Some children spend hours every day on their smartphones. Why is this the case? Do you think this is a positive or a negative development?
Sample Response
Nowadays, some children spend hours every day on their smartphones. There are several reasons for this phenomenon, and I believe this is a negative development.
The first reason is that children can use smartphones to play games, watch videos or use social media conveniently.As a result, children can use their smartphones anywhere for hoursspend more hours on their smartphones everywhere. For example, children may play smartphone games for several hours before they go to sleep. Another reason is that smartphones provide many functions for children, such as translation, calculation or searching for informationsearching for some information. It can influence many aspects of children's daily liveslife. For instance, it can help children to study a new language easily.
Although spending hours on smartphones has several benefits for children, I believe that this is a negative development. Spending a lot of timeSpending much time on smartphones means that they tendhave to pay less attention to their studies. As I have mentioned, if children use smartphones too late, they could not have a good condition to learn something new the following dayin the next day. They may feel tired in class. As a result, they struggle to make academic progresscannot improve themselves. Furthermore, spending hours looking at screens damages children's eyes. They should reduce the time they spendreduce time they spend on smartphones and pay more attention to communicating with familyfamilies or friends.
In conclusion, children spend hours on their smartphones because they provide various opportunities to accessget entertainment and are easy to use. I believe that this is a negative development.This is because using smartphones too much may affect their studies and damage their physical health.
Why this response received Band 6.0
The response clearly addresses both parts of the prompt by explaining why children use smartphones extensively and offering a consistent opinion that this is a negative trend. While the ideas are relevant and easy to follow, development in the body paragraphs remains slightly brief and vocabulary choices are somewhat repetitive. To achieve a higher score, extend explanations with more detailed support and vary language structures to demonstrate greater grammatical range.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Response
The essay directly addresses both prompt questions, offering plausible causes for excessive smartphone use and maintaining a clear stance on its negative impact.
Provide deeper elaboration and more detailed real-world examples to support each main point thoroughly.
Coherence and Cohesion
Information is arranged in a clear overall progression, though paragraph structure and cohesive devices feel a bit basic and repetitive.
Use a wider variety of linking expressions and ensure topic sentences introduce cohesive, well-focused main ideas for each paragraph.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is generally accurate and adequate for the task, but relies on frequent repetition of simple functional words.
Incorporate more precise collocations and topic-specific synonyms related to modern technology and child development.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
The candidate uses a mix of simple and complex sentences with clear meaning, though minor errors in modal verb usage and punctuation are present.
Focus on refining complex sentence construction and ensuring correct spacing after punctuation marks throughout the text.
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IELTS Writing Task 2
Some children spend hours every day on their smartphones. Why is this the case? Do you think this is a positive or a negative development?
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.