IELTS Research Reports

Guoxing Yu, Pauline Rea-Dickins and Richard KielyTask A:Instruction used a stacked bar graph. The participants found it particularly “difficult to find outthe length of the second and the third bars, as they are not from the same starting point” (ParticipantN). The density of the data points of this graph caused further problems as Participant N commented:Extract 5There are so many bars. It would be better if there were only 5 bars, for example, and itwould be ideal if within every part of a bar is indicated with its percentage of the hours of aparticular country. (Participant N)Indeed several participants tried to work out the length of each section of a bar so that they couldget a better sense of the number of instruction hours for different stage of schooling. For example,Participant T tried to estimate the percentage of each part of a bar. To her, the difficulty of describingthis stacked graph was not just “because there are too many bars”; the main challenge of this graphalso came from the fact that “the differences are not easily observable”. Similarly, Participant Kcompared this stacked graph with the line graph in Task B:Viewing, and said:Extract 6Not like the task about TV individuals viewing share, you can see the change there. It isimpossible that I would measure the differences by using some rulers. (Participant K)Or, indeed as Participant W said:Extract 7because the trend of all the countries is all the same, only slight difference between thecountries, but these differences are not obvious to bare eyes. It does not tell us the exactnumber of hours. (Participant W)When comparing Task A: Oil which used statistical table with other tasks using line or bar graphs, thecomments made by Participants H and K are typical. They clearly demonstrated the easier accessibilityof the visual displays of line and bar graphs, while extra efforts were required to make trendassessments out of information from statistical tables: more calculation and judgements were requiredto make trend assessment possible.Extract 8I think the pie or bar graphs are more straightforward, while the statistics tables containa lot more information. In my study of physics, we often have to process a lot of data fromexperiment; we can take a couple of hours to interpret data. At first glance of the statisticstable, I was a bit lost, not sure what to do with so much information. (Participant H)Extract 9The line graph task is relatively easier, because I don’t have to work out the information, Ionly need to follow the lines, the trends; I just need to describe what is there, there seems tobe set procedure, you just follow the steps, one by one, this seems to be a right template youshould follow. But for this type of tasks (Referring to the task with tables), I need to select thekey statistics, it is therefore demanding. At first glance of the table, I tried to compare whichwas bigger or smaller, and also tended to find out the changes, for example, I did somecalculations. (Participant K)396 www.ielts.org