Categories: Activity

Teaching Essay Structure for IELTS Writing Task 2

You are probably reading this because you want to teach your students how to structure their IELTS Writing Task 2 essays. It can be a difficult skill to teach, particularly if they have little experience with academic writing. I do a lot of teaching on this at my other website, TED IELTS. Go check it out for some useful free IELTS resources.

Today I just uploaded a PPT to Slideshare that outlines the slightly different essay structures needed to answer the 5 different questions types for IELTS Writing Task 2. Go take a look and you might be able to use it for teaching your students how to structure their essays.

But how can you get them to practice this, aside from the obvious – just writing essays?

Well, there are some useful ways. You can have them write up plans and then put some of them on the board for the class to analyze. However, one that I really like is to give them a band 9 essay – the perfect example – and then cut it up! The students work in groups to reassemble the cut-up essay.

I’ve done this numerous times with different students, sometimes in a big class and sometimes in a small class, and it always goes really well. They can usually identify certain parts of the essay, but will seldom be able to get the whole thing put together. As such, it can take more time than you’d imagine – but the work they put in is really valuable.

You can use just about any band 9 essay, but here’s one I used recently:

David S Wills

I am a writer, editor, and educator. I have written various books on mid-20th century American writers and a few on grammar and IELTS preparation. I have been in the education field since 2008 and have worked in various countries. I started this website to share some ideas and resources to help my fellow teachers.