Analysis of Organizational Knowledge in Writing Corpora of the General Training IELTS-Practice Materials

Inspired by the concept of organizational knowledge, this research intended to analyze a corpus of 180 writing performances of two tasks of the General Training IELTS-practice scripts across three band scores, 7, 8 and 9 in grammatical (GK) and textual knowledge (TK) features. It adopted the taxonomies of Bachman and Palmer (2010) and Connor and Mbaye's (2002) to makes analysis through Coh-metrix in 22 GK and TK features. The band comparisons indicated that the highest-scored scripts tended to be longer and include structurally more diverse sentences. Lexically, 8 and 9 band scripts almost showed no differences, however, they were denser and involved more multiple-meaning and abstract words than those of band 7. Textually, band 9 writings proved to be more coherent and cohesive, although they did not differ from band 8 or even band 7 in some other discourse features. The task comparisons demonstrated task two (T2)'s superiority in length, structural diversity, density, noun phrase (NP) concentration and reading and comprehension difficulty. Lexically, task one (T1) superseded in using more frequent words but not in diverse, multiple-meaning and the abstract ones. It was also indicated that T2 needed more coherence, conceptuality, causality but not coreferentiality in cohesion than T1.