The Cognitive Processes of Taking IELTS Academic Writing Task One: From Concurrent Think-aloud to Eye-tracking with Retrospective Interviews

This is a follow-up study of Yu et al. (2011) which used concurrent thinking-aloud as its main research instrument to understand the cognitive processes of taking IELTS Academic Writing Task One (AWT1). In this proposed research, we will use unobtrusive eye-tracking system and retrospective stimulated interviews as the two major data collection tools to investigate the cognitive processes involved in the AWT1 tasks. In particular, it will investigate (1) the patterns of cognitive processes, (2) the extent to which test takers’ cognitive processes differ due to the use of different AWT1 graph prompts, (3) the extent to which test takers’ cognitive processes are related to their “graphicacy” (Weiner, 1992, p.16) and (4) the extent to which test takers’ cognitive processes are related to their English writing abilities.