Task 1 Process Diagrams: Transform Band 6 to 9

In this video, I take you through the journey of transforming an IELTS Writing Task 1 report from Band 6 to Band 9, specifically focusing on process diagrams.

I start by examining a real student’s report and pinpoint the common errors that lead to lower scores. Through this analysis, I show you the mistakes and reveal how simple changes can significantly boost your score. You’ll learn the ins and outs of effective paraphrasing, the importance of a clear and logical structure, and how to choose the correct vocabulary to accurately describe process diagrams.

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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 going to show you that with just a few simple changes we can transform a band Six report into a band n 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 bound 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 going to do is I’m going to 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 and illustration perfect below under okay there’s nothing under here but we’re not 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 the 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 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’s 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 mentions specifically here for task achievement b six for academic a relevant overview is attempted now contrast that with what it says for b s 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 stationer 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 Etc 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 you know 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 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 nstep 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 nin 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 I dare you you complain about teachers how dare you support teachers who cause students to lose 250 500 750,000 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 that 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 band Six it says here information and ideas so the stuff you’re writing about are generally arranged coherently I contrast that with with a b 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 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 1 to 4 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 1 2 3 4 is part one and then 5 6 7 8 9 is part two so we need to take these details and we need to divide 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 I’ve kept this starting sentence basically the same the process begins the process starts I’ve just varied the language slightly and we had begins up here now I’ve said you know 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 going to know what we’re talking about into specialized bins into specialized bins which are then collected by I’ve changed it to bin lores uh the reason why I’ve changed it to bin L’s is in Ireland the UK where I’m from we would say bin Lori 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 cocation 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 going to 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 have 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 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 PhD 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 into 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 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 a b n to a b 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 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 in 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 don’t know the substance substance is a great catchall word everything is basically a substance of some sort is then placed into a machine producing plastic pallets be heated to produce the raw material and now they have started a new paragraph and this is very very common with students at a bound five or a bound six level they’ve done something quite strange in summary to what is 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 products 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 this 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 bind AG or b n 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 to have kept it quite vague there because they have stuff like they have plastic bottles which are 100% plastic I think um 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 transform it making a few simple changes to about 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 and if you want to continue on with your journey with us on YouTube check out this video