IELTS Research Reports

The cognitive processes of taking IELTS Academic Writing Task 14 ANALYSES AND FINDINGSThe data were analysed first of all to understand the participants’ graph familiarity and their writingperformances under the normal examination conditions and under think-aloud conditions (4.1).Section 4.2 presents an overview of the participants’ cognitive processes. Section 4.3 addresses thefour research questions one by one.4.1 Participants’ graph familiarity and English writing abilities4.1.1 Participants’ graph familiarityData on the participants’ graph familiarity was collected via the questionnaire (Appendix 3) at Stage1 from 24 participants (see Table 1). Except Questions 42-44 (see below), the participants’ responseswere used to calculate their graph familiarity score. Their responses to all the remaining questions,except Questions 18-20 and 40-41, were added together, with a bigger number representing higher graphfamiliarity. Responses to Questions 18-20 and 40-41 where a smaller number represented higher graphfamiliarity (i.e., negative questions), were recoded to be consistent with the majority of the questions.Questions 42-44 were quite neutral: responses to bigger/smaller numbers did not necessarily meanhigher/lower graph familiarity. They were not used to calculate the total score of graph familiarity, ratherthey were analysed separately (see 4.3.2) from the other questions. As a result, there are 32 questionsincluded in the calculation of the total score of graph familiarity. Reliability analyses of the scale(32 items) indicated an Alpha of 0.948. Overall, we trust the participants responded to the questionsconsistently and the measure of their graph familiarity using this questionnaire achieved satisfactoryreliability. Using the 32 items to measure the participants’ graph familiarity, the maximum possiblescore would be 192 (32 x 6) and the minimum 32 (32 x 1). Within this sample, we observed a minimumof 96, maximum of 182, mean of 143.8 (i.e., around 75% of the total maximum possible score), std.deviation=22.9. The graph familiarity is close to a normal distribution (Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z=0.65,n.s., see Figure 1). The data suggests that the participants were quite familiar with graphs. As part oftheir academic study, a third of the participants (8/24) very often (i.e., the highest of the 1-6 scale) usedspecial computer software to produce graphs, nearly 46% (11/24) very often needed to produce graphs,and a quarter (6/24) very often needed to interpret graphs. For further details of these participants’ graphfamiliarity, see Appendix 8 which reports the frequency statistics of their responses to each question.Figure 1. Graph familiarity of the 24 participantsIELTS Research Reports Volume 11385