IELTS Research Reports

Guoxing Yu, Pauline Rea-Dickins and Richard KielyBACKGROUND AND RATIONALE1.1 IntroductionThis study relates to the first broad area of interest identified by the IELTS Joint Research CommitteeCall for Proposals 2007/2008 (Round 13), namely “test development and validation issues”.In particular, this research investigated “the cognitive processes of IELTS test takers” whencompleting Academic Writing Task One (AWT1). The cognitive processes of taking AWT1 wereexamined at two different points – one before and one after special short training on how to achievethe best performance in AWT1. As such, this research is also linked to “issues in test impact” inrelation to “test preparation practice” – another area of interest identified by the IELTS JointResearch Committee.This section provides the theoretical rationale and background for this study with specific reference tothe effects of the features of graphs and test takers’ “graphicacy” (Wainer 1992, p 16) on their AWT1performances, as explained below. Details of the research design and methodology are provided fromSection 2 onwards.1.2 Dearth of research into test takers’ cognitive processes of completing AWT1In IELTS AWT1 tasks candidates are asked to “describe some information (graph/chart /table/diagram), and to present the description in their own words”. It is suggested that candidates shouldspend 20 minutes on this and write at least 150 words. Candidates are assessed on their ability toorganise, present and possibly compare data, describe the stages of a process or procedure, describean object or event or sequence of events, or explain how something works (IELTS Handbook 2006,p 8). AWT1, therefore, can be considered as an integrated writing task, requiring candidates not onlyto comprehend the graph input, but also to re-present in written English the information accessible tothem (various terms such as chart, graph and diagram have been used interchangeably in research; seeFriel, Curcio, & Bright 2001, Fry 1981, Wainer 1992). The term “graph” is probably the most widelyused in applied cognitive psychology, the key knowledgebase upon which this research will draw, andwe will use “graph”, hereafter, to represent all the other three terms - table/chart/diagram - that theIELTS Handbook (2006) has used.Graph comprehension is a sine qua non for successful performance of the writing task. As a result,the variability in the graph input and the candidates’ different familiarities and proficiencies incomprehending the graphs may pose a threat to the validity of AWT1 as a measure of the candidates’academic writing abilities. Surprisingly, to the best of our knowledge, we notice that only two IELTSfunded research projects (Mickan, Slater, & Gibson 2000; O’Loughlin & Wigglesworth 2003) haveso far investigated some of these issues. As only a very small part of their research focus, Mickan etal. (2000) investigated how test takers interpreted AWT1 task prompts and planned their writings, butthey did not examine the effects of characteristics of graphs on the process or the product of the AWT1tasks. O’Loughlin and Wigglesworth (2003) examined the extent to which the difficulty of AWT1was affected by the quantity and the manner of presentation of information in graphs. As a primarilyproduct-oriented study via the analyses of the written scripts, they found that the writings producedin the tasks with less information in the graphs were more linguistically complex than those writingsproduced in the tasks with more information in the graphs, irrespective of the participants’ languageproficiency level. The results also indicated that there were no substantial differences in the difficultyacross the tasks which varied in terms of the quantity and the manner of information presented in thegraphs. However, we should point out that only three types of graphs (i.e., statistical table, bar chart,376 www.ielts.org