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So, since I collected a list of 30 IELTS Speaking Part 2 questions last December, I've been getting good use out them. I've been using one a day as a warmer in several of my IELTS classes over the past year.
One difficulty I frequently run into is that students will often just give up and refuse to answer any question that is outside of their experience. While I am very sympathetic to the complaint that a lot of these IELTS questions are poorly designed, I'm always trying to emphasize to my students that they can't give up just because they get a question they don't like.
Out of the 30 questions, the one that students seem to balk at the most is:
Describe a city or town that you do not like
You should say:
Where the city or town is
When you first visited the city or town
What the city or town is like
And explain why you do not like the city or town
So, I used that as my base question when designing this worksheet.
First, I gave this question to the students, and had them practice it with a partner. Then we did class feedback, where some students invariable complained that the question was impossible to answer because they didn't have any cities or towns they disliked. Then I gave them the worksheet and asked them to compare the different strategies that the two different speakers used to answer this question. (One speaker uses their time to fully explain why they can't answer the question, another student invents a fictional story.)
In my classroom, I used this activity as a lead-in to another activity. In the IELTS Resource Pack by Jon Marks (A), there's a game called Truth or Fiction in which students are given part 2-esque speaking questions, and give an answer, and their group has to guess whether they are telling the truth or making something up. I used this activity as a way to introduce to my students the idea of making up fictional answers for IELTS speaking part 2 before doing the game from the IELTS Resource Pack. But I think it can still stand on it's own as an independent activity.
Describe a city or town that you do
not like
You should say:
Where the city or town is
When you first visited the city or
town
What the city or town is like
And explain why you do not like the
city or town
|
Read the two speakers below. What
different strategies do they adopt to deal with this difficult, and rather
bizarre Speaking Part 2 question.
Speaker
1
Well, with all due respect, I don’t really agree
with the basic premise of the question.
I know some people will say that they don’t like such-and-such a city,
or such-and-such a town, but I’ve never really believed them. I mean, I can understand if someone says they
don’t like a particular restaurant, or a particular night club. That’s fair enough. But how could you dislike a whole city?
I believe that if someone comes away from a city,
and they say they don’t like it, then that’s their fault. It’s their negative attitude. It’s not the fault of the city. If you have the right attitude, every place
you go to can be a positive experience.
Think of how big a city is. Think of how many different places there are
in it. Think of how many people there
are in it. Are you telling me that you
can’t find one nice place in the whole city?
That you couldn’t find one nice person?
No, I don’t believe that for a second.
What I do believe is that some people have a
negative attitude, and they just go around hating everything they come
across. And those people definitely
exist—okay, I admit that. But that’s not me.
You know what?
I’ve been travelling my whole life.
I’ve been to I don’t know how many hundreds of cities and towns. Some of them have been big, and some of them
have been small. But I’ve never once
come across a city I didn’t like. That’s
the truth. And I’ll tell you something
else: I usually try to get to know the people in every city I visit. I talk to the waitress at the
restaurant. I make small talk with the
gas attendent. And people are good and
friendly everywhere you go. And you know
what else...
Speaker
2
The worst city I ever went
to was called Bazumbambum. Have you ever
heard of it? No? Well, I’m not surprised. Most people haven’t. It’s in a country called, uh,
Cazambabub. It’s, uh, somewhere in
Eastern Europe.
Anyway, a few years
back I was touring Europe with my rock and roll band. We were just driving through in our tour bus,
when our tires blew out right in the middle of Bazumbambum.
Have you ever been in
a town which you could tell was awful right from the moment you stepped
foot in it? That’s what this place was
like for me. I mean, you could just
tell. Right from the moment you stepped
off the bus.
The first thing that
hit you was the smell. Bazumbambum is
famous for its rotten cabbage. This is
because their main crop is cabbage, but some years they produce more cabbage
then they can possible sell on the market, so the extra cabbage just rots in
the streets. The minute you get off the
bus, you just get hit by this wave of rotten cabbage smell.
The smell was so bad
that the drummer in my band actually got knocked down. Have you ever seen someone knocked to the
ground by a smell? He just stepped off
the bus and BOOM! It was like someone hit him in the face.
To tell you the truth,
he was never quite the same after that.
I don’t know. The smell just did
something to him. It was a smell so
strong it could drive a man insane.
I didn’t actually fall
down myself, but I vomited right into my hat.
I’m not sure why I didn’t just vomit on the streets. I guess it was just an automatic reaction to
try to catch the vomit in something. Anyway,
that hat was never quite the same after that.
Now, that’s just the
smell. But I haven’t even gotten to describing
how awful the place LOOKED. The streets
were...
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