Essay about setting homework to students with positive and negative views - IELTS task 2

Effects of study at home

Mr/Ms Holt, Thank you for your comment on my previous threat. After your comment, I found some ways to improve my opening and conclusion paragraph. In this threat, I hope to get your comment and show my improvement by this new essay.

My outline opening paragraph:
- Mention the prompt I am about to discuss
- Mention all views
- Mention my view with some reason

My outline concluding paragraph:
- Mention the contrast point
- Confirm my view

Please let me know if it is better and any error I should improve.

Some people believe that school children should not be given homework by their teachers, whereas other argue that homework plays an important role in the education of children. Discuss both of these views and give your opinion.

The perspective on setting homework to students is one of the most controversial schooling topics. Many people claimed that it is a positive development for children to be given homework. While other disagree with this idea, I believe it is a necessary aspect of education which supports students in improving their independent learning and problem solving skills

On the one hand, it is believed that homework is an unnecessary burden on children. Children spend most of their time at school to study, thus doing further study at home will be a high pressure on them. In addition, they only concentrate on the way to finish homework without participate in any physical activities such as playing basketball, swimming, so forth, which negatively impacts on balance between children physical and mental improvement. Moreover, students in top international education countries where homework is not necessity, taking children in Finland as an example for this, still outperform peers in nations where setting homework is the norm.

On the other hand, I argue in favour of the view that homework has an important role to play in the schooling children. There are two reasons supporting this idea. Firstly, it contributes to enhance self-learning skill. When doing homework, children will figure out an exercise that they cannot complete well by themselves. As this result, they will review lessons or search the way to complete it on the Internet. Secondly, students will find some solutions to fulfill a task such as discussing with teachers or their classmates then summarizing the problems in order to discover an answer. This process helps them improve issue tackling skill. Therefore, children would be more independent and dealing with challenges easily comparing with peers who do not practice these skills which bring great success into their adult life.

To conclude, there are some adverse effects on having a further study at home. However, I strongly contended that if we minimize these negative consequences, giving out homework will be a major benefit to students

It is one way of discussing the essay topic. It is a good start though you have errors in your discussion approach. You only represented one public point of view before presenting your personal point of view discussion. You are short by one reasoning paragraph and could lose TA points and word count points because of that.

The better format will be to withhold your comment / opinion on the topic until you have done a complete comparison discussion for the 2 opinions. The essay is testing your analytical skills and as such, should be formatted as follows:

Par. 1 - Paraphrase (no opinion stated. Rather, indicate an opinion will be based on the comparison discussion)
Par. 2: - 1st Public pov (2nd person / group pronoun usage)
Par. 3 - 2nd public pov (2nd person / group pronoun usage)
Par. 4 - Personal pov supporting one of the two public opinions (first person pronoun usage)
Par. 5 - Reasoning paraphrase and closing sentence

While you may offer a point of view immediately in the paraphrase as a part of the discussion outline, it is best to use the analytical method of discussion so that the reviewer will see some analysis related vocabulary that can help increase the TA, LR, and GRA scores.

The error in your version is that you only focused on one public point of view instead of 2. Where did the other public point of view go? You seem to have focused only on one public point of view instead of both before discussing your personal point of view. That is not the way to write this essay. 3 points of view are required by the prompt so 2 reasoning paragraphs must be found in your presentation.