Most students have no problem with the first step (explaining why), but they
aren't so good at giving alternatives or examples. Take the following question
from last week's lesson for example.

Question:

In your opinion, are newspapers important?

Example student answer:

Yes, in my opinion newspapers are
very important (why?) because they give us information
about what is happening around the world. (why?) They
are a vital source of knowledge about education, technology, medicine and many
other fields.

This is a good start, but let's try to raise the answer to band 9 level.

Example answer with 'alternative' and 'example':

Yes, in
my opinion newspapers are very important (why?)
because they give us information about what is happening around the world. (why?) They are a vital source of knowledge about
education, technology, medicine and many other fields. (alternative?) If newspapers didn’t exist, I think the
quality of news coverage would suffer because there would be fewer professional
journalists. (example?) We would have to rely, for
example, on unpaid bloggers who do not have the budgets to carry out detailed
research before they write an article.

Academy Team

Ration Overseas Studio