A lot of students lose points on the Duolingo English Test because they don't
understand the writing questions well enough, and you don't want that to be you. So in this video,
we're going to talk about the two different writing questions on the Duolingo English test.
And of course, I'm going to give you a bunch of tips to help you score better when you take your
own exam. Before we start, if you're new to this channel, Hi, I'm Teacher, Luke from DETREADY.COM.
Visit our website to find more information about the Duolingo English test, and lots of tools to
help you prepare. The first writing question you'll get on the Duolingo English test is right
about the photo on a test, it looks like this here, you have one minute to write at least one
sentence about the photo. And you've got to do this difficult question three times on the test,
in my opinion, is probably the hardest question on this whole exam. Because like I said, you only
have one minute to write an answer. That's incredibly short. And because you only have one
minute, I see a lot of students making the same mistake when they're writing their answer for this
question type. And the mistake they make often is that they simply just label the photo rather than
actually describing it. When you're writing your own answers for this question type, you don't want
to just label you want to describe fully. But what I mean by labeling Well, let
me show you some examples here. Okay, so this is a photo and this is what I mean by labeling. The
student wrote, I can see six men, there is a TV and a computer. Also, I can see a sofa. So of
course, this is not good enough. This is not a description, this is just a label. Instead, you
want to try to go beyond labeling the items you can see. And you can describe what could be
happening in the image, which can help you to tell a better story. Okay, now let's take a look at a
good answer. This student wrote, This is a picture of a man giving a presentation at work. He's
holding something in his right hand and talking to the three men who are sitting directly in front of
him. So as you could see, in those examples, I was not just labeling the photo, I was instead
describing what I saw. And I was able to write two, maybe three sentences using that structure. I
highly recommend you try this when you take the test because like I said, it will allow you to
write more, which is really important to get a good score. If you want to study this structure in
a lot more detail, you should check out my writing course it's below in the description. The second
writing question on the Duolingo English test is called read then write it looks like this on the
test. Here, you have to read a prompt or a question and write at least 50 words about that
prompt or question. And you have to do that in five minutes. Those five minutes also include
preparation time, so it's not much time at all. And although this question type is really hard,
because you only have five minutes, you can do it. Well, if you understand what you've got to do, you
really need to start typing as soon as you read the prompt, and I'll show you a simple structure
you can use for answering this question in one second. But first, let's talk about the different
topics you might get for this writing question. So there are two broad categories of topics you'll
get. The first category is about yourself. So you might be asked to describe different situations
about your life. For example, describe a time you were surprised this is called a recount paragraph,
and here you're expected to write about your own experiences. The second category of topic is more
about relevant and current issues, things like the environment, technology or business for this
category, you're expected to read the question carefully, and respond with your ideas about those
topics. There are so many different topics you might get for this test. So it's really hard to
prepare beforehand, you just have to write about your ideas using your best English possible now
let's think about how you're scored the criteria Duolingo are using to assess your writing. Let's
take a look here. When you go onto the Duolingo English test website you can find this
information, they actually show you what the criteria is for the extended speaking and writing
tasks which all contribute towards your production score. As you can see, the production questions
are marked based on these elements, grammatical accuracy, grammatical complexity, lexical
sophistication, lexical diversity, task relevance, length, fluency, and acoustic features. Some of
these words are tricky. Lexical basically means vocabulary and acoustic features means
pronunciation. So based on the criteria I just showed you, this is what you must do to get a good
score for this writing question. First, you must understand and then answer the prompt directly.
Next, you want to write between 50 and 100 words, but I recommend you get closer to the 100 word
mark. And then you need to use a range of grammatical structures, some simple and some
complex If you want to learn about complex sentences, you should check the video below in the
description. Next, you want to use lots of topic related vocabulary. So for example, if your topic
is about the environment, then a lot of the words you use it in your answer should be closely
related to the environment. Things like climate change pollution, these kinds of words. And
lastly, you need to organize your answer. Well, a good answer will have a topic sentence, a body and
a concluding sentence. This is how you can logically structure and organize your paragraph.
And you can do that in five minutes. This is the structure I teach my students. So let me show you
how it's done here. Okay, so a topic sentence could be something simple like this. I agree that
children should be banned from eating fast food at school for two important reasons. First, fast food
is detrimental to children's health. Okay, that's
a good supporting idea. But of course, it's not enough just by itself. Now I need to provide an
example or reason I've gone with an example. For instance, fast food is often packed with fat,
sugar and other preservatives, which makes them extremely unhealthy for children. Okay, so
concluding sentences are pretty simple. You basically restate the introduction, and this is
what I wrote. To conclude, for the reasons discussed above. I believe it is vital that
schools stop serving fast food to their students. Okay, now you need to practice some of these
writing questions. So I recommend you watch this video here. I'll see you there. Bye.