Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 1 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · Cambridge IELTS 11 · 2026-09-29

IELTS Writing Task 1 question

You work for an international company. You have seen an advertisement for a training course which will be useful for your job.

Write a letter to your manager. In your letter

• describe the training course you want to do
• explain what the company could do to help you
• say how the course will be useful for your job

You do NOT need to write any addresses.

Begin your letter as follows:

Dear Sir or Madam,

Student answer (Band 5.5)

Dear Sir or Madam,

Hope you are well. I would like to tell you that I have seen an advertisement for a Training course in marketing. It is a four-week traning. I want to join this course for the well-being of our company.

I want a little favour from you. I want to reduce my working hours for one month only and also I want to do work from home so that I can concentrate on the training.

This training will help our company to atract more customers. I will try to do all positive things which i will learn in training to make our company more successful.

Hope you will understand and give me a chance to do the training and make our company proud of me.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 5.0

The candidate addresses all three bullet points from the prompt: describing the training course in marketing, requesting help by asking to reduce working hours and work from home, and explaining its usefulness for the company in attracting more customers. However, the development of ideas is somewhat limited and the response falls short of the 150-word minimum, containing only 128 words. Because the length requirement is not met, the task achievement is penalised accordingly, matching the band descriptors for a partial and minimally developed response under the word limit.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 5.5

The letter maintains a coherent overall arrangement and follows a logical letter format starting with the required opening greeting. However, paragraphing is underdeveloped, and the transition between ideas feels somewhat abrupt. Cohesive devices are minimal, with simple transitions and repetitive sentence starters like "I want". While referencing is mostly clear, the lack of sophisticated cohesive devices and poor paragraph structuring keep this criterion at a moderate level.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.0

The vocabulary used is adequate for the task, with basic and clear expressions such as "training course in marketing", "working hours", and "work from home". However, there are noticeable spelling errors, such as "traning" instead of "training" and "atract" instead of "attract". The lexical range is quite limited, lacking flexibility and less common lexical items, reflecting a standard band 5 performance where vocabulary is minimally adequate but contains recurrent mechanical errors.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.5

The student uses a mix of simple sentence forms with a few basic complex structures, such as using "so that" for purpose. There are several grammatical inaccuracies and awkward phrasings, including "do all positive things which i will learn" and the lowercase pronoun "i". While these errors do not severely impede overall communication, they occur frequently enough to prevent the text from reaching a higher band score.

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

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