IELTS Research Reports

The cognitive processes of taking IELTS Academic Writing Task 1had probably also made AWT1 tasks using statistical tables more challenging than other tasks. Theparticipants reported that they were less familiar with tables of numerical data than other graphs, withthe exception of diagrams (see 4.3.2). In relation to diagrams, however, the use of a simple and lineardiagram reporting the sequence of the events leading to the broadcast of a TV documentary in TaskB:Broadcast did not necessarily lead to the lowest performance; with a mean score of 6.00, it was higherthan the lowest - Task A:Oil (5.93). The substantial accompanying text in Task B:Broadcast might havemitigated the innate high cognitive demands of diagrams.In addition to the participants’ average performance data which provided some insights intounderstanding the effects of different graphic prompts on the cognitive processes of completing AWT1tasks, we investigated which words were used frequently in each task as another means of examiningthe effects of graphic prompts on the participants’ lexical decision-making. Are the words used in thewritings predictable? We ran word frequency using Wordsmith Tools (the full word list is availableupon request). Appendix 9 reports the frequently used words specific to each task. A clear pattern isobserved in the content words used for each task. The most frequently used words (i.e., excludingnon-content words such as the, have and has) for each task matched very well, as anticipated, withthe theme or topic of graphs. In other words, the graphs determine directly and probably naturally thewords test takers use; the content of the writing is largely predictable. As Participant W commented:Extract 4Different graphs would require the use of different words and you may have different levelof knowledge of different words… As I said, different tasks would stimulate your vocabularyknowledge, for example, the line graph activates your vocabulary such as increase anddecrease. (Participant W)At the same time, we also noticed that certain words are used frequently anyway, regardless of thetopics of the graphs, for example, “difference”, “more”, “decrease”, “increase”, and their variations.The use of these four words demonstrates that the participants were constantly making comparisons asrequired by the task instructions. Another word that also appeared frequently in the writings is “show”.Two factors may explain the high frequency of this particular word: firstly because it appeared in allthe task instructions and secondly because this is such a neutral word that it can be applied to all tasks,for example, “This diagram shows…”, “This table shows…”, “This line graph shows…”. However,some participants were looking for synonyms of “show”, e.g. “reveal”, “demonstrate”, “display” andso on. Therefore, content-wise, the use of different graphic prompts apparently affected which wordswere likely to be used and consequently tested; however, process-wise, the participants were doingthe similar activity – constantly trying to make comparisons in all the tasks except B:Broadcast wherenone of the four comparison words were used with any frequency.The primarily product-oriented analyses above on the average test performance and the lexical featuresof the writings of each task provided a useful perspective to examine the potential differential effectsof different types of graphs on the cognitive processes. Next we examine the think-aloud protocolsand interviews to explore further the effects of different graphic prompts on the cognitive processes ofcompleting AWT1 tasks. We report below some of the prominent features of graphs (e.g., the displaycharacteristics and conventions of graphs, the prior background knowledge required to understandthe graphs) that the participants thought made the tasks particularly challenging or easy for them.It emerged that three types of graphic prompts received the most comments or attention from theparticipants: Task A: Instruction using stacked bar graph, Task A:Oil using statistical table, and tasksusing line graphs.IELTS Research Reports Volume 11395