IELTS Task Response

The IELTS Task Response is 25% of your score for your essay. When your essay is marked, you are given a score for each of these criteria:

• Task Response – 25%
• Coherence and Cohesion – 25%
• Lexical Resource – 25%
• Grammatical Range and Accuracy – 25%

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There are two key factors that are important for ensuring you get a high score for IELTS Task Response:

• Fully answering the question
• Developing and extending your ideas

In this lesson and following on from writing task 2 lesson one and lesson two, we will focus on the first factor, answering the question.

Fully Answering the Question

This is very important because misunderstanding the question and not answering it properly can be fatal for your IELTS Task Response Score.

These are the penalties:

• Your answer has no relation to the topic or question at all – Band 3
• The question has been misunderstood but some ideas are related to the question – Band 4
• The question has been understood but is only partially answered – Band 5
• Fully answered but some parts are more fully covered than others – Band 6

However, for band 7:

• All parts of the essay question are adequately covered and ideas are extended and supported – Band 7

Developing and extending your ideas is obviously crucial as well to get a good IELTS Task Response score but there is no point extending your ideas if they are the wrong ones because you have misunderstood the question!

So the key starting point for a high IELTS Task Response score is to fully answer the question.

To understand the problems with this, we will look at a recent IELTS essay question (from a test in May 2019).

This is a question that several candidates reported they had problems with answering and when I queried how they answered it, many had written about the wrong thing.

This is the question from the test:

Before carrying on with this lesson, it would be a good idea to analyse the question and makes some notes on how you would answer and organise an essay like this. 

You can then compare your answer with the suggestions below and see if you analysed it correctly.

Confusing Parts of the Question

The opinion in this essay question is indicating a comparison between two things:

• Technological developments of the past
• Technological developments of recent times

You simply need to say which ones you think have led to the biggest changes and benefits to people’s lives.

There are several things that resulted in confusion for candidates.

Ordinary People

One confusion was with the word ordinary people, which led some candidates to go off-topic and start discussing the lives of poor people or other things not really related to the topic.

This simply refers to the everyday person in society, like you and me. Someone who studies or goes to work everyday and therefore would make use of technology, such as phones, washing machines, cars, computers etc., in the usual way.

So rather than focusing on companies for example, or extremely rich people, your essay would need to be about the general population in societies.

You can of course still mention rich people as long as it is in relation to the question and ordinary people. For instance you may argue that some technological developments were expensive and only benefitted the rich so did not tend to improve most ordinary people’s lives.

Ever Will

Another word causing confusion was ever will.

Seeing ‘will‘ led some candidates to think they needed to discuss how current developments will change in the future.

This would be wrong as the question is about past technological developments and recent developments. ‘Ever will‘ is just a phrase to emphasise the opinion that past developments are not as influential as more modern ones and never will be, even in the future.

The future could be discussed in reference to the extent to which people’s lives may change, but it is not about which developments may arise in the future.

Earlier and Recent

Another problem candidates faced with this essay question was what is actually meant by earlier and recent?