IELTS Writing Task 2 - Punishment for Children and impact on their development

Hi everyone, I'm practicing the writing test in IELTS, would you please give me some comments to my works?

Discipline toward kids

Question:

It is important for children to learn the difference between right and wrong at an early age. Punishment is necessary to help them to learn this distinction.

To what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion?
What sort of punishment should parents and teachers be allowed to use to teach good behavior to children?

Answer:

Everything has a good side and a bad side, punishment is no exception. Although there is a bad side for punishment, I still believe that it is important for having punishment to teach children about the correct values. I support this with the following reasons.

At first, punishment is an effective way to teach children for knowing what is wrong. Undoubtedly, praise can encourage children to do the right thing. In contrast, punishment can deepen children's memory for the wrong thing that they have done. Punishment has been used for over a thousand of years and it is one of the best way for teaching children according to past experience in human history. And now, punishment is still being using to punish the citizens who violate the law.

Secondly, punishment can provide the indication of the seriousness of fault that children made. Different level of punishment apply to different level of fault which allow children to know that which fault they should never do. For example, children can be punished by standing alone for five minutes if they quarrel with each other. However, if they fight with each other, the level of punishment should become higher. In this case, the punishment can be a standing for twenty minutes. Therefore, the children can know that the fault of fighting is a worse than quarrel.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that some kinds of punishment will cause a bad effect to children's psychological and physical health. In the past, parents may use physical punishment to teach their children. However, many experts already point out that it might damage the relationship between the parents and children and it also hurts the children physically.

Therefore, it is essential for us to decide which punishment should be adopted. Personally, I believe that physical punishment should never be used for teaching children as it hurts children in both psychological and physical aspect. We could use other punishments which is not harmful to children such as packing up trash and cleaning houses etc.

From what has been discussed above, we can finally draw the conclusion that punishment is needed for teaching children. However, we should carefully choose what kind of punishment we should use. Punishment that will cause any harm to children like hitting children should never be allowed.

Hi Janice. You really did an impressive job on this essay. I was so impressed by the improvement in your work that I am actually going to score this an overall of 6. the only reason that the score was held back was due to some grammar and sentence structure errors. While you have shown some fluency in English, it does not erase the fact that there were still noticeable errors in sentence development and grammar usage. Although it did not affect the flow of thought and presentation of your facts, the fluency in English still has to be considered. The more fluent and sentence / grammar error free your essay gets in the future, the higher your score will get. I am convinced that you have the ability to gain a sense of fluency in your writing in the very near future. You almost have it, so don't stop practicing and reading English based material. That is the best way to gain fluency in the written language.

Try to learn more topic vocabulary. It can improve your lexical resources score. For example, you can write just corporal punishment intead of punishment that will cause any harm to children like hitting children. But I like your style. Well done

On the contrary, since the word corporal isn't part of the keywords provided in the essay, she could use the term corporal punishment in the wrong context and as such, lower her lexical resource score. It is best to prove English comprehension and lexical skills by first using the keywords in the essay in the proper manner in a sentence. Now, since she has no reason to use corporal punishment in her essay as she is not familiar with the term, it would be best not to use it. An alternative is sufficient. Sometimes, simply proving you understand the question and can discuss it accurately when when using simple English words can gain you a higher score than using complex words in the wrong way. It's all about how comfortable you are in using what you know of the English language, which helps you express yourself clearly that matters the most which can increase your score. Using the term physical punishment is enough in this instance because she knows how to properly use that term.