雅思写作-评分标准

Female Voice: You are now listening to the IELTS podcast. Learn from tutors and ex-examiners who are masters of IELTS preparation. Your host, Ben Worthington.

INTRODUCTION

Ben: IELTS writing test assessment criteria. Hi there. My name is Ben Worthington. In this tutorial, we will specifically look at the assessment criteria for the IELTS writing test; the four components and how to use it in your study sessions. This is going to help you with your IELTS journey because one, if you understand the criteria-- no, let's rephrase that. When you understand the criteria inside out, you can prepare for the exam more effectively. In essence, you can work smarter rather than harder and the second reason, it will help you is because-- well, I'm going to break them all down. I'll break it all down into the four components and I'll be giving you tips along the way. These tips are from ex-IELTS examiners, current examiners, successful students, and also, of course, methods that we've used in the online course that we have at ieltspodcast. com and methods that I have used when I have been teaching for IELTS. As you all hopefully know, I'm a very results orientated person. So, I'll only do something if I know that I can get the results. Data-driven could be a good way of summing that up. Let's jump into this.

FOUR COMPONENTS OF IELTS EXAM

So, you hopefully know that we've got four components to this IELTS exam, to the IELTS. We've got task achievement, task response, coherence and cohesion, grammatical range and accuracy, or we could just say grammar and lexical resource or we can also just say vocabulary.

TASK ACHIEVEMENT and TASK RESPONSE

Let's jump into Task Achievement, Task Response. So, there are two tasks in the IELTS writing test. One is aimed at task achievement and task 2 at task response. So, the general and academic versions of IELTS they differ. So, for part 1 in the general, we're going to write a letter. Now, this is quite easy. Well, I think it's easy because you've got the whole structure laid out in front of you and you will need to one, explain why you are writing the letter. Then there's usually three prompts. You must answer all of these and it's probably a good idea to assign a paragraph for each of the prompts. Then probably the most important is the tone of the register. So, if it's a formal letter, for example, a letter of complaint, a job application letter, or I don't know, a letter to a newspaper, then you will have to use the right register, use the right language, the formal language. However, if it's for a friend, then you use probably an informal tone and you'll be using words like hey, how's things going? Just contractions and more like spoken text. Now, the tricky thing I find is the neutral, the neutral style and this might be when you are writing to a colleague. For example, an email to a work colleague. When you are writing neutral, you need to find a balance between formal and informal. It's not a challenge, but you do have to be aware. You have to bring it up a level, but you also need to avoid using the very formal phrases such as Dear Sir or Madam. I've gone into this in more tutorials in the past. In fact, there's a whole tutorial about it. Next one, part 1 for the academic test you have to describe a table, chart, diagram, graph, or a flowchart. I said that already. Now, this is a challenge because you need to summarize it logically, you need to pinpoint, i. e. identify the main features and you have to give an overview. So, you make sure you've included the appropriate data and then any significant trends. Now, one tip to do this is to look at the chart and slightly blur your eyes so you can only get a rough outline and then you want to get the key features from that rough outline. Now, the language we need here is quite straight forward and definitely worth mastering. For example, we should be able-- we should have a solid control of comparisons; larger than the third quarter by over 50%. We should have a very thorough understanding of the language of change and this is quite popular with IELTS students. So, we should be writing things like shot up dramatically or reached a peak in 1995. This kind of language if it's a dynamic line chart, of course. Also, if it's a pie chart we should have a thorough understanding of the segments; a half, a third, a quarter, a fifth. What I think is definitely useful for all parts of academic task 1 is the ability to write in a fancy interesting way. By this I mean we can use phrases such as I don't know, the chip-- I don't know. Let's see. The production of barley increased three-fold over the two decades. So, not only did I say three-fold, which is quite an advanced structure but also instead of saying over the twenty years, I used two decades. You see? What I'm doing is introducing a lot of variety and this will help me improve my grammatical range and accuracy. Also, just one last thing here before we move on to writing test part 2. With academic task 1, you do not want to list every single data point. You want to be giving an overview. So, we include the maximums, the minimums, and the exceptions. Just bear that in mind. That's probably the biggest takeaway I can give you for the academic task 1. We go into this into a lot of detail in the Academic task 1 course. We talk about what information to include, what tenses to include, the grammatical structures that I talked about; three times larger, grew by five-fold, all these kind of stuff.

WRITING PART 2

Let's move on to writing part 2. Now, as I've said a million times before, the writing test is a reading test and the speaking test is a listening test. By this, I mean that you really need to comprehend. You really need to understand what the question is asking. With regards to task response or task achievement, sorry, this is basically answering the question that's in front of you. So, here's a typical question. Researching one's family tree is becoming a popular trend. Why do you think that this is so? Is this a positive or negative trend? In that question, there are two parts and you must address those both-- you must address them both. You cannot make a list. You cannot use headings. You cannot use bullet points. You have to introduce each idea then back it up with supporting evidence and then ideally use reasoning and evidence and examples to support your claim. And you do this for each paragraph. Now, what's really confusing for students is they don't know if they got the right answer or the wrong answer. And the way you can tell if you've got a right answer or a wrong answer-- actually, that's the wrong question to ask. What you need to be asking is do I have a developed, strong, logically sound argument? I'm not going to go into it in much detail now, but it's not the case of yes or no. It's not like mathematics where you've got a right answer or a wrong answer. Here, what the examiner is testing or the IELTS examiner is testing is your ability to communicate an argument in a logical, coherent fashion. In a logical fashion with strong arguments and backing it up with appropriate points.

COHERENCE AND COHESION