Writing Task 1: Bar Chart: Question 6
Syllabus W.task1
The bar chart below shows the number of students who studied five foreign languages at Elmsworth Secondary School in 2015 and in 2025. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.
The chart has two bars for each language, one for 2015 and one for 2025, with the number of students on the vertical axis.
| Language | Students in 2015 | Students in 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| French | 240 | 130 |
| Spanish | 90 | 310 |
| German | 150 | 60 |
| Mandarin | 40 | 170 |
| Japanese | 20 | 75 |
Write at least 150 words.
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Worked solution
Task overview
This bar chart gives two data series (2015 and 2025) across five categories, which is a classic Task 1 grouping challenge: a strong answer does not walk through all ten bars in the order given, but instead identifies which languages rose, which fell, and which language led in each year, then supports each grouping with real figures from the table.
Why this model answer scores Band 9
- Task Achievement: The overview identifies the two most important features immediately, French’s dominance in 2015 and Spanish’s overtaking of it by 2025, before any individual figures are given, and every figure quoted (240, 90, 150, 40, 20, 310, 130, 60, 170, 75) matches the table exactly.
- Coherence & Cohesion: Paragraphs are organised by year rather than by language, which lets the report group all five 2015 figures together and all five 2025 figures together; cohesive devices (“In contrast”, “By contrast”, “although”) signal each comparison clearly without repeating the same connector.
- Lexical Resource: Precise report language is used throughout (“far more than”, “more than quadrupled”, “nearly quadrupled”, “the lowest figure among the five”) avoiding repetition of simple words like “many” or “a lot”.
- Grammatical Range & Accuracy: A mix of simple past statements, comparative structures (“far more than any other language”) and complex sentences with subordination (“although both remained behind Spanish, the new leader”) is used accurately throughout, with correct subject-verb agreement and article use.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
- Treating the chart as two unrelated snapshots rather than comparing the same language across the two years (e.g. never stating that French fell from 240 to 130).
- Rounding the figures loosely (“about 300 for Spanish”) instead of reporting the exact number given in the data.
- Writing “Mandarin and Japanese became the most popular languages”, an overstatement, since Spanish remained the clear leader in 2025 and Japanese still trailed French, despite both Asian languages growing fastest in percentage terms.