VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES
   GIANG THỊ TRANG

AN EXPLORATORY STUDY ON THE TEACHING
AND LEARNING OF IELTS WRITING TASK 1 IN
VIETNAM
(Nghiên cứu thăm dò về việc dạy và học luyện thi phần 1
của bài thi viết IELTS ở Việt Nam)

M.A. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: Methodology
Code: 60.14.10

HANOI- 2013

HANOI- 2013
iii

DECLARATION

I declare that this minor thesis entitled ―An exploratory study on the teaching and learning
of IELTS writing task 1 in Vietnam‖ submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the Degree of Master of Arts is the results of my own work and that this thesis does not
contain material which has been accepted for the award of any degree or diploma in any
university, nor does it contain material previously published or written by any other
person, except where due reference is made in the text of the thesis.
Giang Thi Trang
v ABSTRACT

There is now a growing demand for IELTS preparation courses in Vietnam since more and
more undergraduate and graduate students wish to sit for the IELTS test in order to get a
scholarship to study abroad or to apply for a job at a foreign company or in some English
speaking countries.
Writing, especially writing task 1 in the IELTS test has long been considered to be one of
the most challenging tasks for the EFL learners. However, it has been taken into less
consideration than the other three skills. This study is intended to explore (1) what are
taught and learnt in IELTS writing task 1 classes, (2) what difficulties Vietnamese learners
have in learning to write IELTS writing task 1, and (3) what recommendations are made
for Vietnamese teachers to teach their students to write IELTS writing task 1 as required.
The participants selected for this study were 68 learners from 8 IELTS classes and 17
IELTS writing teachers at EQuest Hanoi. Through survey questionnaires for teachers and
learners, the study found out that strategies namely understanding the graph, interpreting
the graph, and choosing necessary information from the graph are focused in the lessons of
IELTS writing task 1. However, learners have difficulties in interpreting the graph, using
various structures in expressing their ideas, and overcoming with anxiety in practicing
IELTS writing task 1. It is recommended that teachers’ activities in class should focus on
instructing students to interpret the graph, to use various structures in expressing ideas to
describe the graph. Teachers should also check errors for their students’ writings, and
provide students with common mistakes to avoid, and exercises on vocabulary and
grammatical structures relating to visual information descriptions.


2. Methodology 19
Chapter 3: RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS 22
1. Personal information 22
2. What are taught and learnt in IELTS writing task 1 classes at EQuest. 26
3. Students’ difficulties in learning to write task 1 of IELTS writing 28
4. Difficult expressions for learners 30
5. Common errors among students’ graph-based writings 31
vii
6. Teachers’ recommendations and learners’ expectations for teaching focus 32
PART 3: CONCLUSION 34
1. Summary of the study 34
2. Implications of the study 35
3. Limitations of the study 35
4. Suggestions for further study 36
REFERENCES 37
APPENDICES I
Appendix A: The IELTS 9-band scale I
Appendix B: Writing task 1 band descriptors II
Appendix C: Questionnaire for teachers III
Appendix D: Questionnaire for learners: VII
1
PART 1: INTRODUCTION

This part introduces briefly about the study including rationale, aims, scope, significance of
English for Vietnamese learners, including English for Specific Purpose Courses, Oversea
Study Consulting, International Tests Preparation Courses with its considered-the-most-
outstanding-field IELTS, and so on. EQuest is attracting more and more IELTS test takers
irrespective of ages, genders, life goals, and so on for its reasonable tuition fee and good
quality of courses. The center equips classrooms with modern teaching facilities like
computers, projectors, and whiteboards. Likewise, library is well-equipped with various
kinds of books, material, newspapers, magazines and computers connected to the internet.
Moreover, there are also two informatics technology rooms with many internet-connected
computers, which are often available for students to get access. Equest’s teaching staff
were qualified by prestigious universities like University of Languages and International
Studies, VNU, Hanoi National University of Education and so on. Besides, lecturers who
are teaching at universities and colleges are cooperating as part-time lecturers in here. The
teaching materials are synthesized from a variety of global famous reliable course books
and are continuously revised to suit learners’ demand and features around the different
regions in the country. For those features, namely, the large number of learners, well-
qualified Vietnamese teachers, good condition of equipment and materials, I decided to
choose EQuest to be the context for my research.
2. Aims of the study
The study aims to explore the situation of teaching and learning IELTS writing task 1 in
Vietnam. The focus is on the difficulties faced by Vietnamese learners in learning IELTS
writing task 1 and what teachers could do to help their students improve their score in this
task corresponding to their ability.
Three research questions will be addressed as follows:
1. What are taught and learnt in IELTS writing task 1 classes at EQuest?
2. What are the difficulties faced by Vietnamese learners in learning to write
IELTS writing task 1?
3. What should Vietnamese teachers do to teach their students to write
IELTS writing task 1 as required?

methodology, and the design of the study. The second part is Development which includes
three chapters: Chapter 1, Literature review, deals with the theoretical background of the
study relating to writing skill and IELTS writing task 1. Chapter 2, Methodology, presents
methodology of the study including data collection procedure and data analysis. Chapter 3,
4
Results and discussion, states the findings from the study and discusses some
recommendations. The last part is Conclusion presenting the summary of the major
findings, the conclusions and limitations of the study; implications as well as suggestions
for further studies are included in this part.

In short, writing is an art in which writers want to communicate with audience. Writing is
characterized with some basic features, i.e. being linguistics, creative, progressive and
interactive. Besides, the word ―writing‖ itself may imply an act, a process, or a skill, which
needs practice and study to develop. It requires both physical and mental powers from the
writers.
1.2 Academic writing
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Academic writing according to Oshima and Hogue (1991: 2) stated that ―Academic
writing, as the name implies, is the kind of writing that you are required to do in college or
university. It differs from the other kinds of writing (personal, literary, journalistic,
business, etc.) In several ways, its differences can be explained in part by its special
audience, tone, and purpose.
To make the definition of academic writing clearer, Oshima and Hogue explain the
mentioned differences in more detail. According to them, in academic writing, the
audience plays an important part, as they are the people who will read what have been
written, and only when specifying the audience the writers can reach their goal of
communicating clearly and effectively. Beside the audience, the tone of writing is also a
crucial factor. Tone reveals the writer’s attitude towards the chosen subject by their choice
of words, grammatical structures and the length of sentences. The tone of a piece of writing
is determined more by its intended audience than its subject matter. And the last difference
is the purpose of writing. In academic writing, the purpose will most often be to explain. It
may also be to persuade or to convince the audience of the correctness of the writer’s point
of view on a particular issue. And the organizational form and style chosen for writing will
also be determined by the purpose of a piece of writing.
Swales & Feak (1994) have another approach on academic writing by providing an
overview of some important characteristics of academic writing. According to their book,
academic writing is a product of many considerations: audience, purpose, organization,

are generally considered less acceptable. They suggest the procedure to avoid the
unnecessary in the presentation of their writing. Those tasks are considering the overall
format of the written work, proofreading for careless grammar mistakes, and checking for
misspelled words.
The second approach of writing among two above is followed by the author of this
research for its clearness, details and practicability.
2. Teaching writing
In Raimes (1983: 5- 10), six approaches to writing, namely: The Controlled-to-Free
Approach, the Free-Writing Approach, the Paragraph-Pattern Approach, the Grammar-
Syntax-Organization Approach, the Communicative Approach, and the Process Approach
are presented.
The Controlled to Free Approach stresses upon grammar, syntax and mechanics and on
accuracy rather than fluency. Therefore, students are likely to have good grammatical
competence and low communication skills.
The Free-Writing Approach focuses on writing quantity rather than quality, on content and
fluency rather than accuracy and form. The emphasis in this approach is on audience,
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content and fluency. However, concern for accuracy and form is seen as of little
importance in this approach. This shortcoming has very likely negative effect on learner’s
grammar competence in writing.
The Paragraph-Pattern Approach puts an emphasis on organization and students should
invest time in learning to organize their ideas well in the target language.
The Grammar- Syntax-Organization Approach stresses on simultaneous work which
heightens not only organization but also grammar and syntax. This approach is the
combination of the purpose and the form of the writing.
The Communicative Approach stresses on the authentic audience and purpose of a piece of
writing and is suitable to teach writing to secondary students as it can vary the situation

Nik, Hamzah and Rafidee (2010) in their study found that ―there are many factors affecting
undergraduates writing performance in English as a Second Language (ESL), like content,
vocabulary, organization, language use and mechanics in writing.‖ Among these factors,
the most significant and challenging component in writing that they have to encounter is
language use as they have to learn the grammar , syntactic structure, vocabulary ,
rhetorical structure and idioms of a new language (ESL). The acquisition of these
things is added to their difficulties and makes their writing more difficult and complicated.
They believe that students who do not read and write well in their first language
need to work harder on the new creative activity of forming ideas and thoughts in
English for the readers to understand.
4. The writing task 1 in IELTS
4.1 The IELTS: An overview
―The International English Language Testing System (IELTS) assesses the English
language proficiency of people who want to study or work where English is used as the
language of communication. It provides a fair, accurate and relevant assessment of
language skills, based on well-established standards, and covers the full range of
proficiency levels, from non-user to expert user.‖ (IELTS Guide for teachers: 2).
Two versions are offered in IELTS test. Test takers may choose either Academic (for
linguistically demanding academic courses) or General Training (for less linguistically
demanding academic courses). These two models have four parts: Listening, Speaking,
Reading, and Writing. The two former are the same for both models but the reading tasks
and the writing sub-test are different between the two. This paper focuses on the Academic
version only.
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IELTS results are reported on a 9-band scale (available in Appendix A) designed to be
simple and easy to understand with demarcations in half bands for the Listening and
Reading but only whole bands for the rest. The four sub-test band scores are both presented


4.3 The IELTS writing task 1
According to 101 Helpful Hints for IELTS, Academic module (Adams & Peck, 1999: 55),
Writing Task 1 is designed to test the candidates’ ability to interpret and present
information that is given in short form, often as data within a diagram, graph, chart or
table. The candidates must present the information in their own words as complete
sentences within paragraphs, that is, not in note form unless specifically requested. The
minimum number of words are required is 150. Test takers are not asked to give opinions,
make assumptions, or draw conclusions about the information given. ―The skill to “read
the data” requires extraction of key ideas from the graphs; the skill to “read between the
data” focuses on finding linkages from different pieces of graphical information; and the
skill to “read beyond the data” which is the most advanced one that requires extrapolation
from the data‖ are core rating criteria (quoted in Yang, 2012: 5). The information may be
presented in the test paper in a number of ways, for instance, as:
• a graph
• a diagram of the stages of a process or procedure
• a bar or pie chart
• a sequence of events
• a table of information
• a picture of an object showing how it works.
There might be a combination of graphs, tables and charts, and the candidates may be
asked to compare the information given. Sometimes, however, even when the question
does not specifically ask you to compare information, it might be necessary to do so, for it
might helps with the description.
Alternatively, the candidates may be asked to use the information given to support a
written statement.
The following are details of task 1’s assessment criterion areas:
Task achievement:
This criterion assesses how appropriately, accurately, and relevantly the response fulfills
the requirement set out in the task, using the minimum of 150 words. Academic writing

input (graphs, charts, diagrams) (Yang, 2012).
Of greatest relevance to this study is Bridges (2010), funded by Cambridge ESOL, a study
revealing six processes commonly used to complete IELTS Academic Writing Task 1:
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macro-planning (task requirements are identified), organizing (ideas are arranged and
connected), micro-planning (sentence and paragraph-level plans are formed for sub-
sequent writing), translating (visual inputs are encoded into words), monitoring and
revising (written products are reviewed and revised). The findings also showed that macro-
planning (e.g., goal-setting, task examination) and monitoring occurred more frequently for
skilled writers than less skilled writers and organizing occurred not as frequently as other
strategies, suggesting that the task may only require knowledge telling rather than
knowledge transforming skills. Although he made big contribution in identifying the
cognitive process in which IELTS candidates take to write the graph-based writing, he did
not focus on difficulties experienced by test takers during the process; therefore, the
solutions for those difficulties
Another research, named ―Modeling the relationships between test-taking strategies and
test performance on a graph-writing task‖, conducted by Hui-Chun Yang in Taiwan in
2012 (Yang, 2012) also drew my attention. This study examined second language (L2)
writers’ test-taking strategies in relation to their performance on a graph-writing test
administered to English learners in health science and medical majors by two methods of
data collection which are a strategy inventory and open-ended questions. The findings are
quite interesting and useful for teachers of IELTS preparation course. In fact, the study
discovered that three strategies involved during the task response are graph
comprehension, graph interpretation, and graph translation, which have positive impact on
test-takers’ performance. In addition, learners’ difficulties in completing the task are
caused by lexical knowledge and use, as well as possible sources of construct-irrelevant
variance including graph familiarity, topical knowledge, and test-wiseness strategy use.

subjects, revealed important issues on the teaching and learning IELTS writing task 1 and
were of useful as background knowledge for my study when I am in an effort to explore
the situation of my own country.
Also, the much broader area of Vietnam educational practices and their implications for the
Vietnamese language learners and test takers are taken into account in reviewing literature.
Unfortunately, there are few researches or articles on this topic for, maybe, IELTS in
Vietnam have not received appropriate care yet though it came into the country for years.
6. Affective factors in IELTS learning
Shank and Terill (1995) mentioned factors influencing second language learning as follow:
Personal/individual Factors:
- Age and time of entry into the second language learning environment
- Personality and learning style
- Attitude and motivation to learn the new language
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- A natural talent for learning languages
- Language ability in first language
- The similarity of the first language to the second language
Experience factors:
- Previous educational background
- Previous exposure to and experience in the second language and culture
Environmental factors:
- Adjustment and attitude of the family toward the new language and culture
- Community interest, resources, and parental environment in school programs
- The perceived respect for and acknowledgement of the home language and culture by
the new community
- Maintenance of students’ first language in and out of school
- Supportive learning environments and skilled teachers who use a wide range of

interaction between the writers and the audience; thus, learner’s anxiety seems to increase
much more than other skills like speaking and listening since they have to be extremely
serious to choose the most accurate language to express their ideas. On one hand, this
might promote learners to complete their language ability; on the other hand, learners are
easy to be demotivated if they cannot attempt to find suitable ways to convey their
thoughts to audience.
7. Roles of teachers and learners in IELTS teaching and learning in Vietnam
Currently, there are no state-owned schools or colleges in Vietnam teaching IELTS courses
officially. For this reason, learners who want to study these courses have to take them in
some English language centers with short-term courses in a few months. In these classes,
the roles of teachers and learners can be as followed:
Roles of teachers:
Teachers are often the first significant contact that IETLS learners make with English
speakers and the IELTS learners’ perception of IELTS is mediated by this contact. IELTS
teachers play many roles, requiring a variety of competencies and strategies that facilitate
learning and focus on the development of the whole learner (Schumann, 1998)
As nurturers, teachers establish an atmosphere of acceptance, tolerance, and empathy in
situations where learners of varied linguistic and cultural backgrounds are integrated. As
observers, teachers are careful and sensitive observers of learners as they interact and
become accustomed to linguistic and cultural differences (Schumann, 1998). As
participants, teachers share the challenges of learning while acknowledging the frustrations
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of IELTS learners. As facilitators, teachers act as interpreters for learners as they construct
their own understanding of the new language. As learners, teachers continually become
more knowledgeable about language development and how IELTS learners’ cultural
backgrounds affect their learning experience. As evaluators and communicators, teachers
communicate effectively on an ongoing basis with learners, and seek to bridge the

- Are acknowledged for their continued growth by teachers and peers
- Are in an environment where whisk taking is valued and where incremental growth as
highly as the attainment of goals
- Experience a sense of self-confidence within their new peers and those with a shared
first language
- Understand the new culture, clearly, and show respect for its values while maintaining
and valuing their own cultures
- Are both learners and teachers, individuals and group members