 Okay, Silvana. So we're going to work on this task to a question together. Let's have a read of it first. In some areas of the US, a curfew is imposed in which teenagers are not allowed to be outdoors after a particular time at night unless they are with an adult. What is your opinion about this? So what's the very first thing we need to do with this question? First is, read it and understand the question. Yep. So let's have a read of it. Is there anything that you don't understand in this question? Actually, they too. There's a word that I don't understand, curfew, I don't know the meaning of it. So we have two choices really. If we see a question and there's a word or maybe one or two words that we don't understand with two choices, we can just panic and go like, oh, I'm going to fail and then just try our best. Or we can do something else, which is guess the meaning from context. So what do you think I mean by guess from context? Like you have to find the meaning of that word based on what you read, based on the meaning of the whole sentence. Exactly. So if I just showed you that word without any other words around it, it would be quite difficult to determine the meaning of the word. But because we've got all of this extra information, we can look at all this extra information and guess what this means. So what do you think this means? If I have a guess, I think it's like kind of restriction. Exactly. Yeah, it's a restriction. It's just a fancy word for restriction. A fancy word for restriction with curfew is really about time. It's a time that you, there's a deadline that you have to be home before. So if you have an 11 p.m curfew, that means that you have to be home before 11 p.m. or your mom and dad are going to be. So it's normally for children, young adults, your parents, your guardians says you have to be home before a particular time. So that would be perfect because what some people would do is they would panic and they'd be like, I also so unfair. I don't know what this word means. But often what they'll do is they will give you extra information. So they've given you particular time. So they've really defined it for you there. So they're actually helping you out with this. They know that many people will not understand this word. So they've helped you out by giving you this context. Is there anything else that you don't understand? Apart from the word, everything else. Okay. So in some areas of the US curfew is imposed in which teenagers are not allowed to be outdoors after a particular time at night unless so you fully understand what that means. Yep. If we, what would happen if we didn't take the time to understand it? When we would start panic, we don't know what to do, where to start. Yes. We would also start to write about things that were not related to this. Because when we looked at your writing before, sometimes what you would do is you would write about the general topic rather than answer the question. And there's a big difference between writing about curfews in general or writing about discipline in children or something like that rather than answering the exact question. So number one, understand we've done that. Okay. What's the second thing we need to do? Then we have to understand the general topic. So what is the general topic? Here is it talking about restriction in particularly at night time. Could we go a little bit wider than that? Permissions from the parents to the teenagers. Parenting. Yeah. It's really about parenting. Yeah. Parenting and teenagers looking after children. But let's just say it's parenting. Okay. Why is it important that we understand the general topic first? So we don't talk about... Yeah. So we don't write everything about parenting or we don't write everything related to looking after children at night or something like that. Again, we're wanting to answer the specific question. What's the third thing that we need to do? Then we have to understand what's the specific topic. Okay. What's the specific question that they're asking us? So what things would you underline here? He says in some areas of the U.S. I know now what curfew is. And then teenagers and adults. Okay. So it's not talking about young children. It's not talking about people over 20. Really, it's just talking about people between the ages of 13 and 19 teenagers. Anything else we would? Adults and particular time. With adults, particular time. It's outdoors. So they might be able to stay up and watch movies or play games indoors. But it's all about whether they should be outdoors or not. Because this is going to inform your decision. Because we will then start to think about, okay, what is it about the outdoors that is dangerous? Why would parents not want children to be outdoors? What's the difference between a child being outdoors and a child being indoors? So that helps us start to form our opinion and helps us to start to generate ideas without even getting to the idea generation phase by thinking about these things, the specific thing. And the fourth thing? Now we have to understand what type of question would they ask us. Yeah. So what's the type of question? And what is the type of question? It's an opinion because it's asking about my opinion. Well, what's weird about this? It's got the what's inside. What is your opinion? Yeah. So again, often students get a bit freaked out because it doesn't say do you agree or disagree. Because people learn these static rigid ways of answering a question. And then when they inevitably, IELTS will often change the wording a little bit. Instead of saying do you agree or disagree, they'll say, what is your opinion about this? Or what do you think about this? But it's exactly the same as a do you agree or disagree question. So we answer it in an exact same way. Yeah. Can we move on? Yeah. Okay, good. So what's the next stage that we need to get to? We need to start to generate our ideas. Okay, so what are the two ways that we can answer this? I'll ask for my own opinion. Before we start generating ideas, what are the two ways that we can, we talked about before? We can agree with this or we can disagree with this. So you said to me earlier today, could we, you know, some people say this, some people say that, I kind of believe that you can do that, but it's very, very complicated. The simple way to answer these questions is just choose that one or that one. Okay. So before we, you know, put a line down the board and then go like agree and disagree, disagree. Is there one that you think as a mother that you probably are thinking about already? Agree. Yeah. So what I don't, I don't think we need to do, you know, think of three or four ideas for this side, because as a mother and somebody who knows a lot about parenting, you're probably going to choose this one anyway. And so what an idea I would have is, you know, instead of brainstorming both sides and wasting a lot of time, I would just, do you agree? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about some of the ways that we generate ideas that we talked about earlier today, because one of the problems that you had was how do I generate ideas? I don't know how to do this. And you were talking about brainstorming. We were talking about that. It was not so that successful. Unsuccessful. So waste of time. So what was it one of the ways that we said that? The first one was the, which is the obvious one. The most obvious. Yeah. So instead of trying to think of a high level idea or an idea that, you know, is going to impress people, what's the first idea that pops into your head? Why would you not want your children out on the streets of London? Dangerous. Okay. Yeah. It's dangerous. That's the most obvious answer. What's another way that we could? A hundred people room. If you ask a hundred people, if you asked a hundred people in London, why do you not want your 15-year-old daughter on the streets of London at 1 a.m.? What would most of them say? It's unsafe for them and dangerous. Dangerous. So we'll give this a double tick. Yeah. Because you've generated the same idea twice by a different method. Yeah. Let's say that would be the top option. What would the second most popular option or the second most common option be? Maybe because they're too young. They, you know, when they make decisions, then they won't make the right decision. Maybe they just... Irresponsible? Yeah. Irresponsible, reckless. They won't think as much as an adult would think. They won't think twice. Okay. So we have two good ideas. Well, I would be careful just with these two ideas to make sure that they don't mean the same thing because you wouldn't want... Similar. They're similar, but I don't think they're the same thing. But you would want to think about that before you start writing because what can happen is you write your introduction, you write your first main body paragraph about this one, and then you start writing about this one and you're like, oh, this is actually pretty much the same thing. So you just check those. This is more about third parties. This is more about what other people could do to your children. This is what they'll do to themselves. That's the difference. Which is probably the most worrying bit. What are some other ways that we could think of ideas if we wanted to, you know, keep going with this? We have to put ourselves in somebody else's position, opposite position. What I will think. So you're a mother. What would a father say? You are a nurse. What would someone from a different occupation? You live in London. What would somebody in Paris say or Dublin say? You're from Albania. What would someone from a different country say? Can you think of any other ways of thinking about it? Putting yourself into someone else's shoes? If I think it's dangerous, somebody will say it's safe because it depends where they live. It is a small village. They know each other. Probably not a good for a degree, though. No. Again, these are just tools to help you. So one, you know, if you are using a tool to fix your car, one tool might not work. That's fine. Put it down. Pick up another tool that actually does work. This way of generating ideas just doesn't help you because what you don't want to do in the exam is go like, oh, what would someone else think? What would? And you sit there and you start to stress about it and you start to worry about it. We can move on to something else. If that doesn't work, that's why we have multiple ways of generating ideas. Number four, is there any other way? I have to ask myself. Yeah, you personally. So you as a mother, imagine your son is 13 on his 13th birthday and he said, I'm going to go into Leicester Square in London tonight and I'm going to be there till 3am. What would you say to him? Well, what, what, what, what, he's arguing with you. What excuse would you give? I would say it's dangerous for you. You don't know what you're doing. You don't know. So let's give your irresponsible, your too young. So when we have a double tick, when we have more than one tick, we know that these are probably reliable, relevant, specific ideas that answer the question. And we would always want to go back and just read the question again and think of our ideas, do our ideas support our opinion? So some areas of the US, a curfew is imposed in which teenagers are not allowed to be outdoors after a particular time at night, unless they are with an adult. I agree, because the world is dangerous and teenagers are irresponsible. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think I think that makes total sense. So now that we have our two ideas, what is the next stage? Now I have to start with generating our main topic and planning paragraphs, our two main paragraphs. So we have main body paragraph. One, we have our topic sentence. We have our explanation. We have our example main body paragraph. Two, topic sentence, explanation, example. Okay, we did this slowly before. We're going to do it fast now. So I'm going to give you two minutes. Oh, let's say four minutes. Okay, so topic sentence is going to be obvious. So that is dangerous. But how would we describe that? How would we how is the world being dangerous, a reason to put a curfew on children? Because we see the increase in the violence out on the streets. Lots of crimes. Violence, crime, same thing. Not exactly the same. Boxing is not a crime when it's violence, but you know what I mean. Within this context, violent crime, yeah. Just don't want you repeating the same thing, you know, saying there has been an increase in violence. There has been an increase in crime. Within this context, that's basically saying the same thing. So we could change that to violent crime. This is one of those questions also that this is so obvious to a parent. You know, of course I don't let my children at 1am. But it's so obvious that people don't explain it properly because they think that the examiner and everyone else knows what they're talking about. But remember we talked about before, the examiner can't phone you up and say, is this what you mean? Is this what you meant? You need to explain it to them. So why would an increase in crime, in violent crime, at you as a parent? Because they're more vulnerable compared with an adult. Teenagers are vulnerable. Unable to protect themselves. Remember, we talked about outdoors, the difference between outdoors and indoors. How could we finish this up? Because they don't have the comfort of their own house, the safety of their own home. You don't know who you're going to meet on the street, you don't know the person, you don't know if you can trust that person. So linking it back to the question at the end, I would encourage you to say it's therefore safer to be at home where the parents can see them. Because what you tend to do is you will explain things and sometimes you'll start to just scatter lots of ideas. There's an increase in violence, there's an increase in crime, they're more vulnerable, they're not able to protect themselves. Maybe start with one expert and keep that as a logical chain. As we talked about before, we were doing a question on why do people who work too much get fat? Okay, or why do they get diabetes? They work too much, therefore they don't move, therefore they get fat, therefore they get diabetes. It's like a logical chain of events. There's an increase in violent crime, making them more vulnerable, therefore they're unable to protect themselves and they're at high risk, therefore it's safer for them to be at home. Yeah, so it's just one chain of events. An example? For example, we can use, when we talk to Aliou say we can't, we have, we can use personal examples but we have to make it more general. You can first of all think of a personal example, so you or your sister who has children or something like that, but then make it make it more general, yeah. We can refer to the numbers from the police, they're saying that they show there's an increase in in crimes and especially the victims, we can see more victims as teenagers rather than adults. Do you live in London? Is there any examples recently in London? You see lots of newspapers, every time you open newspaper you will see, you know, 14 years old has been stummed, 13 years old has been stummed. Yeah, so the big thing in London the past year, two years, is a massive increase in stabbings and the vast majority of the victims are young teenagers. So you can think of your own personal examples and try and widen it out but also personal doesn't mean just you as a person, the city you live in, the country you live in, so it could be London, it could be England, it could be Albania, you know, what's generally the time, I don't know, is there a general time that children have to be at home in Albania? In Ireland I would say, you know, for teenagers it's probably 9 or 10 p.m. Same we expect in Albania as well. So there's lots of different ways that we can think of examples. Which one do you want to choose? I thought I would choose the one from the newspapers that, you know, statistics show. So stabb victims in London and you don't have to be a criminologist to know that, like it's on the radio, it's in the newspapers in London every single day, you know, so you don't have to say on the 24th of January in the Sun newspaper it said this, you say, you know, there has been a massive increase in stabb victims in London and most of them are teenagers, proving why you should keep them indoors, you know. So again, yeah, it's not like you don't need a criminology, PhD level answer or anything like that. Okay, so the next one. So the next topic was that they are irresponsible. When I'm saying irresponsible that means that there's no one thing twice of their actions, like what the consequences of their actions going to be. So they don't think of consequences? And they can be easily manipulated by others? Oh, that's a different topic. Is that a different topic? So you have a tendency to do that where you, in order to explain something, you will explain it in three different ways, which is if we're having a conversation and let's say I'm really dumb and I'm letting my teenager go right till any time he wants, you could say to me, well, he's not thinking of the consequences and he might be drinking and other older boys might have an influence on him. And there are lots of drugs around, which makes him even more irresponsible. That's kind of like four, and that's fine if we're talking to each other. But in an essay where we're being marked on coherence and cohesion, we need to just focus on this and have one logical chain of an explanation. So they don't think of consequences, therefore. And we make mistakes? Yeah, more likely to make mistakes. What stops them making the mistakes? If you put them at a time, they're restriction, so they will. If indoors? They will more make these mistakes. Curfew, they will not get in trouble, yeah, or something like that. It's just a plan. So it doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. It doesn't have to be full sentences. But we want to be thinking logically about it, because if we have three or four different disparate ideas in the plan, then we're definitely going to have it in the essay. So we want to do our thinking here, do all of our thinking and our planning here, so that when we're writing, we can just focus on writing. An example? So I put like a recent survey that was done in the USA, showed that teenagers are more prone to be irresponsible and make more mistakes. So remember what we talked about, that you would only use statistics if they were as a last resort, if you had no other choice. Can you think of any idea of any examples of teenagers being irresponsible? All the time, when they go out to get drunk and then come home. You could say something like that. So you do teenage drinking. Yeah, you could say, well, if I was using an example in Northern Ireland, where I am, every weekend, the police stop and catch very young teenagers with big bottles of alcohol every weekend. That's obviously a problem. If we weren't going to use that example, anything from your own life. So that could be something in Albania, something in London. You're a nurse. Is there anything that you can think of in terms of nursing? We've got lots of young people being admitted with overdoses or with over drinking. So NHS at the weekend, at the NHS? The admissions. Admissions. Yeah, there you go. So again, using your own life, your own experience, if it was me, I would use Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland has a problem with a teenager. Well, teenagers don't think it's a problem. They think it's great, but the police aren't too happy about it. But the best thing about teenage drinking is getting chased by the police. And as a nurse, I'm sure you have either worked in a casualty ward, or you have colleagues in casualty, and you see on a Friday night, Saturday night, all the teenagers coming in and getting their stomach pumped and took too much drugs, too many drugs. Okay, so are we happy with that night? Yeah. Do you want to try and spend 20 minutes doing the introduction in the first main body paragraph? Right. Yeah. And then we'll put it up and we'll talk about it in 10 minutes. Okay, so what's the first thing that we need to do when we're reading our paraphrase? What's the first thing that the most important thing? We have to paraphrase first. So what is a paraphrase? You take a sentence. You try to keep the same meaning by using different words. Does it mean the same thing? Yeah. The first thing we need to do is, does this, in general, mean the same thing as the question? So in some parts of the US, adolescents are not permitted by their parents to go out after a certain time, unless they are with a grown-up. Does that mean the same thing? No, what I'm not saying is, are the words, have you changed every single word? But in general, does this mean the same thing as the question? In some areas of the US, a curfew is imposed in which teenagers are not allowed to be outdoors after a particular time at night, unless they are with an adult. Does it mean the same thing? Try to keep it. Yeah. It does mean the same thing. You didn't talk about outdoors, for example, but that doesn't matter because we can infer from the context, permitted by their parents to go out, that's fine. Okay. So it means the same thing. Now we need to think, is it grammatically correct? Are there any vocabulary issues? So let's read. In some parts of the US, adolescents are not permitted by their parents to go out after a certain time, unless they are with a grown-up. Is that okay? Sounds okay. It's good. Well done. Because before you were making lots and lots of grammatical errors, you were making lots of collocation errors, for example. So that's a very, very good paraphrase. Well done. It's a great start to your essay. Everything we might change is just put a hyphen in. So we would make that grown and up when we hyphen it and when we put it together, grown-up. You mean grown-up? Yep. Okay. I totally agree with this. So this is your... My opinion. Your opinion. Okay. So your position, what you think about this question, needs to be clear throughout the essay. So we put it in here in the introduction, so we're making it super clear to the examiner. This is what I think about it. So that's good. All right. Because it is dangerous for young people to be late at night, so what is that? It means that they're dangerous. No, it's our first main idea. Yeah. So this is our first main idea. So we've got it here. And most of them are irresponsible when it comes to make decisions. Anything you want to change about that? Most of them, they make when it comes to making decisions. Again, verb tenses. Sometimes you get confused about the continuous versus the and present simple to making when it comes to making decisions. Okay. So that's our second main idea here. Very good. Okay. So the next stage would be, we're going to take our first main idea and develop it. You know, that's going to be our first main body paragraph. And then the second idea, that's going to be our second main body paragraph. And then we would summarize it all in our conclusion. I need to get you to the airport before you miss your plane. So what we'll do is you write your two main body paragraphs on your conclusion. I'll put it up on the board here next week. And I'll make the video as if you are in the room. And I'll do it and then we'll have a full video. Okay. All right. So what we're going to do here is give Silvana some feedback on the rest of our essay. And because of COVID-19, we're currently in lockdown. So I'm not going to be in the studio anytime soon. So we're just going to share the essay up here. All right. So what I'm looking at in the very first sentence in the main body paragraph, what I'm looking for here is a topic sentence. And the thing I'm looking for is does the topic sentence match her main idea here? All right. So this is her first main idea. Let's highlight this. Is this highlight? Yeah. It is dangerous for young people to be out late at night. Okay. So pretty obvious. It's dangerous. So does this topic sentence match that? And does the topic sentence tell me this main idea succinctly? What tells me what the rest of it is about? Because what we teach our students, this is not the only way to write an essay, by the way, but what we teach our students is to outline the main idea here in the introduction and then state it again here in the topic sentence. That means that all you have to do is just look up here at your idea in the introduction and you know what to write about in your first main body paragraph. It also makes it extremely easy for the examiner to then look at this and know exactly what you're talking about. So making it easy for you and easy for the examiner. Keep it simple. Make things as simple and as easy as possible for you on test day and easy for the examiner to read. Recently, many parts of the US have seen an increase in the number of violent crimes. So this is not a topic sentence. This is a background sentence. So I don't know why students do this. I think it's because they see so many other sample essays and so many other teachers teaching this online where you put a background sentence in at the beginning of your introduction and then for some reason you put another background sentence in here. That is a complete waste of time. Every sentence, every word should contribute to you answering the question. We already know this because it was stated in the question you've already know it because we paraphrased the question. So there's no point in repeating this. So this sentence has wasted the student's time but it has also wasted the examiner's time and made it more difficult for the examiner to understand what the point of this whole paragraph is because the topic sentence, all it is doing is just holding up a little flag and saying, hello, this is what we're talking about here. So let's help Savannah out with this a little bit and change it. Children should remain indoors at night because it is not safe, all right? Children should remain indoors at night because it is not safe. So that's just stating the same idea and making it clear what the main idea is, your main argument is here. Okay, let's have a look at this one. Reports from the police suggest that the most affected age group is between 13 and 19 years old. So this doesn't really connect up with the main idea. So we would, we need to explain why it is not safe to be outdoors as a child at night. So let's just delete this one and see what is here. This age group is suffering more due to being more vulnerable than other age groups. Why? While another lesson is outside alone, he will be more vulnerable and easy to talk about. Why? All right. So this isn't really explaining why it is not safe for children to be outdoors at night. All right. And this would be the main area of concern for me that the explanation doesn't really explain why children should should remain indoors at night because it is not safe. All right. So all the explanation should do is like prove this argument. All right. Imagine you're explaining this to somebody who knows nothing about the topic. So imagine a little four or five year old boy and he's saying, that's a really good example actually because imagine your teenager saying, why do I not have to, why do I have to stay inside? It's not safe. Why? Because there are criminals outside. Why? So you're explaining why they can't go outside, why it's too dangerous outside. Let's have a look at the example. For example, London has seen a double in the number of stubbing. So let's just simplify this. Has seen an increase in the number of stabbings or stabbing victims, age between 13 and 19 or more. And the majority of this is related to crimes are happening during the late hours of the night. So that's pretty good. Because what she's done is she lives in London, she lives close to London, and she's just thought about why would I not let my child go outside? Okay. In London at the moment, it is in the news all the time that there's a huge increase of stabbing victims and most of them are teenagers. So she has used a real example from her own experience to prove this point, which is really, really good. So topic sentence, make it simpler, make it clear, match it to the main idea. And then the big thing that I would do if I was Sylvanna is really work on just simplifying this and proving your explanation why. Maybe this was just a difficult one for her because often the answers are so obvious. Like if you were talking to a mother or a father in London and you said, would you let your 13 go out at 3am and play with their friends? They'd say no. And the mother or father knows why innately it's natural to understand why that is. You don't need to explain it. Some things are so innate, they are so obvious that it's difficult to explain them. And I think this is maybe why Sylvanna had a problem with this. You know, I met Sylvanna. She's a very responsible mother. There's no way that she would let her kids out. But maybe this is so obvious that it's difficult to explain. So let's have a look at her second main idea here. Let's put this in blue. They are irresponsible when it comes to making decisions. Okay, let's have a look at her topic sentence. Adolescents, talking about them in general. As young people with little experience often will end up making responsible decisions. Good. So this is a good topic sentence because as a reader of this, if you are the examiner, the examiner is reading this, they understand what the rest of the paragraph is about. Let's have a look at her explanation. At this age, their body will go through important hormonal changes, which will make them rush while making decisions. Yep. Let's see. Very often, they will be unaware of the consequences of their action. Oh, will be unaware of the consequences their actions will have on them and others and make mistakes. Okay, some clunky grammar in there, but overall quite good. The explanation is good. That's why they should be helped by adults during this process. Okay, I see what you mean. For example, Ireland doubled the police force in order to do with drunk teenagers who thought it was fine to get drunk and cause trouble on the streets late at night. So this is kind of true. Ireland does have a problem, I think like most Western countries with teenagers drinking, but Ireland didn't double the police force to tackle this. Ireland has bigger problems than this and most countries have bigger problems than this. So they wouldn't double the police force just because of some drunk teenagers. So you could make this a little bit more believable. It is true that they probably increased the police force. Ireland increased the size of the police force in order to deal with drunk teenagers who thought it was fine to get drunk and cause trouble in the streets late at night. Okay, that makes a little bit more believable. If I was to make this a little bit better, just based on my own experience as a teenager, when I used to drink as a teenager, we would change it to increase the number of police patrols at the weekend because that's when we used to drink in order to deal with drunk teenagers who thought it was fine to get drunk and cause trouble in the streets late at night. Okay, so you see that makes it a little, you don't want to make up examples that just don't make any sense whatsoever because the examiner is going to look at it and think you just made that up. It's not logical, it doesn't make any sense. So read your example and think about does this make sense and that's why it is much better to think of examples that are real from your own experience because you're decreasing the likelihood that they're going to sound wrong. In conclusion, comma, I believe people as young as adolescents. Why not just I believe adolescents, people as young, it's as if you're trying to avoid saying the word adolescents because you've repeated it, but like a native English speaker would never say people as young as adolescents, why not just say adolescents? In general, you should try to vary your language as much as possible, but don't add in things like that that just don't make any sense. I believe adolescents should not be allowed to go out in the late hours of the night because they will not be able to protect themselves from danger. Okay, the house is a safe place for them to be and it will prevent them from making irresponsible decisions. Good, good conclusion overall because you summarized your main ideas and you've made it clear what your opinion is. I believe adolescents should not be allowed to go out in the late hours of the night. That's your opinion there. Protect themselves from danger. It's dangerous. First main idea and then this is your second main idea. So overall conclusion is quite good. So Silvana, apart from a few character spelling mistakes, some grammar, especially articles and some vocabulary issues, overall you did a good job. I think just the main things that I would say is topic sentence, make it really clear what your main idea is, take it from your introduction and then explain logically and simply that main idea and then think of an example that makes sense from your own experience and overall the conclusion is good. So you're definitely making progress, Silvana. I think just as always you can't look at this video and well let me put it another way. There's two types of students. One type of student would get feedback like this and think I don't know how to do topic sentences. I don't know how to explain things. I don't know how to write good examples. I'll never be able to do that as seeing it as evidence that you're not good enough and you'll never improve. I don't think you are that type of student. The second group of students see this vocabulary and they go great. Now I know that I need to work on my topic sentences. I need to work on my explanations. I need to work on my examples. Now what I'm going to do is get more questions and going to practice them again, learn from my mistakes and then improve and that second group of students sees massive progress. So that is what I would suggest that you do Silvana. You get more questions and you really really focus on those things and get more feedback and you will improve bit by bit. Thanks very much Silvana and if you have any questions let me know.