IELTS Research Reports

Tim Moore, Janne Morton and Steve PriceValue proposition analysisThis assessment task requires you to analyse how the environment, value configuration andbusiness structure affect the nature of a value proposition.Task: Your tutor will assign you with a small to medium business (SME) example for you tofocus your analysis. Drawing on key concepts from the course, you need to analyse variousaspects of the business to explain and evaluate where and how an organisation delivers valueto their customers.Sample A28. Report task – Business StudiesText analysisOne final type of ‘global-interpretative’ reading task involved forms of text analysis. This type oftask is arguably a more recent task-type set for students in the academy, and reflects the growinginfluence of notions of ‘genre’ and ‘academic literacy’ on teaching in university programs. In suchtasks in our corpus, students were typically encouraged to see particular texts as ‘generic resources’from which they could draw for their own writing, as seen in Sample A29 below. In this task, fromthe Communications subject, students need to investigate a range of Opinion pieces from a newspaper(Op-Ed articles) as a basis for writing their own pieces.Writing an Op Ed pieceFor this task you need to research and write an opinion piece on a timely topic. You need toexpress an opinion and then to make an argument to support that opinion. This type of articleis called in the industry an ‘op-ed’ piece. No ESSAYS please. Note that the op-ed is an entirelydifferent genre from the academic essay.To prepare for the writing of this piece, you should locate several examples of op-ed pieceswritten on a similar topic from a major newspaper (eg The Age). These examples of the genrecan serve as a model for your own writing. In consulting the piece, you should consider what issaid about the topic in question, but also – and very importantly – how the piece is put together(the language used, structure etc).Sample A29. Assignment task – CommunicationsThis genre-based reading was elaborated on by the Communications lecturer, who saw such training asessential to the development of students’ writing abilities:COMMUNICATIONS: Because they have to write in this subject, if they don’t read, thenthey will be completely’ off genre’. They’ll just be writing stuff that they would have writtenat high school. So I get them to analyse texts. I actually get them to do things like count thewords in the sentences, get the sentence range, what style of language it is. Is it elaborate oris it plain? And then they need to emulate that.Whilst the setting of tasks such as this is quite understandable in the context of a course explicitly aimedat developing writing skills in students, we noted similar genre– based activities set on courses withoutthe same focus on writing per se. Thus, in Sample A30 below from the Management subject, students areinstructed to study a sample answer based on ‘The Globalisation Debate’ task discussed earlier (SampleA15), and to use this as an ‘indicative guide’ for completion of the ‘debate’ task set for students.240 www.ielts.org