Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 1 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · IELTS Complete Catalyst · 2026-10-03

IELTS Writing Task 1 question

The pie charts below show responses by teachers of foreign languages in Britain to a survey concerning why their students are learning a foreign language. The first chart shows the main reason for learning a foreign language. The second chart shows how many teachers felt that there has been a recent change in the reason.

Write a report for a university lecturer describing the information below.

% of teachers reporting the following as most common reason for learning:

Student answer (Band 5.5)

The two pie charts below the reasons British foreign language teacher's think there student learn foreign language and the second chart illustrates the changes that have occured.

overall, there are multiple reasons for students to learn language but the main two are travel and business work alongside many other.

In the first chart the main reason for learning language is travel with business and buying porperties overseas occupying major chunk with makes a total of 78%. which changes considerably in second chart were travel have a dip and drops down to 3% with business/work also falls to 19% whereas buying properties increase 16% and went up to 34% which covers 56% in contrast to 78% before

The other minor reasons in first chart are social contract and personal development at 7% and general interest and foreign patner have 5% and 3% respectively. Social interest is doubled at 15% but the other remains more or less same with general interest at 6% and personal development at 4% and foreign patner also at 4% furthermore 15% teachers think there has been no change in the reason to learn English.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 6.5

The response successfully covers all parts of the task by addressing both charts, selecting key data points, and presenting a clear overview of the main findings. The student correctly identifies travel and business as major reasons in the first chart and buying property overseas in the second chart, showing features of higher band descriptors. However, some ideas are under-developed or imprecise; for instance, the description contains calculation confusions and slight misinterpretations of the percentages, such as combining categories into a total of 78% rather than clearly contrasting individual proportions. Additionally, some trends are described with minor numerical inaccuracies, reflecting the characteristics of the awarded band where key features are presented but not fully or precisely elaborated throughout.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 5.5

The response demonstrates a coherent overall arrangement with a clear attempt to structure the information into an introduction, an overview, and body paragraphs. However, progression is disrupted by mechanical and faulty cohesive devices, as well as poor punctuation and sentence boundaries (such as stringing clauses together with commas and lowercase starts like 'overall,'). Paragraphing is initiated but lacks effective logical progression between sentences. Referencing is sometimes unclear, and the lack of proper transitions between ideas makes the flow jumpy. This places the organisation firmly at this level, where cohesion is noticeably faulty and repetitive.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.0

The vocabulary used is adequate for the task, attempting some less common words and phrases such as 'occupying major chunk', 'considerably', and 'respectively'. However, there are noticeable errors in word choice, collocation, and spelling throughout the text, such as 'teacher's' instead of 'teachers', 'porperties', 'patner', and 'Social interest' instead of 'Social contacts'. These lexical slips and awkward collocations mean that while communication is generally maintained, the range remains limited and constrained by frequent vocabulary errors.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.0

The writer uses a mix of simple and complex sentence forms, attempting comparative structures and relative clauses. However, there is a lack of control over grammatical accuracy, with frequent errors in verb tense consistency (e.g., 'have occured', 'were travel have a dip', 'went up'), subject-verb agreement (e.g., 'teacher's think there student learn'), and article usage. Punctuation is also weak, with run-on sentences and missing capitalization at the beginning of sentences. These persistent errors restrict the grammatical score, as complex structures are often faulty and cause some difficulty for the reader.

See this exact question answered at other band scores. The same prompt compared across bands.

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