IELTS Research Reports

Tim Moore, Janne Morton and Steve PriceLevel of engagementWith respect to text ‘level’, it is noted that in the design of these tasks, the single sentence propositioncontained in the prompt generally matches with a semantic unit of similar length in the passage, asseen in the first item above. This was not always the case however. In the second item above, forexample, it is noted that whereas the prompt is a single sentence:The plight of the rainforest has largely been ignored by the media.the cognate information in the reading passage is realised in a smaller grammatical unit – a noun phrase:Despite extensive coverage in the popular media of the destruction of the rainforests …The process was also found to work the other way, where the relevant information in the readingpassage stretched over a larger grammatical unit than the prompt. In the following example (Sample1:2), which shows ‘agreement’ between prompt statement and text, it can be seen that the relevantcomponents of the prompt statement occur inter-sententially in the passage (shown in bold).Prompt statement:The approach to health during the 1970s included the introduction of health awareness programs.Relevant material from reading passage:The 1970s was a time of focusing on the prevention of disease and illness by emphasisingthe importance of lifestyle and behavior of the individual. Specific behaviours which wereseen to increase risk of disease, such as smoking, lack of fitness, and unhealthy eatinghabits, were targeted. Creating health meant providing not only medical health carebut health promotion programs and policies which would help people maintain healthybehaviours and lifestyles.Correct response: TRUESample 1.2: Example of information occurring inter-sententially in True/False/Notgiven formatOverall, however, it was found that most tasks of this type required engagement at or around sentencelevel. Accordingly in the analysis, such tasks were assigned to the more local end of the local-globalcontinuum.In performing such an analysis, one also needs to consider the additional component of the task –adjudicating on the ‘not-given’ option. This component suggests engagement at a different textuallevel. To establish whether certain information is or is not contained within a text requires someappraisal of the content of the whole text, and so for this component, the engagement is judged to be ata more global level.Type of engagementThe type of engagement required for the completion of True/False/Not given tasks is one ofestablishing the semantic relationship between two discrete units of information (one in the prompt,202 www.ielts.org