A systemic functional linguistic approach to IELTS essay analysis

Students of English as a Foreign Language frequently complete standardised tests such as IELTS in order to gain positions at English-language universities. Once successful, students must then cope with the demands of academic English genres and their distinct language features. However, test-preparation courses and Academic English courses remain uncommon in contexts including Japanese universities. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) offers both a framework for teaching content and a means for analysing student output. A ten-week teaching program took place at a Japanese university, in which students who wished to improve their written IELTS scores and academic English writing completed a genre-based, SFL-grounded intervention focusing on two persuasive genres and including lessons on nominalisation (or live metaphors) (mapped to the ideational metafunction of SFL), coherence, cohesion and structure (textual metafunction) and evaluative language (interpersonal metafunction). Students also practised writing IELTS-style short persuasive essays. Essays were collected prior to and following the teaching program and a dual analysis was conducted, using an SFL assessment framework and the IELTS Writing Task 2 Assessment Rubric. Results showed improvements to overall essay quality according to both assessment measures, suggesting that an SFL-grounded, genre-based approach to teaching in this context is effective. Additionally, the results from both assessment frameworks were generally consistent, suggesting that an SFL approach may be useful in assessing approximate IELTS levels in the classroom prior to testing. Pedagogical and analytical implications are discussed.