Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The IELTS General Training Task 1 Writing Test

The IELTS General Training Writing Test lasts for 1 hour and includes 2 tasks. Task 1 is a letter and you must write at least 150 words. You should spend about 20 minutes out of the hour for task 1. Task 2 is an essay and you must write at least 250 words. You should spend about 40 minutes for Task 2.
The Task for the IELTS General Training Task 1 Writing

The IELTS General Training Writing Task 1 asks you to write a letter of a minimum of 150 words in response to some situation or problem. The task will probably ask you to complain about something, to request information, ask for help, to make arrangements and/or explain a situation. All these are fairly similar tasks.
Marking for the IELTS General Training Task 1 Writing

The IELTS General Training Task 1 Writing will be marked in four areas. You will get a mark from 1 to 9 on Task Achievement, Coherence & Cohesion, Lexical Resource and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Your final band for task 1 will be effectively an average of the four marks awarded in these areas. Task 1 writing is less important than task 2 and to calculate the final writing mark, more weight is assigned to the task 2 mark than to task 1's mark. To get a good overall mark for The IELTS General Training Writing though, both tasks have to be well answered so don't hold back on task 1 or give yourself too little time to answer it properly. 


Task Achievement This where you can really make a difference through careful preparation. This mark grades you on basically "have you answered the question". It marks whether you have covered all requirements of the task suffiently and whether you presented, highlighted and illustrate the key points appropriately.

Coherence and Cohesion These two are interrelated which is why they are done together. Cohesion is how your writing fits together. Does your writing with its ideas and content flow logically? Coherence is how you are making yourself understood and whether the reader of your writing understands what you are saying. 

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