Writing IELTS exams in a heatwave
What did I learn from writing IELTS exams and model answers in a heatwave? I thought I was going to have a nice, long summer. A road trip around France, followed by a few quiet weeks back in Madrid working on PASS courses. And a short trip to the cooler environs of Hamburg to finish. How wrong I was! Everywhere was stiflingly hot and I also got involved in an IELTS textbook writing project. More fool me for taking it on but I couldn’t resist. You learn so much from being directly involved in exam writing. I was asked to write IELTS exams, in addition to model answers for Writing Tasks 1 and 2. So, essentially I was on both sides: examiner and candidate. The age group for the content was 14 to 17 and the aim was to prepare students for when they do IELTS when they’re older. This meant that I could write reading texts and listening scripts which reflected content which teens might be interested in. The writing and speaking tasks were also adapted to take their age into account....