IELTS teachers will be glad to know that The Economist has a “Daily Chart” section on their blog pages called Graphic Detail.
Featuring “charts, maps and infographics”, not all the content is useful for those IELTS Academic writing part one tasks – the recent retrospective of Margaret Thatcher’s career in Economist covers being an example – but a lot of it is indeed very useful: see yesterday’s exploration of changes to the minimum wage (pictured) as an example.
The sheer wealth of information that The Economist publishes in this way means that there should be something for every IELTS lesson, or at least that you can build up quite a nice collection of graphics for use with your classes.
Ways that I’ve been using these graphics with my current IELTS group include:
Lesson warmers:
A mingle activity where learners each have a different graphic, they mingle and describe their graphic to each other, thus getting a bit of additional practice in using data analysis language. A variation: learners swap their graphics each time, so that they get practice with lots of different graphics and information.
A dictadraw activity using two different charts where learners sit back to back and describe their graphics to each other, draw a representation of their partner’s graphic (based on that description) and when both are done, compare their efforts with the original.
Practice Tasks:
It is, of course, easy enough to design a quick IELTS academic writing part one task based on these graphics.
Task Models:
Each chart is usually accompanied by a short paragraph that describes the chart and the background to it. It’s worth pointing out to learners that the Economist model is a journalistic one – the purpose, tone and content will be slightly different to that required by IELTS. Nonetheless, if you have a large collection of graphics and paragraphs, learners can do a matching exercise or a reading race (where you give learners the graphic and they have to run and find the correct matching paragraph from a selection stuck to the board).
The paragraphs are also useful sources of language and, despite the caveats noted earlier, it is a useful process for learners to mine the text for any and all expressions they think they can pull out and use in their own writing.
The Economist blog can be found here: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail and is also available for subscriptions via RSS or via their Twitter feed: @ECONdailycharts.
teflgeek 
Wednesday 17 April 2013 at 22:16
Hey this is great! I’ll share this with the IELTS teachers in my school.
I’ve also used pages from the Guardian data blog. For example I used this two days after Chavez’s death: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/oct/04/venezuela-hugo-chavez-election-data .
Thursday 25 April 2013 at 19:46
Awesome. Thanks for the info. I’m an IELTS teacher in Singapore and I didn’t know about these charts. I’ll definitely use them for my teaching
Tuesday 22 October 2013 at 02:42
Hi! The dictadraw is a brilliant idea. I haven’t done that in my classes. It will surely liven up the class rather than just merely explaining the how tos. What I also do is ask my students to come up with their own pie chart. I ask them to make a survey of leisure activities of their classmates then draw a pie chart of the results.