An Investigation into Grammatical Metaphor in IELTS Writing Tests

Abstract

Grammatical metaphor is a significant concept in linguistics introduced by Halliday (1985). It has been pervasive in many studies, both theoretical for discovering subterms ideational, interpersonal and textual grammatical metaphors and practical for analyzing, understanding and especially for writing academic discourses. This study aims at exploring metafunctions of grammatical metaphor expressions and their application frequency in IELTS writing tests. Based on the Functional Grammar advanced by Halliday (1985) as a framework, the study analyzes grammatical metaphor expressions used in a source of samples collected from about 230 IELTS writing tests including sample tests. These grammatical metaphor expressions are categorized into three metafunctions of ideational, interpersonal and textual to examine their application frequency in the writing tests. The results show a significant difference in the usage frequency of the three metafunctions of grammatical metaphors in the writing test papers. Interpersonal is mainly used in IELTS test writing while the application of ideational and textual grammatical metaphor is low. The findings suggest some possible ways of exploiting grammatical metaphors to improving writing skill for IELTS tests.