IELTS Research Reports

Guoxing Yu, Pauline Rea-Dickins and Richard KielyAlthough we understand this is a small sample, we also tried to examine if there was any meaningfuldifference in graph familiarity between male and female participants. It was noted that there was nostatistically significant difference in graph familiarity between male and female participants: Mean of11 male participants = 151.4, std. deviation=19.0; mean of 13 female participants (n=13) =137.5, std.deviation=24.7 (t=1.52, df=22, n.s.)The above statistics included all the 24 participants. However, as 6 of them dropped out, we didseparate analyses using the remaining 18 participants only: very similar findings were noted (seeFigure 2). Mean = 143.6, std. deviation = 24.96, min=96, max=182; and the difference between femaleand male participants was not significant either.Figure 2. Graph familiarity of the 18 participantsBelow we report the participants’ AWT1 writing performance under normal examination conditionsand when thinking aloud.4.1.2 Participants’ writing performances under normal examination conditionsUnder normal examination conditions without think-aloud, the participants completed two writingtasks: AWT1 and AWT2 (Appendix 2). Their written scripts were Word processed before being doublemarked by the research team according to the IELTS writing band descriptors (public versions). Eachresearcher independently marked 2/3 of the printed writings randomly assigned to them, to ensuredouble blind marking (see Table 3). If the difference in marks between two raters was bigger than 1, athird rater marked the writing in question. If the third mark was the average of the previous two marks,the third mark was reported as the final mark of the writing; otherwise, the average of the two mostadjacent marks was reported as the final mark of the writing (Note: We retain ¼ and ¾ marks in theanalysis). If there was still no agreement among the three raters, we then had face-to-face moderationdiscussions. The initial agreement between raters before moderation was not satisfactory, largely dueto the different interpretations of the first set of rating criteria of AWT1 - “task achievement”.386 www.ielts.org