Developing Writing Skills For IELTS: A Research-Based Approach, by Sin Wang Chong and Zuejun Ye

This book is aimed primarily at those who are teaching students who are studying for the IELTS, though if someone has a sufficiently academic background in education, this book can certainly be used very profitably for self-study, though if you can understand the authors’ approach and vocabulary, you are probably well on your way to getting an 8 or a 9 on the test or starting a career as an instructor of English to future test-takers. For those who are pondering whether this is a worthwhile book for their teaching or study, it is worthwhile to explain how this book is structured as well as its approach. When the authors call attention to this book being a research-based approach, this book’s contents meet this standard in several ways. For one, the authors have clearly done a great deal of research into the IELTS, into the patterns of the test questions for the writing section, both parts one and two, as well as the scoring rubric, around which this book’s contents are organized. For another, the authors encourage learners to use exemplars as a way of acquiring tacit knowledge into what constitutes ‘good’ writing, and engages in at least some polemical discussion about the ideal learning methodologies for English learners. This sort of discussion, which mercifully is focused at the beginning of the book, will likely not be to everyone’s taste, but as the vast majority of the book’s contents are focused on the IELTS test itself, it is easy to overlook this somewhat defensive phenomenon of writers who find it necessary to talk explicitly about their approach in comparison to others rather than simply demonstrate that approach implicitly in their text.

The structure of this book is straightforward and rigorously logical in its nature. There are two parts to the book, which has between 250 and 300 pages of content. The book begins with a brief discussion of support material and acknowledgements, after which the first part of the book consists of thirteen chapters that are designed around the content and scoring of the writing section of the IELTS, taking up about 180 pages or so. This part of the book begins with two chapters that introduce the reader to the IELTS and the requirements of the IELTS writing section (1), as well as providing information about the use of exemplars by the author as a means of instruction in writing (2). The next four chapters of the book focus on task 1 of the writing section of the IELTS, with a discussion of task achievement (3), coherence and cohesion (4), the use of lexical resources (5), and grammatical range and accuracy (6). The next four chapters focus on these elements within the second part of the writing section (7-10), where students have to write at least 250 words with an introduction, two body paragraphs, and a conclusion and are also scored based on task achievement, coherence and cohesion, the use of lexical resources, and grammatical range and accuracy. The last three chapters of this part of the book then provide an exemplar analysis of both parts 1 (11) and 2 (12), giving both a high (7+), middle (6-7), and low range exemplar for the questions explored in both sections for students to learn from, as well as a lengthy question bank for both sections of the test divided by the types of questions that are asked for the writing section of the IELTS. The second part of the book consists of the answers for the eight chapters of the book that focus on the four elements of the scoring for both Task 1 and Task 2 within the IELTS , and take up about 90 pages or so.

One of the advantages of the exemplar approach that authors demonstrate in this book is the way that readers of the book are introduced to key elements to improve their writing through knowing what it is that scorers of the two tasks of the writing section of the IELTS are looking for in writing samples. Key insights for students include focusing on the task, demonstrating a variety of words and sentence structures, linked together in a coherent fashion, and showing both a knowledge of academic language as well as a facility for creating words through the addition of prefixes and suffixes to words within their understanding. Ideally, this book is the type of resource that would be in the library of an instructor in the IELTS or in someone who is engaged in very serious self-study for the exam, as its interest is limited to one section of the IELTS exam, if one that many people can be expected to struggle with. Of particular interest to many readers will be the statistical analysis of the types of questions in both task one and two of the IELTS at the beginning of the book and the lengthy set of sample questions for both tasks at the end of Part I of the book, which include a label, like T2-48, a type of question like problems and solutions, discuss views, two-part questions, and advantages and disadvantages, as well as a question prompt, organized by theme. For those readers who take their writing and the writing of their students extremely seriously on the IELTS, this is an immensely useful guide, even if the authors should not have felt it necessary to engage in a discussion of the theory of education while denigrating alternative methods at instruction which may be of use to teachers and learners in addition to the authors’ own approach.