Language Testing in Focus: An International Journal

IELTS has been one of the most reliable and widely selected test formats worldwide. In Vietnam, this test has been increasingly popular and used as a criterion for university admission. For its increasing significance, the question about how to improve the test scores has attracted attention from the publicity, and there came an agreement that improvements in language competence or proficiency work. There have been thousands of books published and millions of websites created to provide hints, tactics, and strategies for potential test takers. In this paper, the researcher would like to present her study, which delved into the effects of developing discourse competence for IELTS test takers. Sixty university students were randomly chosen and divided into two groups: the control group and the experimental one. They participated in a 12-week action research project. A survey questionnaire was assigned to get their opinions about the teaching approach. Findings indicate that students in the experimental group got better overall IELTS scores than those in the control group. Writing and speaking tests scored higher than the reading and listening ones. Mastery of discourse features affected reading and listening task types at varying degrees. Most agreed that improvements in discourse competence enabled them to satisfy the marking criteria of the writing and speaking test papers. For receptive skills, which are reading and listening, recognizing discourse patterns empowered them to control the time better and increase the accuracy of their answers. However, there were disagreements about incorporating discourse components into the existing syllabus. The difference in student competence, learning time, and motivation did affect the effectiveness of this pedagogy.