 If you're worried about task one process questions, this is the video for you. One of our students gave us their task one report and we're gonna show you that with just a few simple changes, we can transform a band six report into a band nine report. I'll show you the key mistakes that most students make that lead to low scores and then show you just how easy and simple it is to get a band eight or even nine by following a few simple rules. And if you get a process question on test day, you'll be very, very happy because they're much, much simpler than most students understand. So let's start off by focusing on the students report. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this report and we're going to go sentence by sentence and show you how we can transform it just by making a few simple tweaks and improve to a band nine. So let's start off by looking at their first sentence. An illustration under depicts a method for processing artificial containers. What they've done initially is actually correct. So they've taken the question, the diagram below shows the process for recycling plastic bottles and they've paraphrased it and this is exactly what you should do. Paraphrasing basically means that you take these words in this sentence and you change the words into your own words, but it must have the same meaning. So let's see if they've done this. The diagram, an illustration, perfect. Below, under, okay, there's nothing under here but we're not going to be too strict with them there. Shows depict, shows and depicts means exactly the same. A method for processing artificial containers. And here we start to get into some problems. Is a plastic bottle an artificial container? Let's just take it out of the context of IELTS. If I was saying to my wife, could you get me an artificial container of Coca-Cola please from the fridge? She wouldn't have any idea what I'm talking about. So this is actually wrong. And luckily I was able to talk to the student and ask them, why did you put this in here? And it's probably the most common mistake that we see and it's because of poor teaching. So the way that this student was taught by their former teacher, they told them, all you have to do is just take each word and change each word to a synonym. So a synonym is a word that means the same as the other word. So diagram, illustration, those are two synonyms and those are correct. Plastic, artificial, don't really mean the same thing. So it's not that this student is bad at English or their English is poor, it's just they've been taught to do the wrong thing. So let's take that sentence and just tweak it slightly and then we're on track to get a much higher score. So we'll change it to the illustration picked, high plastic bottles are recycled. So what are the key differences between this sentence and this sentence? Well, the most important one is that this is an accurate paraphrase. This means the same thing as this. It's okay to copy some of the words if you cannot change those words. Plastic is plastic, a bottle is a bottle, a plastic bottle is a plastic bottle. There aren't any other ways really to convey that. So if you have the choice between using something that is correct and repeating the word or using something that is incorrect and changing the word, pick this one. This is why it's so important to really understand the mind of an examiner and what the examiners are thinking instead of just listening to a bunch of rules that an inexperienced teacher is giving you. And it's also fine to change the form of the word. So we've changed recycling to recycled. That is not the same word. And a very, very important point is that this student is trying to be too complicated, too complex. This student is just focusing on giving the examiners what they're looking for in a straightforward way and they are going to get a much, much higher score. So let's move on to the next paragraph which is the overview paragraph. And the student has done the right thing here. They followed our structure which is to start off your task one report with an introduction which is paraphrases, the question and then skip a line and start your overview paragraph. The overview paragraph is the most important paragraph and it says so in the official marking criteria. Every single examiner in the world will be looking at this when they are looking at your report. So you better follow what it says. And it mentioned specifically here for task achievement and six for academic, a relevant overview is attempted. And I contrast that with what it says for band seven presents a clear overview. In other words, if you don't have a clear overview you cannot get above a six for task achievement. And that will also make it pretty much impossible for you to get above a seven overall for task one. So let's read her overview and also importantly look at the question. The process starts with people recycling their bottles and ends with the production of plastic clothes, stationary bags and more plastic containers. There are nine stages involved in the process and the raw materials are plastic bottles. So to an amateur people who don't really know what they're doing, if they looked at that overview they would think that's pretty good, but is it? Let's look at the first sentence and then let's look at the diagram. The process starts with people recycling their bottles and ends with the production of plastic clothes, et cetera. Does it, does it end? No, it doesn't. It is a cycle. It never ends. The cycle begins again. So it is inaccurate. It is not clear. Clear means that you can look at that and look at that and understand what they mean. Now let's look at the second sentence. The raw materials are plastic bottles. Is that important? Plastic bottles is in the question. You paraphrased it and put it into your introduction and now you're mentioning it again. Does this help the reader clearly understand what is going on? Not really. Remember the overview is just a summary of the most important information. In order to write a clear overview and summarize the most important information you need to fully understand the diagram. When I spoke to this student what they were told by their former teacher was just look at the beginning and the end, write two sentences, write how many stages there are and say what raw materials they are. So this is the key problem. They were told to follow a rigid set of rules rather than just look at the diagram, understand it, and then convey clearly what the most important parts of that diagram were. Giving students a list of rules, the biggest, the smallest, how many stages, the beginning, the end, stops the student doing the most important thing which is thinking for themselves. So let's do that. Let's just look at the diagram, understand it, and then summarize the most important parts. Looking at this, yes there are nine steps. It is a cycle. It begins here. The final step of the cycle is here and then it begins again. It starts off with putting plastic bottles into bins and then ends with making a variety of plastic products. So how do they do that? You know, they collect the bottles, they sort them, they process them, which creates raw materials and then you make stuff out of it. That's it. Don't make it any more complicated than that. Let's put that into an overview. The nine step cycle begins. People putting plastic bottles into bins. Oh my God, you've repeated the word plastic bottles. You have to. You're writing about plastic bottles. It's okay to repeat plastic bottles because that's what it's about and there's no other way of saying it. So the nine step cycle begins with people putting plastic bottles into bins and ends with the production of new products. How do they do that? This is achieved by turning plastic bottles back into raw materials that can be turned into a range of plastic commercial goods. So a good test, and this is something that I used to do with students when I taught in the classroom for real, would be I would give them lots of different processes and I would get them to write an overview and then swap and ask the student to try and draw the overview without ever seeing it. If you can do that, then it is a good overview because it just states what the most important parts of it are. You don't need to go into any detail, that comes later. And you can see that there's not a huge difference between this and this. This student is capable of writing this but they were not capable of doing it on test day because their teacher gave them a list of things that weren't actually helpful. So those of you in the comments right now complaining, how dare you complain about teachers? How dare you support teachers who cause students to lose $250,000, $500,000, $750,000 and can't move to the country of their dreams because you're being polite. So, so far so good with the structure for this student. Introduction, overview. Now they're getting into the details. This is where you start analyzing the details and writing about those individual details. But the problem is is the student has taken all of these details and crammed them in to one paragraph. Why is that a problem? So if we look here at the marking criteria for coherence and cohesion, coherence basically means, is it clear? Cohesion means, how did you arrange and link up all of the different information? So for a band six, it says here, information and ideas. So the stuff you're writing about are generally arranged coherently. I contrast that with a band seven. Information and ideas are logically organized. So the key word there is logically. So what does logically organize actually mean? I'm sure all of you know somebody in your life who when they're telling a story, it just doesn't make sense because they start off in a point of the story like halfway through and then they go back to the beginning and then they start at the end and you're just like, what are you talking about? It's really, really difficult to understand what you mean. For process diagrams and your details paragraphs, it's all about talking through them in order which makes sense and is cohesive but also breaking the process down into sections or parts. And there will normally be two details paragraphs and normally when you look at a process, there will be two parts of the process. So if we look at this process, there are a couple of ways that we could kind of cut it in two and divide it into two parts. And I think the most logical way to do that is here from parts one to four, the bottles haven't really been processed yet. The structure of the bottles hasn't been changed in any way, but once we get to part five, then we start to change the bottles and we really process them. So it's easy to just divide it up into one, two, three, four is part one and then five, six, seven, eight, nine is part two. So we need to take these details and we need to divide them into two details paragraphs. Now, why do we do this? Everything that we are doing today has one goal which is help the reader, help the reader understand. That is why we use paragraphs in anything in a magazine article, in a blog article, in a newspaper, in a book, in a textbook. Why do we use paragraphs to help the reader? If we just stick all the information into one big paragraph, it makes it really, really difficult to understand, but when you divide those two details paragraphs out, the reader understands, okay, we're at this point of the process and now we're moving on to a different part of the process. So kept this starting sentence basically the same, the process begins, the process starts, I've just varied the language slightly, we had begins up here. Now I've said, it's okay to repeat some words, but you want to vary it as much as possible. As much as possible means don't change it for the sake of changing it, don't change it to something wrong, but if you spot a way of changing the vocabulary, varying it slightly so that it means the same thing and it's accurate, do that. With the placement of plastic bottles, I've changed it to plastic containers. We've set the context now that it is about plastic bottles. So if we change it to plastic containers, the reader, the examiner is gonna know what we're talking about, into specialized bins, into specialized bins, which are then collected by, I've changed it to bin lorries. The reason why I've changed it to bin lorries is in Ireland, the UK, where I'm from, we would say bin lorries. So I know that that is 100% correct. Trash vans, I know that trash means rubbish, a van is a van, but I don't know if that collocation, trash van is correct or not. It sounds like it might not be totally accurate, although you can correct me in the comments, I'm sure, but I'm just gonna change it to something that I know 100% for sure is correct. She also made a little grammar error here, placements, placement, so I'm just tidying it up slightly. So I've changed the trash vans, then take the plastic bottles to, they are then transported. We're using something called referencing there. So you don't have to repeat plastic bottles, plastic bottles, plastic bottles. So for all of you people complaining in the comments that I've used plastic bottles too many times, I'm now using something called referencing. And I've changed recycling center to processing plant. So what this student was taught to do in the details paragraph was just basically write out exactly what they see. But one thing the examiner will be looking for is, did you take the vocabulary from the actual diagram and change it to show variation of vocabulary and show the examiner that not only do you have a range of vocabulary, but that is accurate. So there's no point in changing it to something that's wrong, but again, if you can change it to something that is accurate, do so. Okay, it's changed. Were they undergo the process of sorting? The process of sorting. So again, she's just taken the word sorting and copied it into her details paragraph. To be sorted by hand, what I've shown the examiner there is I'm aware of what the word sorting means. And I'm also aware of how to change it to a different form of that word, sorting sorted. And by hand, again, is showing the range of vocabulary that I have. So it's really a balance between the range of vocabulary and the accuracy of the vocabulary. So let's look at their next sentence. This sorting process involves placing plastic bottles into one box and non-plastic bottles into another. Does the diagram actually show that? So you see this person and there's a tick and there's an X. She seems to be putting plastic bottles into the one that's a tick. But what this student has done is they have added their interpretation, their ideas, they've taken their own ideas and put it into this part of the diagram. You should never, ever do that. Why? Because it's not accurate. You don't know that. Even if it seems very, very obvious, even if you have worked in a recycling plant, even if you have a PdD in recycling plastic bottles, don't put any knowledge outside of this diagram into the diagram. Because what they are testing is can you look at something and then through writing, communicate that on paper, not add in extra stuff. So this is inaccurate and that lowers your score. And then have a look at this sentence. This results in a block of compressed plastic bottles. Does it? Does she put it into this box and they magically turn in to a big block of compressed bottles? No, the diagram doesn't show that. Again, what she's doing is interpreting this and adding in extra information. Those two sentences are inaccurate and that, again, lowers your score. So let's just add in instead. When they have been correctly sorted, they can be compressed into blocks of plastic bottles. So I'm not putting in any extra information in there. I'm just saying what happens in the process. And you might be thinking, well, blocks, blocks, you've just copied that. I don't know any other way of saying it. Squares, possibly cubes. I don't know. You're not going to be dropped from about nine to about six because you copied one word. Again, it's a balance. So that's the end of that part of the process. So what we do, we skip a line, start a new paragraph, which makes it much, much easier to read and understand. So we're going to add in here at step five. Just putting this in here to let the reader know where we are. A little trick that I teach students is try to imagine the reader, the examiner, as the dumbest person that you know and you have to literally take them by the hand and show them, okay, we're here now. We're at step five now. Are you still with me? I know it's not very nice to talk about dumb people or whatever. It's just a little way of making your writing as absolutely clear as possible. That could be a person in your life. It could be the dumbest kid that you went to school with. Imagine you're writing to that person and it will make your writing super, super, duper clear. So what happens at step five? The bottles are crushed. So taken crushing, the bottles are crushed and the resulting fragments drop into a liquid. So they can be washed. Now compare that with the same part of their report. These compressed blocks are placed into a large crushing machine and then washed in a pool of water. Where does it say anything about water? It's a liquid because we can see those wavy things at the top, but we don't know that it's water. It could be hydrochloric acid, we don't know. Substance. Substance is a great catch all word. Everything is basically a substance of some sort is then placed into a machine producing plastic pellets. They heat it to produce the raw material. And now they have started a new paragraph and this is very, very common with students at about five or about six level. They've done something quite strange. In summary, so what does in summary mean? Means that they're writing some kind of conclusion. That's at the end of their report here. So this would indicate that they think that they should write a conclusion. This process will help the environment by allowing people to produce product from environmentally sustainable materials. All sounds very nice, very good. Some nice vocabulary in there, but it is completely wrong. Why? Because a conclusion is your opinion. It doesn't ask for your opinion here. Your opinion has no place in this report because it is not asking for it. Why did the student do it? You can guess it. Their teacher who was very, very inexperienced got confused between task one reports and task two essays. Task two essays, yes, of course, write a conclusion, summarize your opinion in task two. Task one is very, very different. Again, I'm sorry for criticizing teachers, but it just shows you that this student really should have got a band eight or a band nine. Their grammar, their vocabulary, their organization is all pretty good. They know exactly what to do, but they're being hindered by paying for that inexperienced teacher. So what we do is we just delete that, completely, and we go back to doing what we should do, which is just explain what's happening in the process. So this can then be manufactured into various goods that contain plastic. Joe kept it quite vague there because they have stuff like, they have plastic bottles, which are 100% plastic, I think, I'm not a plastic expert, but you don't need to be, but they have stuff like t-shirts and bags and pencils and pens, which are not 100% plastic. So I've just put in various goods that contain plastic. And then because it's a cycle and the process commences again. And that's quite simply how to transform a band six with lots of basic mistakes and transform it, making a few simple changes to a band nine report. If you want more help with task one and task two, I've included a link to our free fundamentals course, which covers task one, task two, and speaking, listening, and writing. 100% free. Click the link below in the description and you can sign up for free and get that course. Or we cover everything in much more detail and you get a lot more help in our VIP course. I've included a 10% off link in the description as well. Thank you very much. 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