IELTS Research Reports

The cognitive processes of taking IELTS Academic Writing Task 1did seem to affect the way how they interpreted the data and whether they would think it essential toinclude interpretations in AWT1 writings. Their comments on the purpose of describing graphs (seeFigure 3, a key component of the working model: Purposes of understanding the graphs and thecognitive demands of the writing task) are thought provoking and raise some fundamental issues ofIELTS AWT1 tasks – what are the purposes of the writing, and how are these communicated to andinterpreted by test takers?Extract 23Usually when we write and describe data, we have a purpose, have an aim, why do we dothis, but these tasks, we don’t have a clear purpose. I don’t know where to start and howto start to describe the information in the graphs, so I feel these tasks do not have a clearpurpose, so I feel I can’t have a clear idea or the logics of understanding what informationis more important and how to summarise and organize them. I don’t know what the keymessages to summarise are. (Participant L)Her comment was fully supported by other participants. The following conversation between them onthe importance of including interpretations as a natural part of academic writing is interesting.Extract 24Participant E: I still think we should write interpretations because these are foracademic tasks.Participant U: It is always like that in academic writing that you present the dataand explain and interpret why, the reasons why there is such data.Participant E: Yes, like that. We should write like that. In fact, some of the facts, we don’tneed to present them, while the interpretation is important.Participant L: Yes, this is the sort of structure of academic papers, you first present data andthen interpret the data. The purpose of presenting the data is to serve the interpretation anddiscussions. This is the pattern. It is always like that for academic writing. … Why bother topresent data alone?In fact, all the participants in this project insisted that they should be allowed to include theirinterpretation in the AWT1 writings as this is something expected in academic writing. This explainswhy there were a lot of personal interpretations and comments in the writings of the first fourtasks before the special training session which emphasized that they should “describe” rather than“interpret” data.In 4.3.4 below we report how the short test preparation training changed the ways that the participantsdescribed or interpreted the main features of graphs.4.3.4 Research question 4To what extent are the candidates’ cognitive processes influenced by test preparation opportunitiesoffered to them by the research team?In 4.2.1 we reported that the participants were constantly reminding themselves the second sentenceof the task instruction (summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, andIELTS Research Reports Volume 11403