In this tutorial we cover:

* Understand the questions and context for the letter in general task 1.

* Think about what to write – how to use the prompts that you are given in the question rubric.

* Work out how creative to be? Is it ok to make up lots of strange facts and information?

* Understand how to Start and how to Finish your letters – this is so important and at IELTS level you cannot make mistakes on this!

And finally …

* How to get your letter in a logical order which will help your coherence.

* How to use great grammar but make it sound natural

I am really enjoying marking so many of your amazing letters – they are intelligent, clever, accurate, creative and sometimes so funny that I am laughing while I am correcting them- thank you all for those ones!

However, I feel that letter writing is sometimes an area which is a bit neglected – that means not focused on enough- and in this two part tutorial I am going to look at the main types of letters which come up in the IELTS exam, help you think about the CONTEXT (the situation) the CONTENT (what to write ) and the REGISTER (the level of formality) needed for IELTS letters and share with you some KEY functional language which you will need for these kinds of letters!

You can see the  letter questions I am going to talk about (and a few extra ones as a bonus) on the website page which links to this Podcast.

Let’s start with an overview of General Training Task 1 for those of you who are not familiar with it. You will be asked to write a letter – this could be to

* Request information

* Give personal or factual information

* Explain a problem or situation

* Explain wants or needs / make a request

* Complain about a service

* Make a suggestion or recommend something.

All these letters require what we call ‘functional language’ which is specifically the kind of language used to perform certain tasks for example:

I am writing to complain about … / I am writing with reference to… / I would be grateful if you could answer a few questions for me…. It is very important to build up a list of these phrases and learn them before your exam. Each essay will require different phrases and I will show you some as we go along! You can find a really great list of all these important phrases on our website. 

The instructions will say

You should spend about 20 mins on this task. Write at least 150 words. You do NOT need to write any addresses and it may tell you to begin your letter Dear Sir or Madam, but this is not always the case.

Marking – your letter will be marked according to Task Achievement – does your letter answer all parts of the question? Are all your ideas relevant?

Coherence and Cohesion – are your ideas well organised, clear and well connected?

Lexical resource– Have you avoided repeating the same words and copying words from the question – this means paraphrasing and we talk about this a lot both in Task 1 and Task 2 questions.

Grammatical range and accuracy– have you made any grammatical mistakes and shown a good range of grammatical structures? Incidentally – very common mistakes in letters are in the use of tenses and prepositions and we will look at this later.

So, here are the instructions for the first letter I want to look at: