IELTS Research Reports

Lynda TaylorIn discussing their research findings the researchers offer us some valuable insights into key featuresthat appear to differentiate the reading demands of IELTS from the demands of academic reading in theuniversity study context, including specific features relating to epistemic entities, interpretative readings,readings of multiple texts, the contextual nature of reading, the reading-writing nexus, informationliteracy and genre readings of texts. The researchers’ discussion touches upon the central issue inlanguage assessment of construct under-representation, i.e. the extent to which a test does, or does not,sample adequately from the universe of tasks and activities linked to the construct of interest, in this casethe construct of academic reading. Moore, Morton and Price advocate strengthening the link between thetwo domains (of the IELTS test and the world of study) by including more test items requiring global/interpretative rather than just local/literal reading. This, they suggest, would help bring the cognitivedemands of the test more into line with the type of reading required on students’ courses.It is encouraging to see that the researchers are not at all naïve about the practical considerations involvedin test production and they readily acknowledge the challenges associated with modifying the IELTS testin order to improve construct representation along the lines they propose. We clearly need to recognisethe limits to which a test such as IELTS can (or should be expected to) simulate language use in thetarget use situation in its entirety. The testing of reading in IELTS is premised upon a generalist constructof academic reading and the researchers are right to highlight the inevitable challenge that disciplinaryvariation in reading requirements at university raises for a test such as IELTS. Furthermore, as previouslymentioned, IELTS is designed principally to test readiness to enter the world of university-level studyin the English language and does not assume test takers have already mastered the high-level academicliteracy skills they are likely to require for their future studies. Such skills may well need to be developedduring their studies, perhaps even during the early months of their first year, and within a specificdisciplinary context which enjoys its own specialist discourse and approach to literacy.Despite these caveats, however, the IELTS test producers are committed to maintaining a cycle ofsystematic monitoring and continuous improvement of the test and they recognise their responsibility toenhance test content and delivery in the light of ongoing research and as conditions and circumstancesallow. Thus the researchers’ practical suggestions for how IELTS reading tasks might be extended toreflect a greater degree of global and interpretative reading are immediately relevant to the test-writingprocess. The sample tasks offered at the end of the report should offer valuable input to the IELTS itemwritingteams currently working on material for the Academic Reading module. It may be that closerattention can be given by the test writers to ensuring a larger proportion of reading test items that functionat the global and interpretative levels. In the longer term, it is interesting to speculate whether futurecomputer-based development of IELTS might permit a greater inclusion in the reading test of some of thefeatures that characterise academic reading, and thus a broader representation of the construct of interest.Innovative computer-based testing techniques, for example, might enable the test-taker to do one ormore of the following: engage with larger quantities of text; interact with multiple texts; exercise skillsrelated to the searching and selecting of sources, including electronic media; and even undertake moresophisticated reading-into-writing tasks.It is worth noting that recent theoretical and empirical work discussed by Weir in the field of L2 readingand reading assessment (see Examining Reading by Khalifa and Weir, 2009) highlights the criticalparameters that appear to characterise the higher levels of second language reading ability: in particular,the ability to go beyond simply establishing propositional meaning at the clause, sentence and paragraphlevel in order to build complex mental models, creating a text level representation based on a single textand an inter-textual representation drawing upon multiple textual sources. This is the sort of reading,argues Weir, that characterises the C1 and C2 levels of the Common European Framework of Reference(CEFR); it is the type of high-level academic reading that students typically need to undertake in theiruniversity courses. Although Weir et al (IELTS Research Reports, Volume 9, 2009) accept that fullcontextual authenticity is generally unrealistic for language assessments, our growing understandingof the nature of high-level L2 reading proficiency, combined with the evidence from empirical studies16 www.ielts.org