[LC MALANG] AN OVERVIEW OF IELTS ACADEMIC WRITING

One of the skills that is assessed in the International Language Testing System (IELTS) is writing. The writing session takes about 60 minutes. The candidates are given two tasks to be completed within that particular time frame. The first task is more about descriptive writing, whereas the second task is about argumentative writing. For each task, the candidate is being assessed in four aspects:

1. Task achievement,
2. Coherence & Cohesion,
3. Lexical Resource, and
4. Grammatical Range & Accuracy.  

Academic writing task one is a report on a chart (bar chart, line graph, pie chart, table, map, diagram/process. The candidate is recommended to spend no more than 20 minutes on writing task 1. However, time management can be managed by the candidates as they wish.  In this part, the test taker is required to write 150 words. It is highly important to pay attention to the word counts as it affects the score.   

Different from academic writing task 1, in academic writing task 2 the candidate is being assessed on how they could compose a well-structured argumentative essay. The word limit for this task is 250 words. As writing task 2 weighs more than task 1, it is recommended that you spend around 40 minutes completing this task. The common types of topics are: Discussion, Advantage/Disadvantage, Agree/Disagree, and Problem- Solutions.