You and your colleagues have recently attended a foreign language training course organized by your company. Now you all want to do some more language training. Write a letter to your manager. In your letter: - say how you and your colleagues felt about the course - explain why you all want to do more language training - suggest when and where the training could take place
Sample Response
Dear Sir or Madam,
First, I would like to thank you for arranging a French language training course last month which a couple of my colleagues and I recently completedwhich I and a couple of my colleagues have recently finished. Needless to say, we all feel delightedvery ecstatic and empowered to have had this valuableawesome opportunity to learn Frenchthis important language. We believe it will make us muchway more confident about our communication skillscommunication skills and abilities, both personally and professionally. Regarding the courseTo tell you something about this course - it was designed very thoughtfully, especially for beginnersespecially, for beginners like us. The course instructions were very clear and simple, and it was particularly engagingbecame very interesting from time to time as the course also aimed to teach us French culturethe French culture in an entertaining waysome entertaining manners. AlthoughAnyway, while this short language course was good enough for us to learn the basics of the French language, some more training is needed to communicate more effectively with French-speaking people and companiesmore professionally with French-speaking people and companies more effectively. We can holdget this training in our second meeting room which is left unused most of the timepretty much all the time. We would like to have another professional French language trainer along with the previous trainer to lead the sessionsfor this. We are ready to start this training at any time in Septemberanytime in September. Yours sincerely, Elmina Flora
Why this response received Band 6.5
The letter fully addresses the colleagues’ reaction, the need for further training, and a practical September venue, with useful supporting detail and a positive purpose. Its main weakness is register and presentation: phrases such as ‘awesome’, ‘way more’, and ‘pretty much’ are too casual for a manager, while the single long body paragraph reduces clarity. Prioritise formal wording and separate paragraphs for reaction, rationale, and arrangements.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
All bullet points are clearly covered with relevant detail, but repeated informal expressions make the tone less appropriate for a letter to a manager.
Keep the enthusiasm while using a consistently professional register and make the request for approval explicit near the beginning or end.
Coherence and Cohesion
The response follows a logical sequence from reaction to reasons and arrangements, but the single long body paragraph obscures that structure.
Create distinct paragraphs for feedback on the first course, reasons for continuing, and the proposed time and venue.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is varied and communicates the ideas clearly, though informal, exaggerated, and awkward choices recur in a professional context.
Replace ‘very ecstatic’, ‘awesome’, ‘way more’, and ‘pretty much’ with measured formal wording such as ‘enthusiastic’, ‘valuable’, and ‘considerably’.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A range of complex sentences is used successfully, but errors in pronoun order, punctuation, reference, and phrasing occur with some regularity.
Refine forms such as ‘my colleagues and I’, remove misplaced commas, and avoid loose constructions such as ‘in some entertaining manners’.
Write this task while it is fresh
Try the same task now. It helps you remember the feedback and write better next time.
IELTS General Training Writing Task 1
You and your colleagues have recently attended a foreign language training course organized by your company. Now you all want to do some more language training. Write a letter to your manager. In your letter:
- say how you and your colleagues felt about the course
- explain why you all want to do more language training
- suggest when and where the training could take place
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.