Academic IELTS Writing Task 2 Understanding and Planning Part 1

hi and welcome to a E helps IELTS test preparation videos this material is taken from triple w AE help calm for more videos practice lessons and tests please visit us there and join the full course alright so in this video we are going to be looking at preparation for tasks to writing of the academic IELTS exam I'm going to show you several steps that you need to practice again and again at home before you set the exam so that you can get a very good mark on the task 2 essay some of these strategies you're going to use during the test and many of them you need to perfect at home ok so again we are looking at writing tasks to academic IELTS and these are practice strategies for a high score so this lesson will be divided into three steps the first step will be understanding the question the number one mistake that a lot of students make during the exam is they begin writing a response without actually understanding the question some of them were many of them think they understand but they don't truly understand and in order to get a score over 6.5 your response must specifically answer what the question is asking it can't just be generally about the same topic if it's just generally about the same topic the best score even with good vocabulary and grammar will be a 5/5 because the examiner simply just don't know if it's a memorized essay or if the person is genuinely responding to the question so again understanding the question and then responding exactly to that question is the first and most important step so we'll talk about that the second point that we're going to discuss is planning the correct response now of course during the IELTS exam you don't really have enough time to do an essay outline on paper but you should follow some basic steps to have a very clear picture of your whole essay before you begin writing and I'll show you how you can do that so by the end of this after you go through the steps you will know what your introduction will include your body paragraph 1 & 2 will include and what your conclusion will include because again remember that the information must be coherent and cohesive which means that you can't just write the essay step by step or sentence by sentence it must have a wholeness to the idea okay and then the third part of this lesson will be actually just writing the response or writing the essay and I'm going to use an example question from the a help materials to show you how to go through each of these steps and come out with a very good strong essay at the end that will get you that six point five or higher score okay so writing a strong essay okay so first of all let's look at understanding the question all right so to make sure that you understand the question there are a couple of steps that you need to take and these steps you should actually do during the exam not just while you're practicing at home so this is understanding the question okay so as we discussed in some of the previous videos where we looked at some of the key strategies remember that paraphrasing is a very powerful tool to check our understanding so it's human nature to think that we understand information but often we don't understand information or we just partially understand information this is not good enough for task 2 of the IELTS in task 2 of the IELTS you need to completely and in detail understand that question so use paraphrasing to check your own understanding so first of all paraphrase the question now with practice during the exam this shouldn't take you any more than two minutes and using these two minutes from the 40 minutes is absolutely worth the invested time why because paraphrasing the question first of all you'll make sure that you understand it clearly so makes sure you understand clearly secondly when you paraphrase the question you're collecting some very useful synonyms for the essay because the words that are in the question of course are the topics and the controlling ideas and you are going to use these words throughout the essay so it's good if you can use some synonyms and be a little bit more colorful a little bit more flexible with your language so collects very useful vocabulary and then a third reason why paraphrasing is an extremely good idea to employ or to use during the exam as well is because it will help you to think deeply about the question so when you're paraphrasing an idea or a question or a statement it helps your mind to think more deeply about these ideas so gives deeper thought about the question so again remember paraphrasing should be your very first step and this is something that you must practice at home and also I strongly recommend sacrificing those two minutes during the exam to do this as well again this way you won't just think that you understand but you'll know that you understand you're going to have some very useful synonyms to switch up some vocabulary in the essay and you'll think deeper about the question so already you're on your way to coming up with just a much better answer a much better response all right so now that we've done this let's have a look at a second step for making sure that you're clear about what the question is asking you okay so I'm going to give you an example of this paraphrasing the question and for this I strongly suggest using the method of synonyms again remember from the paraphrasing lesson that you can paraphrase with grammar Anthon 'm negatives descriptions but in this case I strongly suggest trying to use synonyms so the question that we're going to use here again is taken from a ehelp comm materials and here it is so writing task 2 you should spend about 40 minutes on this task right about the following topic universities should take the same number of men and women in each major to what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience write at least 250 words so take just the question and write it out so here's our example universities should take the same number of men and women in each major to what extent do you agree or disagree okay so at home as well take a different colored pen or pencil and above the original question just use your own words if you're having difficulty use a thesaurus it's basically a synonym dictionary and paraphrase the question so post-secondary education ought to accept except for take post-secondary education for universities same number can be equal number of men and women can be male and female students in every every instead of each and major could be a field or subject so every subject and then this is one type of the follow-up question to what extent do you agree or disagree we can paraphrase this as to what extent can be degree do you think this correct or incorrect okay so now that I've paraphrased the question with my own words I can be sure that I know what it's asking me and of course as we can see there are lots of very useful words here that I'll be able to apply in the essay and just make it sound that much better okay so now that we've done this let's go to the second step of understanding the question you all right so the second step to understanding the question is identifying the topic and the controlling idea of the question basically every statement or every question has a topic and a controlling idea the topic means what or who were talking about and the controlling idea is everything that is connected to that person or that object or that idea that we're talking about so the second step of understanding the question is i dint off' i the topic and the controlling idea now one really important part of this is that you keep this as simple as possible okay so remember to keep it simple okay that means don't use the whole question when you're doing this it's kind of interesting but in the IELTS for task too often the question is quite long and includes a lot of words and it can be simplified in a much more elegant way so in our example our sentence is already quite simple but you'll see that many of these task 2 questions are three sentences or three four lines long you should be able to make it just a lot less and a lot more simple so try to do that that's a really important part of this okay so remember that the topic is the subject what or who the question is concerned with and the topic in most situations will be just one word so it's going to be just a noun okay so you're looking for and noun keep that in mind sometimes you'll need an adjective that describes the noun a little bit more like for example the subject might be students but more specifically it might be university students so make sure that you're clear about that it is important that you are specific about the the topic so if it's university students then you need to say university students ok so again remember it's usually a noun so it's a noun or one word can you think of what the topic is in the question example that we're using in this video well if you thought that the correct answer here is universities then you're absolutely right in this question we are talking about universities that's what the question is concerned with so the topic in our case is University and when you're identifying the topic in the controlling idea use the original question not your paraphrase okay alright so the topic is university so now the next step here of course is figuring out the controlling idea so what is controlling the idea of University in our question all right so let's have a look at that okay so the controlling idea is everything that's connected to that topic that is connected or controlling that topic that is connected with the topic again this is where you want to keep it simple so in our example what controls the topic of universities so in our example the controlling idea is what so try to think about that if your answer is should accept equal number of men and women then that is absolutely right that's what controlling this but don't forget the part in each major that is a key part of this controlling idea so same number of men and women in every major in our example we can't really make it too much more simple because the sentence is already quite simple but for a lot of the tasks two questions definitely you will be able to and I will show you some more examples of this in future videos so this is the controlling idea this is what we need to think about alright so once we've done this so once we've gone through a and B which means gone through the paraphrasing and gone through identifying the topic in the controlling idea we're a hundred percent clear on the question and now we can take the next step of planning our response so planning a strong response and we're going to use this information in that step so that's why it's very important that your topic and controlling idea are accurate again you must practice this at home check with other people your friends or your teachers to make sure that you're finding the correct topic and the correct controlling idea it's not always this easy so definitely take the time to do this several times over and over at home and make sure to check with others so that you all agree on the same topic and controlling idea okay so then let's look at how to go about planning a correct response you okay so then the second step once we've understood the question precisely is to plan a correct response so planning a correct response now again this is something that you need to practice at home with pen and paper unfortunately during the exam you simply will not have enough time to do this on paper but you will need to do it in your head in order to be able to do this in your own mind quickly and efficiently it's really important that you practice this at home at least four five six times before you sit the IELTS exam so for planning a correct response we're going to use some critical thinking and remember from the key communication strategy videos that critical thinking is includes thinking about the what why and how because any time we see new information to understand and work with that information we need to know what it is why it is and how it works so we're following the second step of understanding here where we identify the topic and the controlling idea and then we use critical thinking with each of those asking and answering the what why how question so here I'm going to call this C because it's following from step B of understanding so use critical thinking and ask what why and how about the topic and controlling idea or ideas so again you need to keep these questions and answers quite simple don't over complicate them stay focused on the right topic right controlling ideas and then the answers that you are going to give to these questions will basically become the outline of the entire essay so you're going to come up with some excellent definitions and explanations and reasons for or examples for those explanations and that's what you will use when you put together the finished essay so again remember keep the questions and answers simple okay so let's use our example question and let's go through this stage of the planning you so again the material in lesson you just saw is coming from triple w AE help calm for lots more help with writing and other strategies and tips for the IELTS exam please visit us there and join the full course

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Keywords: IELTS writing task 2 structure, paragraphs, sentences, vocabulary, introduction paragraph, body paragraphs, conclusion, IELTS description, International English Language Testing System, English examination, writing IELTS, writing for task two, second part of writing, writing strategies, IELTS task 2, Lesson, Teacher, Learn, Student, Lessons, Learning, Free, Intro, Tutorial, IELTS task 2 explain, IELTS task 2 learning, IELTS task 2 explanations, plan, planning, understand, skills, strategies

Id: qHsNDV_l5ts

Length: 25min 44sec (1544 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2013