Discourse Features Of Ielts Sample Essays - A Functional Grammar Perspective

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) has been considered as the preferred test to assess English language proficiency of non-native English speakers. With a view to improving the quality of IELTS candidates’ answers to the academic writing test, the thesis addresses three aspects of meaning, namely textual, interpersonal and experiential meaning in formulating IELTS Academic essays based on the Systemic Functional Theory developed by Halliday (1994), and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004, 2014). A descriptive method accompanied by qualitative and quantitative approaches was used to give a detailed description of three kinds of meaning in relation to the band descriptors. 180 sample essays with band scores of 7.0-7.5 and others rated 9 were selected as data for text analysis. The findings revealed that the prevailing types of Themes deployed in the essays were multiple Themes, demonstrating high levels of English proficiency among IELTS writers in constituting a message. It is also noticeable that more successful IELTS writers favoured marked topical Themes and exhibited tactical manipulation of thematic progression to arrange information logically in the text. From the perspective of interpersonal metafunction, successful writers were good at building up and maintaining appropriate relationships with examiners thanks to appropriate modality and mood choice. In terms of experiential meaning, the writers employed more clause complexes than clause simplexes to specify the type of interdependency in the texts. From the findings, it is recommended that IELTS writers should choose clause complexes over clause simplexes, make good use of cohesive devices, modality and mood choice, different types of interdependency as well as deploy multiple Themes. In particular, more marked Themes, and subtly a few interpersonal Themes are suggested to be deployed in order to create logical connections between experiential events and to make the writing more academic. It is obvious that IELTS test-takers with better insights into the salient linguistic features of IELTS essays in terms of thematic structure, cohesion, mood, modality, logico-semantic relation and transitivity can produce a piece of writing in accordance with the IELTS community expectation, thus reaching the perceived and desired IELTS band score.