Abstract
Young people’s interest in taking international exams such as IELTS results from student mobility and their willingness to appraise language abilities. In this paper, Academic Writing Task One of IELTS is examined. This task implies candidates comprehending graphic information and processing it in written discourse. The gap between a host of graph description tests and an insignificant number of efficient teaching methods has provided a rationale for the current study. It focuses on graph description as a cognitive, psychological and educational process and employs the analysis method in the theoretical section. Based on the action research method, drawing on 25 students’ written samples, the study has quested for peculiar language problems detrimental to processing the graph description task. The data have revealed the key pillars of successful written graph presentation: the combination of all four main skills, i.e. reading, listening, writing, and speaking; skills transfer; critical thinking and writing; the appropriate use of style; graphic literacy. It is concluded that the “constant nudging” method, a skills transfer, the use of appropriate vocabulary for describing trends alongside academic functional phrases and grammar features, the analysis of mass media information with numeric data are solutions to graph description issues. The findings have implications for preparing students for IELTS.
 
 This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Highlights
Young people’s interest in taking international exams such as International English Language Testing System (IELTS) results from student mobility and their willingness to appraise language abilities
This paper looks into the writing aspect of the EAP (English for Academic Purposes) course that affords ground for students to be trained as required by the IELTS test
Even scrutinizing some IELTS-oriented studies cannot provide teachers with a definite answer to the question of how to teach Academic Writing Task One productively since the majority of researchers pinpoint attention upon the well-known and important elements: format, scores and band scales, tips, assessment criteria, whereas the role of cognitive processes and critical writing is disregarded. This didactic gap accounts for the need to have a deeper insight into Academic Writing Task One (AWT1) (Yu et al, 2007), as from the cognitive perspective, it is under-explored in the literature in comparison with Academic Writing Task Two (AWT2)
Summary
Young people’s interest in taking international exams such as IELTS results from student mobility and their willingness to appraise language abilities. This paper looks into the writing aspect of the EAP (English for Academic Purposes) course that affords ground for students to be trained as required by the IELTS test At first sight, such a training process comes across as an ideal and unique set of EFL teaching methods and educational tools. Even scrutinizing some IELTS-oriented studies cannot provide teachers with a definite answer to the question of how to teach Academic Writing Task One productively since the majority of researchers pinpoint attention upon the well-known and important elements: format, scores and band scales, tips, assessment criteria, whereas the role of cognitive processes and critical writing is disregarded. This might involve describing and explaining data, describing the stages of a process or how something works, or describing an object or event’ (British Council, 2013)
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