Welcome to your online IELTS writing course!
This course is going to provide you with the language you will need to succeed in the IELTS writing exam.
Hi everyone! As mentioned in the tutorial video, this course is going to provide you with the language you will need to succeed in the IELTS writing exam. You will also have the chance to practise this new language during the final interactive task in each lesson, which relates to a different part of the writing exam as detailed in the 'course content' section below. If you haven't seen the course tutorial yet, please click on the hyperlink above. For information about the writing test format itself, please click the link below (you may need to right-click and open a new tab). Scroll down and click on 'find out more' in either the 'IELTS Academic' or 'IELTS General Training' sections, depending on which test you would like to take, and then click on the 'writing' tab.
Course content
If you are comfortable with how the writing exams work, let's quickly break down the focus of each lesson:
Lesson 1: Structure - Final Task: IELTS writing task 2 - Topic: Social media.
Lesson 2: Register - Final Task: IELTS writing task 1 (general training) - Topic: Applying for a job.
Lesson 3: Topics - Final Task: IELTS writing task 2 - Topic: City or countryside?
Lesson 4: Describing Data - Final Task: IELTS writing task 1 (academic) - Topic: Line graphs.
Lesson 5: Collocations - Final Task: IELTS writing task 2 - Topic: Crime and punishment.
Lesson 6: Describing a Process - Final Task: IELTS writing task 1 (academic) - Topic: Manufacturing process.
Lesson 7: Linking Words - Final Task: IELTS writing task 2 - Topic: University or apprenticeship?
Lesson 8: Charts & Tables - Final Task: IELTS writing task 1 (academic) - Topic: Bar charts.
Keeping a lexical notebook
During this course you will not only have access to videos and interactive tasks, but you will also be able to test yourself on the content of the video by downloading exercises from each lesson. To organise the new language that you will learn, you might want to take notes in a certain way. For example, when students learn a new word or phrase, they usually just write the meaning or a translation next to it.
In addition to the meaning though, it would be useful to write the form, pronunciation and collocations of the word or phrase. For example, lets look at the uncommon, formal word 'inclement'. Instead of:
inclement - unpleasantly cold or wet (+ translation).
You could write:
inclement (adj.) - unpleasantly cold or wet. (Collocation - weather).
Here you add the form of the word, which is an adjective. An adjective describes a noun, such as people, things or places (not everyone knows the meaning of these words!). For pronunciation, you could put a line under the syllable that needs to be stressed - in this case the second syllable: in-cle-ment. Finally, a collocation is a word or phrase that is commonly used with the word or phrase in question. For example, 'inclement' is mostly used to describe the noun 'weather'.
Organising language like this, especially adding collocations, is a big part of keeping an effective lexical notebook. After all, ‘learning more vocabulary is not just learning new words, it is often learning familiar words in new combinations’ (Woolard, 2000, p31). From: Lewis, M. (Ed.) (2000). Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. Hove: Language Teaching Publications.
To help you with recording collocations, here's a link to the free collocation dictionary website (you may need to right-click the link to open it in a new tab):
It will provide you with words that 'collocate' or 'match' with the word you enter into the search bar. This is useful if you learn a new word or phrase and want to learn its collocates.
Finally, the pdf below from the British Council gives more examples of how to organise your notebook:
First task of the course! - The Community Wall
If you have just bought this course, you will now have access to the 'community wall'. This is a good chance to test your Padlet profile that you should have set up through the welcome email. I'd like you to follow the link above and leave a recording or message, as I have done below, introducing yourself to your fellow course participants. I look forward to hearing from you!
Opening quote sourced from: Hedge, T. (2000). Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
