An Introduction to the Course

Hello everybody and welcome to mastering IELTS writing task one for the academic module. Now many of you will have watched my video course on mastering IELTS writing task two. This is a companion piece to that video which is focusing on IELTS writing task one in a rather similar format. For those who don’t know who I am. My name is Matt and I run a Web site called the IELTSteacher which is a Web site which has been exclusively designed to help students to prepare for the IELTS exam via Skype lessons and screen sharing. I’ve been running this website since 2013 and I’ve been teaching English since 2008 so I have a lot of experience with IELTS in particular. Having been given over a thousand one to one IELTS lessons online since starting the website. OK so let’s have a look at what this course is all about. First of all who is this course for. Well if you’re aiming to achieve band 7 or above in IELTS writing this course is for you particularly of course if you’re struggling with task one. If you’re aiming to achieve a band six or a six point five there will be plenty of material in the schools which will also be relevant for you. But you may find challenging at times. The course is structured into seven sections which are designed to address each band descriptor category requirement or in other words what the examiners are looking for and to help give you the confidence to produce a high quality response to any task one question the course works because it addresses the most common difficulties encountered when responding to task questions. And I know about these because I deal with them on a day to day basis. In my Skype lessons the course also offers a number of clear strategies for tackling this task and addresses as mentioned each band descriptor requirements individually as I mentioned the course is divided into seven sections. The first section is the introduction which goes through an overview of the course as you were looking at now looks at how Isle’s is structured and how task one in particular is structured and then looks at the band descriptors for tasks 1. If you’ve taken my task to cause you may want to skip over the videos for how ials is structured and perhaps this this video as well as it’s quite similar to the task to course we next move into the approach section where we learn about how to approach task one before we even begin writing the response we need to acknowledge the different question types we need to acknowledge how to plan our response and how to tie my response effectively and we will also look at a model answer to see what a good response looks like and why it is a good response. We then consider the band descriptors and begin by looking at what’s called Task achievement that will become clearer later on. But that’s basically about the general answer and how well we are responding to the task requirements. How well we’re identifying trends selecting data covering the task requirements and finding accuracy in our writing. As mentioned this is one of the key band descriptors. Another of the key band descriptive categories is coherence and cohesion which we look at in Section 4 how to write an introduction how to write an overview cohesively how to write the detailed paragraphs how to use cohesive devices referencing staging language. Okay so that’s what we’ll look at in Section 4 and Section 5. We look at lexical resource or in other words vocabulary vocabulary for Grosse vocabulary for maps vocabulary for processes in section 6. We look at grammatical range and accuracy. Another of the band descriptors focusing on common grammatical mistakes when looking at graphs focusing on complex sentences and how to join ideas together using grammar and focusing on how to use punctuation effectively when describing data. The final and seventh section is the conclusion section where we wrap up what we’ve learnt. We have a look at a full demonstration of how to write a task one response we look at some secrets to success. Some of my top tips and go through a few bits of information about how to best prepare. On the night of your exam. One thing that I do offer as part of the service for the aisles teach a dot com is writing corrections writing corrections are an opportunity for you to write a response to task one or toss two questions to send them to Ceuta and to have your writing corrected to a comprehensive degree so that you can understand what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong and how to fix what you’re doing wrong. At the end of this course there’ll be a discount code to get 10 percent of these corrections which as mentioned you can purchase on my website. Let’s talk about how to approach this course in the best way. Ideally you should try to complete this course within four weeks. If you have responsibilities of course take your time and prioritize accordingly. To make the most of these calls you should do a number of things. You should bring a hard working attitude to every lecture. You should continue to practice on your own by answering task one questions and try to do this fairly frequently. You should try to read at least two articles or book chapters in English every day and if you can read anything which has an element of statistics or data representation even better as this is very much relevant for this part of the exam try to find an ials writing shooter to check your work. As I’ve mentioned this is something that I offer on my web sites. But there are plenty of other teachers who would be willing to do this for you either locally or online. Install freedom now. This is optional but freedom. I have found is a really really good piece of software which allows you to cut out all distractions. It is a program which I have found indispensable in terms of being productive in my work and I’m sure that would also apply to your study and you can download freedom by going to the link that I have included on the screen. Finally try to enjoy the writing process. If you do need to contact me please don’t hesitate to do so. I do read everything that you send. You can either contact me via you to me. You can use the comment or q and a function on the page. You can email me at Matt at the I’ll teach dot com. This is my recommended version of contact has I tend to be most responsive via email. You can contact me on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash the teacher or Twitter Twitter dot com slash the teacher my Web site the aisles teacher dot com or you can find me on Skype at the dot ials dot teacher. Looking forward to getting started and I’ll see you in the next lecture.