Ielts Speaking Test Iravani Download
Mazie Wingeier
Given the importance of IELTS for individuals with migration or higher education aims, it is necessary for teachers and material developers to carefully take all aspects of language into account. Instructionally comprehensive and pedagogically relevant activities should target the needs of learners in real contexts. Accordingly, they can help learners develop essential language skills they need when taking an IELTS exam or when living in English speaking countries (Farid & Saifuddin, 2018).
The importance and the widespread use of IELTS (Pearson, 2019) have made it one of the most standard tests. Besides, its fairness and predictive ability are already ensured (IELTS, 2015b) and confirmed through several studies in the literature (Schoepp, 2018; Thorpe, Snell, Davey-Evans, & Talman, 2017). The test has two versions: academic and general training. The former is taken by individuals applying for higher education, and the general version is considered a necessity for migration to Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom (IELTS, 2019c). The test provides an assessment of listening, reading, writing, and speaking language skills. General and academic versions of the test are the same with regard to the speaking and listening skills, whereas they differ in how the reading and writing skills are assessed. For example, those applying for an academic program of study sit the IELTS with academic reading and writing modules, and those intending to migrate to an English-speaking country for other purposes take the general reading and writing modules (IELTS, 2019d; Wilson, 2010).
In order to help learners with speaking skill, a number of books have been published in Iran, namely, IELTS Speaking Tests (Iravani, 2003), and IELTS Speaking Ultimate (Borhani & Hashemi, 2016). The former includes three chapters, specifically targeting parts 1, 2, and 3 of the IELTS speaking test respectively. The book covers a range of common topics for the IELTS exam followed by conversation tips and sample answers. Similarly, the latter contains three sections with the same purposes as the former. This book also covers a range of the most common topics for the IELTS Speaking test followed by categorized samples. These two books have remained unevaluated in the literature and are used by many IELTS candidates.
Speaking performance and fluency is shown to be associated with the use of multiword units in the literature (Boers, Eyckmans, Kappel, Stengers, & Demecheleer, 2006; Stengers, Boers, Housen, & Eyckmans, 2011; Tavakoli, 2011; Tavakoli & Uchihara, 2020; Thomson, Boers, & Coxhead, 2017; Wood, 2009, 2010). This relationship can be explained through a psycholinguistic research point of view. This line of research suggests that multiword units (e.g., in the middle of the) are dealt with differently from novel language strings (e.g., association is not a matter of), with the former units being more advantageous than the latter when one processes them in both productive and receptive linguistic tasks (Siyanova-Chanturia & Van Lancker Sidtis, 2018). This increase in the language processing speed, which can enable speakers to communicate language items more fluently, is shown to liberate the attentional resources speakers need to activate in favor of other aspects of language production resources such as articulation and monitoring (Kormos, 2006; Skehan, 2009). In other words, multiword units provide cost-effective and ready access to acceptable lexico-grammatical linguistic elements for learners, enabling them to move beyond their current language production capacity and creativity (Myles, Hooper, & Mitchell, 1998).
It is apparent that the formulation stage or more specifically the lexical selection phase in speech production can benefit from the use of multiword units for speaking fluency (Kormos, 2006; Levelt, 1992). In the lexical selection phase, speakers rely on the mental lexicon to retrieve appropriate lemmas from the alternatives available in it. Longer multiword units, as opposed to single-word linguistic items with a similar processing cost, can be retrieved by speakers who have a large repertoire of multiword units at this phase. Doing so, they can save processing time in favor of other syntactic and message generation processing (Boers et al., 2006; Skehan, 1998). On the contrary, speakers who have a small amount of multiword units in their mental lexicon may not benefit from this processing advantage since they need more cognitive resources when retrieving every constituent of the whole multiword units.
Based on the considerations stated above, it seems reasonable that learning materials targeting speaking skill need to pay careful attention to the multiword units. Material writers can achieve this either explicitly by giving lists of relevant multiword units or implicitly by using them with high frequency in spoken language samples provided. Therefore, this study aims at answering the following research questions:
The reasons for choosing BASE and MICASE as authentic sources of spoken English over others are: 1) Different studies exploring spoken language have referred to these corpora throughout the literature (Dang & Webb, 2014; Grant, 2011; Lee & Ziegeler, 2006; Lindemann & Mauranen, 2001; Nesi, 2002; Pastizzo & Carbone, 2007; Simpson & Mendis, 2003; & Yang, 2014) 2) BASE as a sample of British English and MICASE as a sample of American English were chosen to avoid bias in favor of each side, and 3) BASE and MICASE were freely available for language exploration (through Sketch Engine), and downloading for further analysis. ISSAC is compiled based on two books: IELTS Speaking TESTS and IELTS Speaking Ultimate, namely. The texts in ISSAC were written as intuited responses to IELTS speaking part 2 topics. For the most part, the language in these textbooks is introduced as oral language in the form of monologues. These two books are published in Iran as IELTS speaking test preparation guides for the candidates. The books are published in 2003 and 2016 respectively. They are two of the most frequently used textbooks in different IELTS preparation courses and centers held at several private language institutes in Iran. Table 1 presents more information regarding the transcripts and tokens of each corpus.
It seems that ISSAC is a relatively small corpus with regard to general research in the field of corpus linguistics. This is especially because we are handling a very particular type of discourse in a specific domain (intuited spoken texts in answer to sample IELTS speaking part 2 topics). Only the most frequently used textbooks were selected to represent an overall view of the spoken English discourse IELTS candidates in Iran are exposed to. The language presented in these textbooks is the English spoken register that students encounter the most often in IELTS courses in Iran. Therefore, ISSAC seemed more suitable for the identification of the relevant linguistic aspects.
Three basic criteria have been indicated in the previous literature concerning the analysis of lexical bundles. The first criterion considers the length of word sequences. To identify lexical bundles, researchers need to first decide on the length of the word sequences. Usually, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7-word sequences are considered for analysis in the literature, and this factor varies from study to study. The present study focuses only on the four-word lexical bundles because of three reasons: 4-word lexical bundles often contain 3-word lexical bundles within their structure as well, and offer more variation for analysis than 5-word lexical bundles (Cortes, 2004), they offer a more straightforward range of functional characteristics (Hyland, 2008), and they are perceived to bring forward a more manageable list for further analyses (Chen & Baker, 2010).
The next criterion is the cut-off frequency. This factor determines the number of times a 4-word sequence must occur repeatedly in a corpus data to be considered as a lexical bundle in further analysis. This threshold ranges between 20-40 times per million words in studies dealing with large corpora (e.g., Biber, Conrad, & Cortes, 2004; Hyland, 2008). It should also be mentioned that, for spoken corpora that are relatively small, a non-normalized cut-off frequency ranging from 2 to 10 is commonly used (e.g., De Cock, 1998). Accordingly, in order to adopt a conservative approach, the cut-off frequency was set to 30 times per million words to consider 4-word sequences as lexical bundles in this study.
The structural analysis of the lexical bundles was carried out based on the structural types identified by Biber et al. (2004). The classification divides lexical bundles into three structural types: (1) lexical bundles that carry verb phrase fragments like is based on the, have a lot of, (2) lexical bundles that contain dependent clause fragments like if you look at, to be able to, and (3) lexical bundles that carry noun phrase and prepositional phrase fragments like a little bit more, at the end of. Additionally, as presented in Table 2, each major type involves different structural sub-types.
The above threshold resulted in the identification of a total of 58 and 49 lexical bundles in BASE and MICASE, respectively (Appendix A is a full list of lexical bundles in each corpus). As can be seen in Appendix A, the lexical bundles in MICASE are fairly more frequent in comparison to those of BASE. In other words, the sum of the lexical bundle frequencies in MICASE is far greater than that of the BASE (7312 vs. 4835).
Before presenting and discussing the results of the analysis of this study, it should be noted that, as referred to before, two academic spoken corpora are compared with a less formal spoken corpus; therefore, the results of this study should be interpreted cautiously. They are mainly used to enable a comparison between the lexical bundles that constitute the discourse of spoken in English in authentic versus intuited samples of oral English communication. The structural distribution of the patterns of the 4-word lexical bundles in BASE and MICASE are shown in Figure 1.
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