Do your IELTS students sometimes lose points because they exceed the WORD COUNT in COMPLETION questions in the READING or LISTENING tests?
Here’s a tip to tackle this.
Get them to practice transforming the ‘first draft’ of their answer from a NOUN PHRASE to a COMPOUND NOUN.
For example:
diplomacy in times of war -wartime diplomacy
the egocentricity of some teenagers -teenage egocentricity
the breeding of racehorses -racehorse breeding
the dinosaurs becoming extinct -dinosaur extinction
the planning of cities -city planning
the illumination of the streets -street illumination
the extraction of the teeth -tooth extraction
Notice the following grammatical maneuvers that can happen:
• word formation (e.g. ‘extinct -‘extinction’)
• the plural noun of the original ‘of’ noun phrase often loses its plural (e.g. ‘teeth -‘tooth’)
• ‘the’ is often dropped too (e.g. ‘the planning of cities’)
What might have been the original (i.e. longer) phrase in the case of these (two-word) answers?
1) carbohydrate consumption
2) movie production
3) quality control
4) prototype evaluation
5) equipment testing
6) CO2 reduction
7) property maintenance
8) industry recognition
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Hi. I’m Fatime. I’m an IELTS Teacher Trainer, helping CELTA-qualified English language teachers become better at teaching SKILLS, as opposed to just testing them.
Check out my courses here:
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