IELTS Research Reports

Guoxing Yu, Pauline Rea-Dickins and Richard Kiely024Comprehendingnon-graphicallypresented taskinstructionsReading time allowance (often skipped)Reading expected length (often skipped)Reading summative introductory sentence(s)Reading “summarise... where relevant”English reading abilitiesminutes68101214161820Graph comprehension (e.g. reading x-axis, y-axis, legends,recognizing patterns and relationships between graphical components)Re-producing graph comprehension in continuous written form in English as a foreign languageDisplay characteristicsof graphs including:Subject/theme/topicTypes of graphs (e.g. bar,line, map, diagram) and theirpresentational conventionsRelative importance andrelationships of graphicalcomponentsCharacteristics ofcandidates including:Prior content knowledgePrior knowledge ofgraph conventionsGraphicacy: experienceand expertise of graphExplanatory and otherscientific reasoning skillsPurposes of understanding the graphs andthe cognitive demands of the writing taskWriting/revising main features of graphsWriting/revising comparisons, trends, and predictions,based on different types of graph conventionsMaking personal interpretations (sometimes)Constantly monitoring and self-evaluatingEnglish writing abilitiesFigure 3: A working model of cognitive processes for taking IELTS AWT1 tasksOverall, the participants’ English writing abilities should play a pivotal role, at least in theory; and atthis stage, the more generic second language writing models become more applicable for AWT1 tasks.This working model will be used to guide our analyses of the empirical data to address the fourresearch questions in Section 4.3.392 www.ielts.org