As noted above, the Iranian data consist of short argumentative essays produced by Iranian students in response to the writing sections of two sample IELTS tests. My main impetus for compiling this corpus was the popularity of IELTS in Iran (see Rasti, 2009). Iran is one of the top countries in terms of the number of candidates who sit the IELTS test (IELTS Annual Review, 2003). As the number of Iranian IELTS candidates increases, so does the number of preparation programs. I was responsible for organizing and running one of these programs in a busy offsite IELTS venue of the British Council for the administration of actual IELTS tests in Iran from 2004 to 20076. Students who intended to attend the IELTS preparation programs in this centre were given a full sample version of the IELTS test for placement purposes7. The placements tests were available in Academic and General training versions. It was up to the applicants to choose the version which suited them the best. The tests were administered in the same place where the actual IELTS tests were being held in that period. Like the real IELTS test, all the placement tests were given in the morning. In addition, prior to the administration of any IELTS placement test in this language centre, I used to give a brief presentation of the test format in order to familiarize students with the test rubric ensuring that the tests would measure their language proficiency and that their likely unfamiliarity with the format of the test would not adversely affect their real linguistic competence. By strictly controlling the facets of the testing environment and the test rubric (Bachman, 1990: 119), I would argue that the administration of the sample IELTS tests closely resembled
6 The name of this venue is Dibagaran Technical College and it is located in Shiraz, a city in the south west
of Iran.
7 I had compiled the placement tests mainly from the commercially available retired IELTS papers (i.e. they
the administration of the real IELTS tests. Matching the real IELTS as closely as possible both through controlling the testing environment and using actual IELTS questions (see footnote 8 below)enabled me to compare the findings of the present study to those of the studies which have used authentic IELTS scripts (e.g. Mayor et al., 2007; Coffin and Mayor, 2004; Kennedy and Thorp, 2007).
In the contexts of such placement tests as a whole, all the four language skills were assessed. The writing section of these tests required the candidates to respond to a task (see 3.1.2 above for the format and wording of such tasks) by writing a short argumentative English essay.
This is a purposeful sample of such essays produced by Iranian candidates in 2007, in the testing environment introduced above, which has formed my Iranian learner corpus for the present study. Since, for the purpose of the present study, I needed to have two distinct proficiency levels, I chose only the essays which were graded 4 or 68, defined as „low-scoring‟ and „high-scoring‟ essays respectively in this study (see Table 3.1). This gave me a corpus totalling 220 essays. All the 220 essays were written by Iranian students speaking Persian (or Farsi) as their first language. They were both males and females aged 16 or over. One of the factors that makes the Iranian corpus a bit more controlled and homogeneous is the fact that almost all the participants intended to sit the
8 I marked all the student essays based on the public version of „IELTS Task 2 Writing band descriptors‟
(see Appendix 1) published jointly by the British Council, IDP IELTS Australia, and the University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations. I had been marking sample IELTS tests for about five years then and was fairly consistent in marking the writing sections. The high correlation of my students‟ actual IELTS scores obtained from the real IELTS tests with the exit scores they typically got from me before sitting the real
actual IELTS test for university admission and/or vocational/immigration purposes and as such could be expected to be highly motivated in taking the sample IELTS placement tests seriously as the results of these tests meant they could or could not enter the preparation programs.
It is worth mentioning that level 6 essays are not really very proficient language users, not least because they typically have many language errors. As Kennedy and Thorp (2007) point out, “level six essays are level four‟s better versions”, meaning that level 6 essays are not actually „high-level‟ essays. But since there were only a handful of essays which were given scores of 7 or above, I had to consider level 6 essays as high even though it is only in comparison with level 4 essays. In other words, „high‟-scoring is mainly a term that I am using in order to distinguish such essays from low-scoring essays. I also divided my Iranian data according to the test version into Academic and General sub-corpora (see Table 3.1). What follows show the standard format and wording of the writing tasks together with the controversial topics of the Academic and General training of the sample IELTS tests given to students9 (from which virtually all the examples in this study are drawn):
Academic Writing Task 2
Present a written argument or case to an educated reader with no specialist knowledge of the following topic.
Television is dangerous because it destroys family life and any sense of community; instead of visiting people or talking with our family we just watch television.
To what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion?
You should use your own ideas, knowledge and experience and support your arguments with examples and relevant evidence.
Write at least 250 words.
General Training Writing Task 2
Write about the following topic:
People should be allowed to continue to work as long as they want to, and not to be forced to retire at a particular age such as 60 or 65.
Do you agree or disagree?
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your experience.
Write at least 250 words.
The full sample of the Iranian essays subjected to analysis is shown in Table 3.1.
Table 3.1 Distribution of Iranian essays according to test version and task score Test version Task score Number of essays Word count Academic essays High-scoring (6) 50 13,205
General essays High-scoring (6) 50 13,060
Academic essays Low-scoring (4) 60 10,270
General essays Low-scoring (4) 60 10,242
All 220 essays written by Iranian students and 114 essays written by British students were analyzed in the present study. Each Iranian essay was given a unique identifier in the form of IR/A/6/15 (indicating an Iranian candidate who took the Academic version of the sample IELTS test and obtained a score of 6, with a unique identifying number of 15). All references to individual scripts are given in this form. All Iranian scripts were originally handwritten but they were all typed into a Word processor to make them into machine-readable texts. Spelling errors in the original scripts were corrected since such errors might distort the results of automatic word counts. Each British essay was also given the unique identifier already ascribed to them in Granger‟s (1993) corpus (e.g. ICLE-ALEV-0005.9 or Boxing–B11). All British essays were already typed in word documents by the compilers of the corpus.
One of the most obvious differences between Iranian and British essays was the overall length of the texts. The average length of a typical British essay is 528 words, whereas the average length of a typical Iranian essay is 213 words. In the Iranian sub-corpora, the overall length of high-scoring essays is greater than low-scoring essays: the average length of a high scoring essay is 263 words, whereas the average length of a low-scoring essay is 171 words. The overall length of Academic and General essays, however, is almost the same with an average length of 213 words. Since I was dealing with the corpora of unequal sizes, I normalized the raw frequencies of the findings in each chapter to be able to make comparisons.
There are several reasons why I decided to compare the Iranian student argumentative essays with the British A-level discursive essays. First, and most importantly, A-level essays perhaps represent the best level realistically that we could expect the Iranian L2 students in this study to attain. Second, finding a comparable test type was very difficult precisely because essays of this kind (i.e. argumentative) are a kind of discourse that often appears in educational contexts and is not expected to be found very much in the real world outside education, so the A-level essays seem to be the nearest comparable corpus of the kind. Finally, the overall target of the majority of the Iranian IELTS candidates in this study was to get their required band scores and subsequently use them as a way to get out of Iran. In other words, most of them were not trying to prepare themselves for publishing scholarly papers; thus comparing their performance with a target like research articles (as is often the case in similar studies [see, for example, Hyland, 2002c]) was felt not to be a reasonable option. Student essays are a genre in which writers get no official exposure to other models of the genre but the research article genre is not expected to be the genre students would model themselves on instead. Obviously, there are many possible educational and socio-cultural differences between the two language groups preventing a direct comparison of their written performances, and this should be borne in mind when considering the results. However, there are also considerable similarities between the two sets of data and as such they can be considered as being broadly comparable: both corpora belong to the genre of student argumentative essays, written as practice for a high-stakes test which the students would take later; they were both written by students of a similar age range typically above 16; finally, both A-
level students and IELTS candidates typically intend to pursue their higher education and/or find jobs and in this respect they seem to share similar motivations.
3.2 Method
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the analysis drew on Hyland‟s (2005a) interpersonal model of metadiscourse (see Table 2.4 in Chapter 2) in which explicit writer-reader interaction is realized by engagement markers. Illustrated below by examples from my data, these engagement markers are (1) interactant pronouns, (2) questions, and (3) directives:
(1)
a. In fact, we should increase the salary of the old people IR/G/4/15 b. It is expensive to partake in as you need a horse, dogs and riding equipment (e.g. helmet, boots etc.) you also need land to do it in.
Fox hunting - FH03 (2)
a. How can T.V influence our ordinary life? IR/A/6/41 b. Is it inhumane to support a sport in which death can so tragically happen? Boxing - B-06 (3)
a. Consider a person works during a day and unable to see his/her family. IR/A/4/21
b. You have to decide exactly when and where you want to travel in advance. Transport 02
In order to highlight the various features of engagement markers in the data I formulated research questions in each chapter. In addition, since each chapter dealt with a different grammatical feature I established different analytical and functional frameworks for analysing the data. For this reason, each chapter adopts a fairly different methodology preceded by a brief survey of relevant literature highlighting why each of the engagement markers is considered an important linguistic means of constructing writer-reader interaction. After presenting the results and discussing them, in the last chapter I explore the writer-reader interaction in student essays through the analysis of one typical essay from the British corpus and two typical essays from the Iranian corpus, following the example set by Kennedy and Thorp (2007: 329):
Though it cannot be said that any particular script is strictly „typical‟, it is, in ethnographic tradition, „illuminating‟ or „telling‟ to look at one in closer detail. As Evans (1988: 7) says of his own qualitative studies, „the validity … does not depend on numbers but on … necessarily subjective efforts to understand the whole through close attention to individuals”.
(Kennedy and Thorp, 2007: 329)
Finally, I link my findings with some possible socio-cultural factors focusing mainly on the Iranian students‟ performance.