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IELTS Writing Task 2 Language Essay Topics

Language essays hide inside the word "communication". Everyone is in favour of it. The prompt is about a timetable, a law, a lecture, or a screen.

  • 6 practice questions
  • 6 question types
  • Original questions
Inside this topic
  • Early lessons
  • Official languages
  • Translation

Before you pick a question

How this topic works

When a child starts a second language. Whether a state freezes an official language by statute or lets the street change it. What a student loses when the degree is taught in a language they read slowly. Why an adult drops an evening class in month three. What an instant translation does to the effort of learning. If your paragraph still works after you swap in "culture" or "education", you have not reached the language yet.

  1. 01

    Write the task the person is trying to do

    Write the task the person is trying to do. An early lesson is twenty minutes of sound and play, or it is a grammar grid the child cannot read. An official-language law is a form that must be filed in one tongue, and a clerk who may or may not speak the other. University English is a seminar where silence might be vocabulary rather than ignorance. Machine translation is a menu you can order from and a contract you should not sign on the machine’s word. Name the task. The slogan can go.

  2. 02

    Do not invent the number of speakers of a language unless you know it

    Do not invent the number of speakers of a language unless you know it. A form, a seminar, a dropped class, a subtitle: those are safer. These questions are original practice, not past papers. Outlines show the jobs of the paragraphs. A phrase about a statute will look absurd in an answer about an evening class, so keep the vocabulary on a short lead.

A question sheet with the instruction line highlightedQtype

6 original practice questions

Practice questions

Showing 6 of 6 questions

Opinion01

Original practice question

Some people think children should start learning a foreign language at the beginning of primary school. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

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Discussion02

Original practice question

Some people think a country should protect its official language by law. Others think languages should change as people actually use them. Discuss both these views and give your own opinion.

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Advantages and disadvantages03

Original practice question

What are the advantages and disadvantages of teaching university degrees in English in countries where English is not the first language?

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Problem and solution04

Original practice question

Many adults begin a language course and stop within a few months. What are the causes of this problem, and what solutions can you suggest?

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Two-part question05

Original practice question

Migrant workers often need the local language to get a better job. Why is language such a barrier at work? What can employers do to help?

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Positive or negative development06

Original practice question

Machine translation now lets people read foreign websites in their own language within seconds. Is this a positive or a negative development?

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6 question types on this topic

Question types

The language questions above use these instructions. The guide names the paragraph jobs. You still choose the arguments.

Both sides of the debate

Common arguments

In favour

4 arguments
  1. 1

    An early ear for a language is a physical advantage that embarrassment later spends. Children will repeat a sound an adult will dodge. The case for starting in primary school is a case for using those years on oral pattern, daily and short, with a person who can hear a mistake. It is not a case for adding an exam. If the lesson has no competent speaker, the advantage reverses and the early start is a way of practising an error. The policy is the teacher, not the birthday.

  2. 2

    States create duties with words. A consent form, a tax return, a warning on a machine: someone must own the sentence that will be enforced. The argument for an official version is an argument about the signer. A relative improvising in a corridor is not a translation. They are a risk. Providing a checked text in the languages large numbers of residents actually speak is how a state takes that risk back. Purity campaigns that police borrowed words are a different, weaker project and should not be smuggled in under the same heading.

  3. 3

    Workplaces already run in a language, and promotion runs in the meetings. A worker who can do the task and cannot enter the briefing is stuck by a door, not by a lack of effort. Employers are the people who hold the door. Paid practice on the phrases of that briefing, and a trial that watches the skill, are cheaper than losing a deputy to a slang test. The positive case for employer help is practical. An optional night class across the city is how institutions look helpful and change nothing.

  4. 4

    Low-stakes translation by machine is a library that did not exist. A school-closure notice, a recipe, a news page: the cost of a small error is a confusion, not a signature. Defending that use does not require defending a phone as a lawyer. The enlargement of who can look at a foreign page is a genuine good. Essays that treat every machine sentence as a fraud flatten a useful tool into a villain and then cannot explain why a reader was right to use it on a Tuesday.

Against

4 arguments
  1. 1

    English-medium degrees often measure an accent and call it a mind. Students who can reason in their first language learn to wait. Tutors learn to reward the fluent. Over a generation the local language loses the words for the advanced work, because nobody has to coin them. The critical case is not "English is imperialism" as a banner. It is a seminar in which the best explanation was illegal. Support, a right to clarify in the first language, and a demand that key terms exist locally are the repairs. An unsupported switch is a prestige policy.

  2. 2

    Adult courses fail by design and then blame the adult. One long evening, a week’s forgetting, a room of strangers: this is a format that produces dropout and a story about perseverance. The sceptical line looks at the hour. If the class cannot be recalled on the bus home, it was entertainment. Short repetitions tied to a meeting the person is afraid of will look less serious in a prospectus and will be used. Providers who prefer the two-hour block prefer a timetable that suits the tutor.

  3. 3

    Laws about official language drift into laws about identity. A form needs a stable text. A proverb, a borrowed tool-name, a young person’s syntax do not. Once a statute starts fining the street, the office has mistaken itself for the owner of speech. Opposition to that drift is not opposition to translation of consents. It is a refusal to let the necessary document become an excuse for an academy to police a ward. The two policies should be forced apart in the essay or the argument is a muddle.

  4. 4

    Fluent machine translation is dangerous because it does not look like a guess. A dropped clause in a tenancy, a dose, a warning: the sentence that remains is grammatical, so the reader stops checking. The same ease also drains the adult class of its last reason. Why reach month three if the phone reads the page? The objection is to the unexamined use, not to the existence of the tool. A reader who treats a smooth paragraph as a checked one has been trained by the smoothness. That training is the negative development.

15 phrases for these ideas

Vocabulary in context

PhraseIn a sentence
an oral lessonThe oral lesson lasted fifteen minutes and used the classroom instructions, so the pupils learned a sound rather than a grid.
a generalist teacherA generalist teacher followed the tape and could not hear the wrong vowel, which the class then rehearsed.
an official textAn official text of the consent form replaced a relative’s improvisation in the corridor.
a borrowed wordThe borrowed word named the tool. A fine would not have given the ward a better term.
English-mediumThe English-medium degree let her read the paper in time for the site meeting, and it also silenced the best explanation in her first language.
a seminarIn the seminar, fluency was graded as understanding, so hesitation looked like an empty mind.
a higher registerThe higher register of law and medicine was no longer coined in the local language, because the degree never asked for it.
an evening classThe evening class met once a week, which was long enough for shame and too rare for memory.
a briefingThe briefing used a slang he was never taught, so the packer’s skill stayed on the line and out of the deputy role.
paid timePractice on paid time, for ten minutes before the shift, reached the worker an optional night class did not.
an accentThe accent was treated as a test of judgement until someone watched him run the trial.
machine translationMachine translation gave her the date of the school closure and, on another day, hid a repairs clause.
a low-stakes textA low-stakes text such as a recipe can survive a small error. A tenancy cannot.
a subtitleA subtitle is a visible guess. A smooth translated contract does not look like a guess at all.
dropoutDropout after three Tuesdays was the predictable result of a gap longer than the memory of the pattern.

Marked in red pen

A teaching paragraph

One paragraph written to the question below. It shows how a point, an explanation and an example can sit in the same paragraph. It is not an essay.

The question

Migrant workers often need the local language to get a better job. Why is language such a barrier at work? What can employers do to help?

The barrier is rarely the word for the tool. A packer can run the line and still be shut out of the morning briefing, where the rota changes in a slang nobody has taught him. Supervisors hear the hesitation and do not offer the deputy role. An optional class across town in the evening will not touch that briefing. Ten paid minutes on its actual phrases, and a trial in which someone watches him do the deputy’s job, will. The skill was already in the building. The language of the decision was the locked door, and it is the employer’s door.

Why this works

The first question is answered with the briefing, not with a general remark about communication. The second is answered by a practice that happens in the same room. On the criteria, Task Response is served because both parts of a two-part instruction are dealt with in turn, and Coherence is served because "briefing", "deputy" and "paid minutes" refer to one promotion rather than to education in the abstract.

Questions about language

Almost none. You need to say what the person is trying to do: follow a classroom instruction, sign a consent, survive a seminar, understand a briefing, trust a contract. Naming a tense will not rescue a paragraph that never says who is excluded. Plain accuracy beats a label from a textbook.

It sits on the border. On this page, write about the language of the seminar and what happens to the local language’s higher register. If you spend the essay on fees or graduate unemployment, you have changed topic. One clause can note the labour market. The body belongs to the medium of instruction.

Yes, for the street. A discussion still needs the other view: the signer of a form needs a text the state will own. If you defend change, defend speech and borrowed words. If you also defend chaos on a medical consent, say why the signer is safe. Most honest answers split the two objects.

No. They are original practice. A memorised essay on children and languages will not fit a prompt about translation or about an official statute. Practise spotting whether the instruction is about a law, a timetable, or a tool.

Write the essay on the question you chose

Aim for Band 7+. Treat the Grade Report as practice.

Task 2 checker