Abstract:

EFL learning has always been a hot research field in Second Language Acquisition. As an international assessment test of English language proficiency for non-native English learners, IELTS has become one of the most renowned testing systems among Chinese candidates and acts as a standard to apply for a master degree. Nevertheless, current research concerning IELTS still remains in a relatively low level. Although Linguistic Adaptation Theory belongs to pragmatics, its content and structure can be functioned as guidance for the improvement of students’ academic writing. This essay attempts to apply Linguistic Adaptation Theory into IELTS writing, thus it is of great cross-disciplinary significance.

The design of his research is a mixed method one, involving a combination of quantitative and qualitative questionnaire-based approaches. A total of 185 questionnaires are collected then SPSS 20.0 is used to further explain the statistical results and text analysis of typical errors in IELTS writing with different scores is made in order to find the place where the content of writing does not conform to Adaptation Theory.

According to the results of the survey, a vast majority of undergraduates feel anxious about IELTS writing. Students in different score groups tend to behave significantly different and those with higher IELTS writing scores show better performance on adapting to all aspects of IELTS writing including task response, coherence & cohesion, lexical resources and grammar. Besides, the common weakness of all participants lies in task response, with an overwhelming majority bothered by presenting and extending arguments. In addition, it is not negligible that transfer of the native language (mostly negative transfer) plays a significant role in students’ writing, since they tend to think in Chinese in the mind then translating words and sentences into English. At last, some useful pedagogical suggestions are put forward for the enhancement under Adaptation Theory.

Keywords:

Linguistic Adaptation Theory, IELTS, EFL, second language writing, pragmatics.