IELTS Research Reports

Guoxing Yu, Pauline Rea-Dickins and Richard Kielyand 7 in social science and arts. The subject areas of the selected participants reflected the overallpicture of the specialisms of the 380 students who expressed their interest in participation. None ofthem had taken official IELTS tests, but all of them were planning to take IELTS at the end of 2008 orearly 2009. For ease of reference in this report, we assigned each participant a code, from A to X.StatusMSc PhD UG TotalGENDER F 5 1 7 13M 2 4 5 11TOTAL 7 5 12 24Table 1. Cross-tabulation of 24 participants by gender and academic statusHowever, at the start of Stage 2 data collection (see 3.3), 5 dropped out (Students F, M, O, P, V). At thestart of Stage 4 data collection, 1 more dropped out (Student A). Therefore the final complete datasetconsisted of 18 participants (see Table 2): 11 female, 7 male; 11 undergraduate, 7 postgraduate (incl. 2PhD candidates).StatusMSc PhD UG TotalGENDER F 4 1 6 11M 1 1 5 7TOTAL 5 2 11 18Table 2. Cross-tabulation of the final set of 18 participants by gender and academic status3.3 Data collectionThis research collected both qualitative and quantitative data at five stages with different researchfocuses and instruments, as summarized below in time order.STAGE 1: Baseline data collection and think-aloud training1 At the first meeting, the participants were briefed about the purpose of the project andthe schedule of data collection. Written consent was obtained from each participant (seeAppendix 1).2 Administration of IELTS Academic Writing Tasks 1 and 2 (see Appendix 2), developedby the research team according to IELTS Handbook (2006), to measure the participants’writing abilities without thinking aloud. The AWT1 task asked the participants tosummarise, making comparisons where relevant, the main features of a line graphreporting the UK greenhouse gas emissions by different end users between 1990 and2003. The AWT2 task asked the participants to write on the extent to which they agreedor disagreed with the following statement: “Once children start school, the teacherswould have more influence in their intellectual and social development than parents”.382 www.ielts.org