A Comparative Study of IELTS Argumentative Essay and Other Subgenres of Learner Academic Writing in Pakistani Context

Abstract

This research is an attempt to study if IELTS writing is different from students’ university writing in Pakistani context. It has already been theorized that IELTS writing is different from university writing by Moore and Morton (2005). They collected the students’ university assignments and evaluated them according to IELTS rubric for Task 2. However, in the present study a corpus of argumentative essays has been collected from IELTS test takers in Pakistan (IAEC) and Biber’s multidimensional analysis (1988) has been used as the framework for the analysis of data. The dimensions have been extracted according to Biber’s framework for old MD (1988) and further it has been compared to previous MD studies conducted on learner academic writing in the university. For this purpose three studies have been used for making comparisons: Abdulaziz (2017), Hussain (2016) and Abbas (2020). The results confirmed that the IELTS writing is different from university writing. Significant difference has been observed on dimension 1, 3 and 4. This study can be helpful for the instructors in IELTS preparatory centers in Pakistan as well as for the material developers to design more localized materials according to the requirements of Pakistani learners. Overall, this comparative analysis aims to provide insights into how language use has evolved or remained consistent across different studies and timeframes, contributing to a deeper understanding of language variation and development in academic writing contexts.