Letter to Friend About New Year Celebrations

Your English-speaking friend has asked for your help with a college project he/she is doing about celebrating New Year in different countries. Write a letter to your friend. In your letter: Say how important New Year is to people in your country Describe how New Year is celebrated in your country Explain what you like about New Year celebrations in your country

Annotated response

8 correction notes

Dear Hermione,

I hope all is okay with you. I got your email asking for useful facts regarding how we celebrate the New Year in Korea.

In my , Korea, the New Year or Seollal celebration holds great significance. It is a three-day celebration when the majority of Korean families travel to see their family to make up for lost time. We always attend the holiday celebration since it is one of the few occasions when families get together and catch up with each other.

During the New Year, we participate in ancestral ceremonies, wear the hanbok, engage in traditional sports, and eat customary food like japchae, jeon, and tteokguk together. Receiving money from after making a ceremonial bow is one of the most well-known in the modern day.

Visiting my grandparents and family home is the best part of the New Year for me. I get to play video games and interact with my cousins. Honestly, most of my favorite memories with my are I cherish them.

With love,

Yuni

Overall assessment

Why this response received Band 7.5

The letter fully achieves its purpose, covering all three bullet points with relevant, well-developed detail about Seollal and a warm, appropriately friendly tone. The strongest aspect is the precise cultural content, while the main limitation is somewhat simple connective language and occasional awkward or imprecise wording.

IELTS criteria

How each score was decided

Task Achievement

8.0

The letter covers all three bullet points from the prompt—significance of New Year in Korea, how it is celebrated, and personal likes—with clear purpose, friendly register, and well-chosen supporting detail such as ancestral ceremonies, hanbok, and tteokguk.

Coherence and Cohesion

7.0

Ideas progress logically across clearly focused paragraphs answering each bullet point in turn, though cohesion relies on fairly simple devices and some linkages, such as 'make up for lost time', are slightly loose.

Lexical Resource

7.0

Vocabulary is flexible and topic-appropriate, including natural cultural terms like Seollal, japchae, and ceremonial bow, but there is some repetition of 'country' and 'family', a spelling slip ('ountry'), and occasional imprecise phrasing like 'complete family'.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy

7.0

A good range of sentence structures is used accurately, including complex forms such as 'since it is one of the few occasions when families get together', with only minor awkwardness, for example in 'travel to see their family'.