IELTS task 1

    When you describe a chart, for example a pie chart, in 25% of your marks is based on grammar. In the criteria of grammar, the examiner will check the range of sentence structures and also the accuracy of your grammar. The more mistakes you have, the lower your score will be.

Writing IELTS Task 1

– Grammar for Academic Task 1: Essays –

For Writing IELTS Task 1 essays, you are required to describe the detail in a chart, graph, table, map or diagram, most especially, to record changes in data.  

This will involve:

• Describing trends

• Describing increases and decreases

• Making comparisons

To do this, you will need to use particular sentence structures and these are one of the things we’ll be learning about in this lesson.

We’ll also be looking at common Task 1 verb tenses and other elements of grammar that frequently cause problems for students.

Here's an overview of the lesson:

1) Verb tenses

2) Key sentence structures

3) 2 Common grammatical errors

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1) Verb Tenses

The choice of which tense to use will be determined by whether or not the graphic contains dates and, if it does, whether the dates are in the past or the future.

Follow these guidelines:

• No date – use the present tense

• Dates in the past – use the past tense

• Dates in the future – use the future tense

The tenses you are most likely to need are:

   – Present tense – present simple, present perfect or present perfect continuous

   – Past tense – past simple

– Future tense – future simple or the future perfect

The table below gives explanations of these verb tenses and examples from Task 1 essays.

Common Writing IELTS Task 1 Verbs

Most graphics will require you to compare data from two or more time periods, for example, past and present or present and future predictions, so you will need to use a range of different tenses in your essay, as appropriate.

The key word in the sentence above is ‘appropriate’. Whilst you will gain marks for using a good range of tenses in your Writing IELTS Task 1 essay, you should never do so just to show that you know many different tenses. Only use the tense that is 100% correct for expressing a specific piece of information. It is accuracy that the examiner is looking for.

2) Key Sentence Structures

The first two steps of writing a great Academic Task 1 essay are to:

• Analyse the question

• Identify the main features

I cover these tasks in detail in the lesson on How To Understand & Analyse Task 1 Questions.

Once you’ve done this, you'll understand what you’re required write about. It will be one or more of these things:

• Describe trends

• Describe increases and decreases

• Make comparisons

There are specific sentence structures that you can use for each and these are what we’re going to look at next.

How to Describe Trends

The two most useful grammatical structures for describing trends are:

1) Noun phrase + verb + adverb

    For example,

The number of unemployed women fell significantly.

2) There + be + adjective + in + noun phrase

    For example:

There was a dramatic improvement in the percentage of people in employment.

 

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