5 Key Things I Learned Correcting 10,000 IELTS Writing Task 2 Essays

hey there Chris here from IELTS advantage and we did something really interesting over the past week over the past week we look back at all of the essays that I've corrected all the task 2 essays that I've corrected over the past five years and what I wanted to see was are there any common things that keep coming up again and again and again or what were the things that students changed that really led to success or what were the things that the advice that we gave that made the biggest difference and what I did was after analyzing them all I came up with these five things that are going to help you guys as much as possible and so yeah over the over the past five years I've corrected more than 10,000 writing tasks to the essays and feedback is very very important and it really does help a lot of people and collating all this information together is really gonna help you in this video so the first one the first thing that was very very obvious was students are not doing the most important thing which is clearly answering the question so toss to you get a question what is your number one job what is your main job it's not to show off how amazing your vocabulary is it's not to show off how many grammar structures you've memorized is to clearly demonstrate that you have understood and that you can clearly answer the question and this seems to be the number one problem it's not grammar it's not for capillary it's not structure it's did you actually answer the question and the answer to that for most of the students that we deal with is no the answer to the question is not clear on the paper so why is this and how can you overcome this problem well there are a few reasons I'm looking at the data these are the four reasons that came up so the number one was students were very confused about what to do and their writing is was a reflection basically of they're confused thinking we tell this to students over and over again if your thinking is very clear then your writing is going to be clear if your thinking is you know you're confused about the question and confused about what and confused about everything then your writing is going to be very confusing and this is not your fault there are so many different blogs and Facebook pages and YouTube channels and books all about IELTS all saying different things but it's no wonder that people are very confused about what to do and and when they look at that question and they're like well one teacher says this and another teacher says this and another blog says this and it all becomes very very very confusing and you're under pressure you have you know a time limit and that leads to some very very confusing answers when students start to focus just on one way and follow one method and I'm not saying to join me or I'm not saying this because I want you to join my course what I'm saying is it doesn't matter if it's me it doesn't matter if it's someone else follow just one way of doing things and then your thinking is going to be very certain and very clear and that's going to improve your task achievement and your coherence and cohesion so that's the first reason being clear on what to do and having that clarity of thought is really going to help you the second reason and it's also the most common thing that comes up in our success stories we recently analyzed our success stories and the most common thing that all of those successful students said was planning we normally when when a student joins our VIP course we give them a number of essays to to send us and we give them feedback on that and normally the first essay that they send it's very clear that they didn't do any planning and then we encouraged them to do more planning and more planning and more planning and their essays just become better and better and better and better and it's related to the to the first point as well the first point about you know your writing as a reflection of your thinking if you're planning everything on it and you're doing all your thinking and your getting clear and what you're going to be writing before you start writing then of course your essay is going to be much much much clearer also when you're planning everything out it actually saves you a lot of time because you are getting all of the thinking and the idea development and the idea generation and the structure all of the thinking you're getting that out of the way so that you can just focus on writing and then later on editing so taking time to plan a knowing hider plan is absolutely crucial what we seen in the data by looking at over 10,000 essays was very very clear the students who would plan did much much better than those who wouldn't but then there was a different category there were students who planned and those who planned effectively the ones who planned effectively doing the right things during planning were much higher than the other two groups so it's not only just about planning it's about learning how to plan effectively and practicing that as a skill and doing that and on exam day the third one was idea generation this is something that students really struggle with and what most of the time what they're taught is brainstorming brainstorming does not work at all it works in other things like if you're trying to think of lots of ideas and you're trying to just free you know free think and be as free as possible when you're thinking then brainstorming is a really good idea like when we're thinking of new videos to make for example for this channel brainstorming is an amazing way to do that but brainstorming is a complete waste of time when you're writing essays under exam conditions you only have 40 minutes by brainstorming what you're doing is you try to think of as many different ideas as possible that is a waste of time and it generates a bunch of irrelevant ideas and then you have to spend time sorting through all those irrelevant ideas and then you might not even come up with an effective idea so having a technique having a strategy that helps you generate ideas that are you know worthwhile ideas that you can actually use in your essay and being able to do that and generate those effective ideas quickly is absolutely crucial to success so once students stop brainstorming and start using our strategies to help them with idea then a they save a lot of time and B they start generating ideas really really quickly but effective ideas that they can actually take and then use in their essay and that helps them answer the question clearly because those ideas clearly answer the question and then they can develop those ideas and into coherent arguments the other thing that we noticed when we look back look back at the advice was this when things really clicked for students was when we told them put yourself in the readers shoes why are you actually writing anything why do you write anything why do you write a text message why do you write an email why do you write an essay you do that to communicate it's just communication you are communicating with someone ie the reader so putting yourself in the readers shoes really really helps students with answering the question clearly and improving everything and to do with their writing why is that because most people are writing for the sake of writing and they're just trying to show off to the examiner show off how amazing their grammar and vocabulary and structures and all of these things are I'm not really thinking about why am I actually writing when I'm writing to communicate with someone to clearly communicate and for them to be able to understand me and once they start doing that and putting themselves in their shoes and asking themselves will the reader understand this is this helping them is this clear communication then everything core trying to transforms and their whole essay just gets much much much better so that's number one you need to clearly answer the question and demonstrate to the reader the examiner that you have answered the question and to do that you need to get clear on your thinking follow one method you need to start learning how to plan effectively you need to start learning how to generate ideas quickly and effectively and you need to understand the real purpose of writing which is to clearly communicate with the reader once you start to learn how to do those things then we saw a massive increase in scores second thing is the basics of writing and the fundamentals of writing most of the students from when they started working with us - when they got the scores they needed had a massive improvement in the fundamentals of writing what do I mean by that well the three fundamentals of writing are do you know how to write an introduction do you know how to write main body paragraphs and do you know how to write a conclusion most of the students who he worked with were people coming to us and saying I have no idea why I keep getting 6.5 IELTS is a scam I will never be able to do this it's so unfair and then we looked at their writing and we pointed out but you don't know how to write at all you don't know the fundamentals of writing you don't know how to write an introduction you don't know right how to write a main body paragraph you don't know how to write a conclusion and some of them will get angry with us and be like oh why don't they just give me a 7 it's like you're not going to get 7 in writing until you learn how to write so learning the fundamentals of what an introduction is what's supposed to be included in an introduction what is included in the main body paragraph what's the topic sentence how do you write an explanation how do you write an example how do you write a conclusion what is a conclusion and most students do not understand these very very basic fundamentals of how to write an essay and that is what is being tested you're being tested on can you write an essay in English so would it not be a very very good idea to learn what an introduction is in a main body paragraph on a conclusion and it doesn't take very long to actually learn these things it's not that complicated but it just takes a little bit of time to learn what these things are and then try and do them so try and write introductions try and write main body paragraphs try and write conclusions and then get feedback on them and most students will do them pretty well but they need a little bit of feedback you know fix this and fix that and then everything becomes much much much easier for many students you have to learn how to walk before you can run being able to produce about seven or a band 8si is quite difficult for most students and you're trying to do these things without really understanding or being able to do the fundamentals which is doing the things that we just discussed so number two learn the basics of writing learn the fundamentals of writing what is an introduction what is a main body paragraph what is a conclusion and how do you write those the third thing that we noticed is vocabulary is 25% of your total mark but vocabulary is completely misunderstood the the hardest thing about our job when we are doing essay Corrections and when were giving feedback to students is trying to convince them that the simpler their vocabulary and I put simple in quotation marks the more effective it's going to be because some students have been taught by teachers who told tell them that the only way to get a high score is to use like really complex vocabulary other students just assume that the more complicated their vocabulary the higher a marketer going to get and it's really difficult to convince a student to take the risk of simplifying their vocabulary and thinking more about the accuracy of their vocabulary and the effectiveness of their vocabulary rather than using these you know highfalutin words but once and it's like it you can notice it in essays it's like a switch being turned on once they accept that advice and start using that advice then that is often for many many students the moment where they go from struggling with about 6 or 6.5 to about 7 and Beyond and we see this in many of our success stories where students will say you know for six weeks you were telling me this and I wouldn't do it on the day that I started doing it was the day that I started getting the scores that I needed and I'm not saying that you shouldn't use some complex vocabulary or you shouldn't show the examiner that you you know how to use vocabulary what I'm saying is that you should learn how to use vocabulary effectively think about how you use vocabulary in your own language do you try and use the most complex complicated words possible when you're talking to someone or writing an email no you just use the vocabulary that is appropriate to use in that scenario and you use it effectively and you use it accurately and many of students are afraid to do this because they think it will lower their score what we tell students is you know try it out try your way try doing a really content in a really complex way you've already been doing that and you failed six seven eight times why not try it our way and see what happens and invariably they go and do the test and next time they get the score that they need and many people will disagree with me because most of our students disagree with me or not as well but the data is very very clear and those students who do that improve their scores those students who don't don't improve their scores the fourth thing is about grammar and the the the thing that was really really apparent by looking at all the data and looking at all the past Corrections was that most students don't need to improve their grammar per se they need to just improve a few areas of grammar so what do I mean by that so if you look at you know an English grammar book it is it's like the size of a telephone book it's it's massive there are so many different areas of grammar but what most students struggle with is not everything related to grammar it's just one or two areas for example I was and talking to a student from the Ukraine last night he's one of our success stories Vladimir and when we worked with him there were only two areas of grammar that he struggled with one was articles is he's a native Russian speaker and they don't have articles em in that language and the other was punctuation that he was unfamiliar with English punctuation so we didn't need to teach him about tenses we didn't need to teach by prepositions we didn't need to teach you about conditionals we just needed to focus on those two weak areas exactly the same as if there's something wrong with your car like at the moment my car is at the mechanics because I drove over a log and I punctured a hole right in the undercarriage of the car knowing the only thing that the mechanic needs to do is replace that the part that the undercarriage is one part of the car he doesn't need to replace the windows he doesn't need to replace the steering wheel he doesn't need to you know fix the engine it's just the undercarriage that's the only thing it's just one part exactly the same happens when we look at a student's essay we figure out what their main problems are with grammar and then they can address those specific problems and when they do that not only do they improve the grammar but the coherence and cohesion of their essay improves as well because it's just much clearer and much easier to understand so that's the fourth thing and last but not least the fifth thing feedback really does work and it is an absolutely essential part of the whole process of getting better at writing it is amazing the number of people who emailed us every day and say I have no idea why I keep getting 6.5 I've looked at every IELTS book I've read every IELTS blog I've watched every video on you know under the Sun on IELTS writing and I don't get any better it's like yeah of course because you've no idea whether you are actually doing those things effectively or not another funny email we often get from students is I followed your system and I got six point five when I say okay send me your essay we look at the essays like you didn't follow our system for this reason this reason this reason this reason this reason so you might think that you are doing nothing wrong but I guarantee if you're getting a 6.5 when you need a 7 you're doing multiple things wrong that would be like me trying to fix my own car it's not going to happen I do not know anything about fixing cars I need an expert to point out wearing going wrong and to give me feedback and show me what's wrong exactly the same with essays there could be problems with your task achievement your coherence your cohesion your grammar your vocabulary or multiple other things but you need someone to look at your essays and give you feedback or not again this is not a marketing video I only work with a very very very very small number of students and 99.99% of the content that we make just like this is totally free and and you know I'm very happy to do that I'm not saying it because I want you to join our course I'm saying that you probably will waste thousands of dollars failing the test multiple times if you don't take that advice and because you want to save bit of money and you don't want to get a teacher to look at your writing it does really really work it does really help and whether that's with ourselves or with another teacher do use use those services and however make sure that the services you use are reliable and a lot of people are doing essay Corrections these days and look at their feedback that they have some of them are great some of them are doing just copy and paste jobs they're not really looking at your essays they're just you know doing copy paste copy paste generalize feedback and that's not really going to help you and that's it that's what we discovered over the past five years and looking at over 10,000 tasks two essays and what we have coming up for you guys next week is another $1 challenge we haven't done a $1 challenge in about six months and but what we do every three to six months is we get a bunch of people into a group they all pay one we run through a task to sa teaching you how to answer the question running through the fundamentals of essay writing helping you with grammar helping you through cab you Larry and helping you improve your scores we will be releasing that next week and it's just one dollar it's probably the best dollar you'll ever spend normally our courses are between 500 and 700 dollars so this is a good way to get feedback on your work learn what to do and improve your writing scores more than that next week hopefully you enjoyed this video and that was useful it took a long time looking at all those essays so hopefully that distilled knowledge will help you out thanks very much guys see you again soon buh-bye

Channel: IELTS Advantage

Views: 29,904

Keywords: IELTS, IELTS Advantage, Chris Pell, www.ieltsadvantage.com, ielts test, band 7, ielts writing, international english language testing system, ielts listening, subscribe, english, live lesson, learn english, grammar, 5 Key Things I Learned Correcting 10, Writing Task 2 Essays, 5 Key Things, how to, lesson, in this lesson, english lesson, ielts preparation, pronunciation, vocabulary, tips, ielts 2019, english teacher, ielts tips, ielts reading, ielts new, ielts writing task 2

Id: qNjuHHx2orc

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2019