‫We're now moving on to our second lesson of writing tests, too, and today we'll be learning how the
‫examiner marks and gives your essay a score.
‫And of course, in aout, you were given a band score, much like Ale's writing task one.
‫The Examiner uses a set of banned descriptors to assess and give your essay a score.
‫By the end of this lesson, you better understand these banned descriptors and the criteria that you
‫need to meet to score band six, seven or higher.
‫So as with task one, the band descriptors have four sections, the first one being task achievement,
‫task.
‫Achievement basically means how well you answer the question.
‫For example, if your essay doesn't answer the question, given you scored very low in task achievement.
‫Coherence and cohesion means how well you organize your essay, for example, using paragraphs.
‫As I'm sure you will remember, lexical resource measures how well you use vocabulary and finally grammatical
‫range and accuracy measures, how well you use a range of sentence structures and grammatical forms.
‫I believe it's highly useful for you to understand these four assessment criteria, as you will know
‫exactly what the examiner is looking for in your essay.
‫Now will go into a lot more detail about what you need to do to score highly in each of the four band
‫descriptors.
‫First up, we'll be taking a look at TASC achievement, and this measures how well you answer the question.
‫Here are the band descriptors from six to nine if you want to take a closer look.
‫Download the full band descriptors in this lesson.
‫OK, so what do you need to do to score highly in task achievement?
‫To put it simply, you need to fully answer the question that you have been given.
‫A lot of students make the mistake in only answering a part of the question or not clearly giving their
‫opinions.
‫You'll also score higher if you develop and fully explain your ideas.
‫You can give relevant examples to clearly illustrate your thinking.
‫Also, it's very important that you write over 250 words now with a bit of practice, you won't need
‫to count as you will be able to tell from the look of your essay how many words in a roundabout way
‫that you have written, but at the same time, you don't want to be writing for 500 words, as you won't
‫score any extra marks for doing this.
‫So do you make sure that you answer the question in full with fully supported and clearly explained
‫ideas and opinions?
‫The second one descriptor is coherence and cohesion.
‫To score highly here, you need to logically organize your essay.
‫That means you can use the four step structure, which I briefly showed you in the last lesson to help
‫present and organize your essay.
‫It's really important to remember that each paragraph has one big idea.
‫For example, in your supporting paragraph, you wouldn't want to write an argument for and against
‫something in one paragraph.
‫Try and stay focused and organize your ideas simply also using linking words like there for old, though,
‫will help to organize your essay.
‫So it's important that you use these and we'll be looking at that more later on in the course.
‫Our next band descriptor is lexical resource, and as you may remember from Task one, this is all about
‫the range of vocabulary that you can use.
‫He synonyms and collocations will really help you score higher, and it's important to remember not
‫to repeat vocabulary often.
‫It's also very important that your spelling is accurate, as any errors in this will mean you will lose
‫some marks.
‫I believe it's a really good idea to look, for some example, essays on the Internet, read them through
‫and try and steal some common language that you can find.
‫And now onto our last Bundy script, which is grammatical range and accuracy.
‫As with task one, it's important that you can use a range of sentence types and grammatical forms with
‫few errors.
‫It's also important to use the correct tense and use a range of punctuation.
‫Here is the band descriptors in full and remember, you can download this from this lesson.
‫My top tips are to organize your ideas logically and use the force that structure to help write your
‫essay.
‫That's all for how you were scored in Eilts writing test to see you in the next lesson.