IELTS Research Reports

Tim Moore, Janne Morton and Steve Price1 INTRODUCTIONReading has always been a key element of university study. There was a time in fact when thepreferred terminology for studying in a subject area at university was ‘reading the subject’. Nowadays,many recognise that it is the intelligent engagement with one’s sources that more than anything elsedefines the quality of being academically literate. Taylor (2009), for example, sees most studentendeavours in the academy – whether the writing of essays, or engaging with the content of lectures,or the discussing of ideas in tutorials and seminars – as emerging from a “conversation” with one’sreadings in a discipline (p 54). In the domain of language testing, the manifest importance of readingin university study is reflected in the prominence given to this skill area in the various language testsused by universities for the selection of students. Thus, in all the varieties of format found in the morewidely-used language tests over the last 30 years (ELTS, IELTS, TOEFL), one single common elementhas been the use of a dedicated reading component.Given the importance of reading within academic study, an issue of continuing interest for researchersand test developers is the validity of tests used to assess students’ academic reading abilities. A test issaid to be valid if it ‘reflects the psychological reality of behaviour in the area being tested’ (Hamp-Lyons, 1990, p 71). In the case of a test of academic reading proficiency, this validity relates to anumber of different areas, including:■■■■■■task stimulus i.e. the texts that candidates engage with on the testtask demand i.e. the test items, which prescribe certain types of interaction between thereader and texttask processes i.e. the reader-text interactions that actually take place in the completing ofthe test (McNamara, 1999).Previous IELTS validation research has seen strong emphasis placed on the first of these areas – thetask stimulus component of the reading test (see for example, Clapham 1996). Recently-commissionedresearch has also seen some attention given to task processes – in the work of Weir, Hawkey, Greenand Devi (2009) into performance conditions on the test and how these might relate to the subsequentreading experiences of first year university students. To our knowledge, there has been limitedvalidation work done in recent years (one needs to go back to Alderson’s (1990a; 1990b) majorwork on the testing of reading comprehension skills) on the second of these areas – that is, the task‘demands’ of the current version of the reading test, and how much these might relate to the types ofreading tasks and activities required of students on university programs.The study described in this report investigated the suitability of test items in the Academic ReadingTest in relation to the reading and general literacy requirements of university study. Specifically, theresearch sought answers to the following questions:1 in what systematic ways can items on the IELTS academic reading module be analysedand classified?2 what does a taxonomic analysis of test items reveal about the construct of readingunderlying the IELTS academic reading module?3 what is the degree of correspondence between the reading skills required on the IELTStest and those typically required on a range of undergraduate university programs?Two methods were employed in the research: i) a comparative analysis of IELTS test items andassessment tasks from a range of undergraduate courses; and ii) semi-structured interviews with188 www.ielts.org