IELTS Research Reports

Construct validity in the IELTS Academic Reading testThe IELTS test is an example of a public test that is used to make crucial decisions about largenumbers of people – whether they are eligible for English-speaking university entrance or not basedon their English language abilities. An increase in the numbers of international students wantingto study at English-speaking universities and a concomitant increase in the number of universitiesrequiring IELTS scores has led to a significant expansion of the IELTS test in recent years. This in turnhas resulted in IELTS preparation programs being an important focus of many EAP courses taughtin language centres throughout the world (Saville and Hawkey, 2003; Read and Hayes, 2003). Theincreased influence of IELTS and possible concerns about test washback suggest the need for, in thiscase, the reading construct underlying the test to be firmly based on a thorough understanding of thenature of reading demands in university study. It is this issue – the importance for the reading test to beas authentic as possible given practical and other constraints – that has motivated the present study.2.3 Dimensions of readingThe current project is framed within broad theories of reading. Central to these are differing viewsabout the nature of textual meanings and the relationships that exist between these meanings andthe reader of a text. The more traditional view – the ‘transmission model’ – sees texts embodyingrelatively stable, objective meanings, ones that a proficient reader is able to locate and reproduce.Carroll (1964), for example, characterises reading as “the activity of reconstructing the messages thatreside in printed text”. This conception of reading as the finding of pre-existent meanings is arguablythe predominant construct in many reading comprehension tests, especially those that rely heavily onmultiple choice formats (Hill & Parry, 1992; Alderson, 2000).An alternative view, one that has gained increasing acceptance in many areas of the academy(particularly in education and in some branches of the humanities) is to see texts as having no singledefinitive meaning, but rather the potential for a range of meanings, ones that are created throughthe engagement of individual readers. As Widdowson (1979) states, “since conceptual worlds do notcoincide, there can never be an exact congruence of coder’s and encoder’s meanings” (p 32). Despitethe growing acceptance of ‘receptionist’ theories of meaning, there appears to be a reluctance – evenon the part of more committed post-modernists – to accept fully the logical consequences of thisposition – namely, that any subjective account of the meaning of a text may ultimately be valid. Itis the view of the researchers that both a strong receptionist and a strong transmissionist positionrepresent rather idealised accounts of reading, and are best thought of as end points on a continuum ofmore reader-oriented and more text-oriented perspectives on meaning.Related to these broad definitions of reading are differing ideas about what the processes of readingare thought to involve. Traditionally, accounts in this area have tended to aggregate around twobroad approaches: bottom-up ‘information processing’ (with a focus on the processing of moremicro-level constituents of texts – letter, words, phrases, sentences etc); and top-down ‘analysisby-synthesis’(with a focus more on macro-level constituents – genre, text structure, as well as therole of background schematic knowledge etc). Recently, there has been a move towards a moreinteractive, hermeneutic approach, one that assumes a degree of bi-directionality in these processes(Hudson, 1998). In the current project, research in the area of reading processes was useful as a way ofidentifying the type(s) of processing that test items appear to be principally concerned with, and alsothe levels of texts.IELTS Research Reports Volume 11191