How IELTS writing band description serves guidance in teaching English writing

Ⅰ.Introduction

IELTS，a test serves as a standard of speakersEnglish level.Recently，many universities in China have set academic IELTS course to support studentsEnglish learning.

IELTS writing examines students ability to communicate with formal and written form.The purpose of teaching IELTS writing is helping students to express what they see and think in a logical way.Designed Tasks is close to most of foreign passage writing topic.Therefore，if students master the skills in IELTS Writing，they would face less difficulties in future academic writing.There is a systematic band description for IELTS writing，to some extent， it serves as a guidance in designing IELS writing class.Teaching English writing based on the four dimensions is beneficial for students to understand hypotaxis in English，especially for those who speak Chinese，which is a parataxis language.

Ⅱ.Task Achievement/Task response

Task Achievement（TA） in Task1 demands selecting and presenting all important features and data of graphs.And Task Response（TR） in Task2 asks for presenting opinion and support opinion with relevant reasons.Thus，in the process of designing teaching，As for Task1，teachers can give a common rule of reading graphs，telling them some important data need to describe，which is useful for them to group and organize body paragraphs.Regarding Task2，most of students are blank in mind and fall to generate relevant ideas to the topic.To address the anticipated problems，instructors could adopt cooperative teaching approach，this kind of content-centered language instruction will encourage development of thinking and study skills.

Ⅲ.Cohesion and Coherence

Cohesion and Coherence（CC） requires showing clear information chunk and progression.Since Chinese is parataxis language，Chinese students do not have strong awareness of expressing with structure. Mostly，they often express themselves in “spots” not in “chunk”.Cultural differences in language patterns can adversely affect communication in English.（Oxford， R.& Ehrman， M. 1992） Therefore，teaching English passage and paragraph structure should be well-designed.Providing Chinese and English reading materials in the class and setting activities or discussion to make comparison between Chinese passages and English ones could be taken into account.Recent reading research points to the benefits of working with texts for the purpose of drawing students attention to formal features of written language as well （Long & Crookes，1992）.To meet the demand of cohesion，grouping data is the key to achieve decent paragraphing. Meanwhile， in presenting opinions in task 2，how to teach students organize their ideas is significant.Textual analysis focus on meaning and form，so it could be effective when ask students to abstract topic sentence and support sentences in a paragraph and then mark all cohesive devices between sentences.When they finish，they could rewrite the paragraph based on the structure.Task-based approach is alternative method.Specifically，to strengthen awareness of applying structure，jigsaw one English sample and let students to joint the sample is effective.

Ⅳ.Lexical Resource & Grammatical Range and Accuracy

Apart from TA/TR and CC，expressing ideas with accurate and wide-ranged vocabulary and grammar is also necessary.

Based on the band description，teachers could combine two approaches to help students with vocabulary and grammar.One is explicit teaching. Because IELTS Writing tasks and most of general writing tasks is topic-focused，offering a vocabulary booklet or a sentence lists is a direct supplementary to support students to know the spelling，the meaning and the usage of relevant words and sentences.Another is implicit teaching which encourage students to learn new words in the context of reading authentic texts. Authentic reading materials usually are written for specific purpose.Thus，by reading these texts，students could imitate the usage of words and sentences and develop deep understanding of the words.During teaching process，two approaches could work together. Implicit one usually presents words in one sentence，students could learn both words and grammar before and in class Explicit one could serves as summary or review method after class，supporting to form a systematic expression bank.

Ⅴ.Conclusion

IELTS Writing band description serves a standard to assess the quality of both IELTS and general English passage.Therefore， when designing a English Writing class，the four band items could serves as four dimensions in teaching content and an four aspects to select teaching approaches.

References：

[1]JoAnn Crandall. Content-Centered Learning in the U.S.Cambridge University Press[M].1992.

[2]Oxford，R.&Ehrman，M. Second Language Research on Individual Differences[J]. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics，1992，13：188- 205.

[3]Michael.H.Long&Graham Crookes[J].Three Approaches to Task‐Based Syllabus Design，1992.

【作者簡介】王秋子（1991.10-），女 ， 汉族，江西定南人，西安欧亚学院，助教，硕士研究生，研究方向：英语教学。