Volume 2, 1999, Paper 4
Paper 4: Authenticity in the IELTS Academic Module writing
test
Tim Moore and Janne Morton
The study reported here investigated the authenticity of the
Task 2 component on the IELTS Writing test (academic module).
Specifically, the study's aim was to find out the extent to which
this component of the test corresponds to the Writing tasks set in
the two domains, and through interviews with academic staff.
In the task survey, a total of 155 assignment tasks from a range
of undergraduate and post graduate course were collected and then
compared with a corpus of 20 IELTS Task 2 items. The tasks
were compared according to four dimensions of difference: genre;
information source; rhetorical function; object of enquiry.
This part of the study found that the IELTS tasks bear some
resemblance to the predominant genre of university study - the
essay; however, a number of important differences were observed
between the two corpora. The most important of these
were:
- the use of prior knowledge as the basis for writing in the
IELTS tasks, compared with the prescription of a variety of
research processes in the university assignments;
- a restricted range of rhetorical functions in the IELTS items (
with a focus on hortation), compared with a diversity of
functions in the university tasks;
- an emphasis on real world entities (situations, actions,
practices) in the objects of enquiry of IELTS items compared with a
greater focus on abstract entities (theories, ideas, methods) in
the university tasks. .
