IELTS Research Reports

Guoxing Yu, Pauline Rea-Dickins and Richard KielyWord choice is another area that the participants often had to make decisions when completing AWT1tasks. For example, Participant K must have mis-read the word “disused” as “discussed” in TaskA:Layout, he then wrote: “In the South the lake, a railway line which was under discussing in 1937has already been built up”, which of course led to a completely different interpretation from what wasintended. Other examples of the participants’ decision-makings on word choice are less dramatic. Forexample, Participant L tried to figure out whether “proportion” would be a more appropriate wordthan “amount” when describing the biggest source of UK CO2 emissions in 1970; whether to use“sources”, “uses” or “approaches”, and whether to use “steadily”, “steady”, “stead”, or “stable” whendescribing the trend of CO2 emissions. Finally she decided to use “proportion”, “approaches” and“steady increase”.Extract 20Industry in 1970 accounted for the largest amount, no, accounted for the largest proportionin different end users, the largest proportion in the UK CO2 emissions.Other, UK emitted about 30 million carbon in other sources, in other uses,in other approaches.Transport, however, transportation, transportation, transportation emitted more and moreand more during the 34 years steady, more and more showing a steadily, showing a trendof stead, steadily, stable, steady increase in 2004. (Participant L)However, when the participants were much less certain about the meanings of unfamiliar words, thiscan be a long and struggling process. Often their final decision was to “just copy” if these happenedto be the words in the accompanying texts of the graphs. For example, Participant G was not quitesure “what is the meaning of million tonnes carbon equivalent”. Although she adopted the strategyof “I just copy this”, later on, she was still repeatedly asking herself “what carbon equivalent mean”.Similarly she kept asking herself “what’s the meaning of Year to Date, year to date, year to date, Idon’t know what is year to date”. A “just copy” strategy was also used to “solve” this problem. YTD isclearly written in her script.When asked about the contribution of their writing ability on the AWT1 task performance, all theparticipants agreed that it is the writing ability, in particular, lexical knowledge, that matters most. Thefollowing comment is typical:Extract 21This is definitely so, for example, your knowledge of certain words and some sentencestructures and so on, these are essential for the completion of the AWT1 tasks. For example,if you only know the words such as decline, increase, but you don’t have other more powerfulwords, your writing will become a bit boring and plain. (Participant J)Extract 22I think the most challenging inhibitors may be that I could not find the right wordsstraightaway, or even if I can remember of a word vaguely, but I may not be able to spell itcorrectly, then I will have to use a simpler word instead to be safe. (Participant S)Another aspect of writing, although not necessarily synonymous to English writing ability proper,the participants’ experience and expectation of academic writing, whether in English or Chinese,402 www.ielts.org