[continued from the first part]
So one day we looked at this (from the book IELTS Masterclass):
The charts illustrates spending on advertising across different media sources, so the emphasis was about numbers to express expenditure, proportions, preference, etc.
After a bit of vocabulary clarification, and a few sentence samples, the students were put into groups and given one of the charts, for which they had to provide the best possible written description. The groups were then mixed and the charts compared verbally. After a bit of feedback the students were given 12! minutes (not 20, because the thinking had already been done, and also because this class had the tendency to write too much) to actually write the task. So far so good, although of course they don't like this task. Nobody does. The results aren't exciting no matter how much craft you possess.
Another day, a different chart. This time from Cambridge IELTS 8:
We focused this time on consumption, degradation, eating habits, overuse etc.
Another day, it was this set of charts, from IELTS 9:
Even without including the task instructions, it appears evident that these charts are describing age groups in two different countries. However, because we teach the IELTS exam, but we have no time to actually teach why charts such as these exist, when and how they are used etcetera, they are perceived by some students as mostly sadistic ways to test the students' understanding of numbers inside and around differently shaped graphs, despite the graphs actually having no meaning of their own.
It is not always easy or obvious to make the students think differently, and the results can be sometimes discouraging or hilarious, depending on your outlook on that particular day. So this was the result after our time spent on writing task 1 (right from my locker where I keep the trophies):
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