考官走心批改雅思作文范例系列1：youth crime

雅思作文题目：The rate of youth crime is rising in many countries. What are the causes of this trend? Suggest some possible solutions to it.

This essay is excellent. Your student should be very proud of themselves. There are many strengths here and I shall address those first.

The written papers are assessed on four different points:

Task Achievement.

This is how well the student has answered the question. It is the easiest way for students to get points, and this essay answers the question excellently. It makes three great points, offers clear solutions and has a nice well thought out conclusion. I was very pleased with this part of the essay. And if I were the examiner I would put this in the region of a 6 with an eye towards the 7.

Secondly, Coherence and Cohesion.

This looks at how well the essay flows and how it is linked together and this again was done excellently. There was no repetition, while at the same time it had a natural flow. I was impressed with this and would score it at least a 6 and would seriously be considering a 7 here.

Lexical Resource.

This looks at the vocabulary used. Again this was incredibly impressive. The student used vocabulary that showed a high level of education. This perhaps was the most impressive part of the essay. Vocabulary such as juvenile delinquency, score-orientated and root causes will gain the examiner's respect. A few times the student made mistakes with their lexis. Legal-abiding should be law-abiding. I'm thinking perhaps the student was confused between law-abiding and legally binding. However this even further goes to show the impressive extent of the student's vocabulary, and trying to do something difficult and making mistakes is far far better than to keep it simple and all correct.

Some mistakes here (but please do not be disheartened because the vocabulary really was brilliant)

Glory the violence

should be

glorify the violence.

Glory is a noun

Glorify is the verb.

Glorious is the adjective

Young children have no immune

Should be

Young children have no immunity

Immune is an adjective

Immunity is the noun

So it could also have correctly said: young children are not immune..

This is in the region of a 7 due to its highly sophisticated vocabulary, however a harsh examiner could potentially drop the grade to 6 due to these mistakes.

Grammatical range and accuracy.

Now I do not in any way wish for this student to be disheartened because I mean it when I say I was highly impressed with this work and that it was of a very high standard. However, this essay contained no complex grammar. The tenses it did use were correct but your examiner wants to see examples of higher level grammatical structures.

To be specific, we want to see perfect tenses, passive tenses and relative clauses. I understand that it's not easy to add in this grammar when the topic naturally lends itself to simple grammatical structures but it is important for the student to try. My own suggestions would be to try something like instead of

'insufficient parenting is responsible for the juvenile delinquency'

to put,

'insufficient parenting has been blamed for juvenile delinquency.'

Here you'd have the present perfect and the passive in one sentence. This would make any examiner extremely happy.

Instead of

'The family is the most important element in the formation of young people’s personality.'

The student could have written:

'Family has always been the most important element in the formation of young people's personality.'

I think perhaps this student will feel a little frustrated at this suggestion because their English is of such a high standard that they are answering the question quite naturally and do not want to stop to artificially add complex grammar; especially when it is normal to answer without it, even to a native speaker. But examiners want to see that difficult grammar, they really do!

The second issue with the grammar is overuse of 'the'. There are many times in which there was no need for it, for example:

Firstly, the insufficient parenting is responsible for the juvenile delinquency.

The student needs to be careful of this, although it does show an understanding of the language and it is far better, in the eyes of the examiner, to use it when it should not be used, than to not use it when it should.

The score for this is tricky and your examiner may even look in the region of a 5. Not because it was terrible, but because there were simply no examples of anything complex.

A level 6 is a student who tries to use complex grammar but who makes some mistakes with it. A level 5 is a student who uses simple grammar with a fair amount of accuracy. What would make the examiner choose the 6 however, is that at no point is it difficult to understand. However if you have a harsh examiner, you may find them grading you a 5.

The public descriptors of a 5 are:

Uses only a range of structures.

Attempts complex sentences but these tend to less accurate than simple sentences.

The public descriptors of 6 are:

Uses a variety of complex structures.

Produces frequent error-free sentences.

Has good control of grammar and punctuation but may make a few errors.

Here you can see how an examiner may grade as low as a 5.

There were times during the grading of this essay that I even started looking as high as an 8 in certain aspects. This is how impressed I was at points of this essay.

Overall this text is looking in the region of a 6.

With more complex grammar and more accurate use of its sophisticated vocabulary, it could be raised easily to 7. This is an excellent student, really excellent.

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