Assessing Five Genre Writing Task-Based Practice On the Second-Year Diploma 3 IT Students’ IELTS Writing Test-like Essay

Abstract

This paper assessed the results of five genre writing task-based practice in the second-year Diploma 3 IT
students’ skills for writing an IELTS writing test-like essay. The problem of the study was to explore how
the five genre writing practice impacted the students’ ability to discuss their opinion academically. The
particular objective of this study was to inquire if the task-based learning enabled the students to ponder
ideas and express opinions into well-defined, coherent and written explanations in compliance with good
IELTS essay standard. The study was conducted in a quantitative method in which the students’ grades of a class test given after completing the tasks were analyzed based on the IELTS Task 2 Writing Band
Descriptors and modified IELTS Reading Task Band Score Converter. The results showed the task-based
learning method instructing the students to yield five basic essay genres from Narrative to Argumentative
needed to be only focused on Argumentative genre writing task practice if the learning objective was to
equip the students to produce an IELTS typical essay in good quality, for the students’ essay writing grades
revealed an unsatisfactory prediction band score, only 4.5 from a scale of 0 to 9. In particular, they should
take more intensive drills in organizing unbiased but persuasive explanations, providing supporting examples for their personal views, picking proper transition markers for the text coherence and being aware of fragment and run-on sentences, Subject and Verb disagreement, Use of Tenses and Redundancy.