The importance of grammatical range and accuracy in IELTS tests
This video will help you prepare individuals for success in their IELTS writing tests.
It looks at grammatical range and accuracy, which is one of the four writing test criteria, alongside coherence and cohesion, lexical resource and task achievement/response.
In this video, you’ll find useful tips on the use of grammar for IELTS, such as when and how it’s appropriate to use specific tenses – including past tense, present tense and a variety of future tenses, both on their own and in combination.
It also touches on:
- Comparatives: used to compare two things or to show change, e.g. older, cleaner, slower.
- Conditionals: used to describe the result of a certain condition, e.g. if you study hard, you will pass your test with flying colours.
- Modal verbs: used to show if we believe something is certain, possible, or impossible, e.g. can, may, must, will.
- The passive tense: used to move the focus of the sentence onto the person or object that experiences an action, e.g. my bike was stolen.
Examples of all these tenses [and how to use them t/b/c] are included in our speaking and grammar checklist.
Tenses, prompts and checks
As well as learning and practicing a variety of grammatical tenses, those taking the test should also use a range of complex structures in their writing tasks. A complex sentence structure is one that contains multiple pieces of information rather than just a single piece. The video provides some useful prompts on how to do this in the shape of ‘wh’ questions – who, what and why.
Those taking the test will be scored according to the impact of errors on communication rather than on the number of mistakes they make, so they should be advised that control is more important than accuracy.
They should also remember to leave time at the end of each writing test to check for and correct any errors. This is essential, as these few minutes can help to improve their overall score.
Please encourage everyone intending to take the test to download our speaking and grammar checklist. You may also wish to share our other writing test videos on coherence and cohesion, lexical resource and task achievement/response.