IELTS Research Reports

Construct validity in the IELTS Academic Reading testand a cognate one that needs to be located by the test-taker in the passage), and to decide whether therelationship is one of synonymy or non-synonymy (eg contradiction). The additional component ofthe task requires one to establish whether the propositional content of the prompt does in fact occur insome form in the reading passage – consideration of the ‘not-given’ option. Where this option applies,the task is thus one of detecting a lack rather than a presence.The specific features of this task type – the need to establish the presence of certain propositionalcontent in a text, and then to establish the relationship between this content and a variant version ofit – suggest a strongly ‘literal’ engagement with reading material. Accordingly, this task type wasassigned to the higher end of the ‘literal–interpretative’ continuum.The preceding analysis gives the configuration shown in Figure 3 below (T1a refers to the ‘True/False’component of the task, and T1b, the ‘Not Given’)More LocalMore GlobalT1aT1bMore literalKeyT1a = True/False formatFigure 3. Analysis of True/False/Not given task typeType 2: Section–summary matchSection-summary match tasks were the second most common format, accounting for 16% of itemsin the corpus (Table 4). In this format, the task for test-takers was to match a section of the readingpassage (usually a paragraph) with a statement that summarised the principal content of that section.An example of this format is shown below (Sample 2:1)IELTS Research Reports Volume 11203