Comparability of IELTS Academic Writing Tasks and graduate-level multimodal writing tasks at universities in Türkiye, UK, and USA

Multimodal writing has become increasingly important in today’s academic contexts. It is important that standardised writing tests reflect and model the features of writing tasks required in university settings since students’ performance in the tests is assumed to predict the extent to which they will successfully meet the requirements of the written assignments in the real academic context (Chapelle et al., 2008; Cumming et al., 2000). However, the correspondence between IELTS Academic Writing Tasks and multimodal writing tasks completed by students in university classes is unknown.

To better understand the use of multimodal writing tasks in university graduate programs and how IELTS Academic Writing Tasks compare to graduate-level multimodal writing tasks, this project examines the similarities and differences between the writing tasks across the two domains (i.e., test and academic) in terms of task features, students’ linguistic performance, and perceptions of students and academic staff members.

Over three million test-takers sit the IELTS exam globally every year, with the majority of them taking the exam for educational purposes such as admission into undergraduate and graduate programs at university. In this project, we only address graduate students for convenience reasons, taking into account our professional contexts.

We specifically examine:

1. the extent to which IELTS Academic Writing Tasks are comparable to graduate- level multimodal writing tasks required at university in terms of genre, topic and modality
2. the extent to which graduate-level students’ performance on IELTS Academic Writing Tasks are comparable to their performance on graduate-level multimodal writing tasks in terms of lexical sophistication and phrasal complexity
3. the extent to which graduate-level students and academic staff perceive IELTS Academic Writing Tasks to be comparable to graduate-level multimodal writing tasks.

Data include multimodal writing assignment sheets from graduate courses, students’ responses to the IELTS Academic Writing Tasks, students’ and academic staff participants’ responses to online questionnaires, and interviews with students and academic staff.

Textual analysis of IELTS writing task prompts and assignment sheets was conducted to examine the similarities and differences of writing tasks in those two domains in terms of their task features. Quantitative analyses of the students’ performance data were used to identify how the test tasks compared to the graduate assignments in terms of eliciting different linguistic features in student writing. Analysis of the perception data, including questionnaire responses and interviews, was used to better understand the similarities and differences identified in the textual and quantitative analyses.

To broaden perspectives on the research questions, we present three studies conducted in three different cultural contexts:

1. Türkiye
2. UK
3. USA.

We present country-specific findings with relevant discussion and conclusions in an effort to provide more context-relevant information to help the readers interpret the findings.

Based on trends identified from a synthesis of the findings, we discuss implications for designing and using multimodal writing tasks in tests, acknowledge our limitations, and conclude by offering future research directions.