph by another
supporting sentence okay not going to go into directly like the thesis statements
and all of this just yet because we're only on the ideas okay so as I said
three ideas why I'm gonna favor faster cheaper more accurate now now what's the
next stage of this paragraph of constructing this paragraph well when
you are making an argument in academic writing especially in the ielts the
normal thing to do is to give evidence as to maybe quote a scientist or some
results or some some common practice but give evidence substantiate your claim
because one thing is saying that it's usually faster quicker more accurate but
now I need to back this up this is an argumentative writing this
is convincing the in this case the reader the examiner convincing the
examiner that we know what we're talking about so what we're going to do is put
in an example or a claim okay sorry an example or evidence that's what I wanted
to say so what kind of example could we give well we can just say something like
in recent studies most academic institutions who adopted technology no
actually bad
example you'd say for example I don't know let's
see Copyscape okay Copyscape is some copy software just came to mine now
we could even just say advanced word processing scanning software if we don't
have any brand names to mind just say advanced essay analyzing software has
recently improved accuracy by over 20% while correcting the essays and academic
papers for the London School of Economics okay something like that I
wouldn't even just make it appear more simple and say and let's see essay paper
scanning software has usually outperformed human essay corrections by
over 50% in most, in recent scientific tests this clearly shows that technology
technology can bring vast benefits and then we'll go on to explain the benefits
or not benefits but just list a few more ok so here what we're doing is we
state stating a claim we're going to give you some advantages some reasons
then we're going to put some evidence in there with an example and then
round off the sentence oh sorry round off the paragraph then we're going to do
exactly the same for paragraph two as well okay it's going to be very very
similar so paragraph 2 others think that is the role of academic
institutions okay you can say yeah the role of academic institutions is
definitely positive they can assess definitely advantageous maybe they can
assess certain they're better suited to assess special situations okay so and
here you can say we can even use a hypothetical example and you can say for
example if the student had a physical disability which greatly hindered their
handwriting ability then a human assessor would be better equipped to
decipher their poor handwriting than a machine okay therefore having human assessors
working at an academic institution is possibly a more fairer outcome for the
students involved okay so here I did kind of go slightly off-topic by talking
about human sort of like essay correctors so I can tilt it back to
academic institutions working in academic institutions okay so and then
the example it was more hypothetical in this case I talked about you know
somebody writing with we call it a physical disability but you could
probably see that I may have gone slightly off-topic with this okay so
this is why I should have checked it beforehand so if we were saying academic
institutions we can make the assumption that maybe we were talking about human
essay correctors and then just mention that in the paragraph okay so let's
see so we've got our paragraphs we've got our body paragraph 1 body paragraph 2
then as we said before we're going to put this into sort of like yeah we'll
put these into our essay and also we're going to the flesh the ideas out beforehand and
we'll start the introduction go through briefly mention some of the ideas that
we're going to talk about and then we're going to move on to paragraph two do
exactly the same as I move on to paragraph one flesh out these ideas that
we made a note of then move on to paragraph two do exactly the same and
then conclude okay conclude with a position so there we go if you've got
any questions please feel free I'm gonna check now if anybody's put any
questions here let's see two seconds
so if anyone's got any questions just feel free to put them below and okay let's
see so I'll be doing more of these videos so if you want any more help just
leave a comment in this video if not you can they always email me
message me and yeah be more than happy to help hope you enjoyed this video and
all the best with your IELTS preparation
thank you