IELTS Research Reports

Construct validity in the IELTS Academic Reading testRelevant section from reading passage:When the Lumiere Brothers and other pioneers began showing off this new invention, it was byno means obvious how it would be used.In contrast, Item 11 requires engagement with a more extended section of text – what in the passage isa full paragraph, as seen below (Correct response = B).11 The writer refers to the film of the train in order to demonstrateA the simplicity of early filmsB the impact of early filmsC how short early films wereD how imaginative early films were.Relevant section from reading passage:One of the Lumiere Brothers’ earliest films was a 30–second piece which showed a section of arailway platform flooded with sunshine. A train appears and heads straight for the camera. Andthat is all that happens. Yet the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, one of the greatest of allfilm artists, described the film as a ‘work of genius’. As the train approaches’, wrote Tarkovsky,panic started in the theatre; people jumped and ran away. That was the moment when cinemawas born. The frightened audience could not accept that they were watching a mere picture.Pictures are still, only reality moved; this must therefore be reality. In their confusion, they fearedthat a real train was about to catch them.’Finally, the last question in this sample, Item 12, requires consideration of the whole reading passage –a text consisting of 10 paragraphs (Correct response = D).12 What is the best title for this passage?A The rise of the cinema starB Cinema and novels comparedC The domination of HollywoodD The power of the big screenSignificantly, items of this latter kind – requiring test-takers to decide between different possible titlesfor a reading passage – were the only tasks found in the corpus that called for engagement at thiswhole text level. A total of five instances of this item type, all in a multiple choice format, were notedin the overall corpus, accounting for 1% of items.From the examples above we can see that multiple choice items in the IELTS reading test probe avariety of textual units, ranging from the very local to the very global, as shown in Figure 7.Type of engagementAs was the case with the level of engagement, IELTS multiple choice tasks in our corpus resisted anysimple generalisation regarding the way test takers needed to engage with material. The sample itemsabove suggest a variety of modes. Thus, Item 10, requiring identification of quite specific information(i.e. the perceived future of cinema), is clearly of a more literal type. In contrast, Item 12, which askstest-takers to consider how the contents of the whole text can be encapsulated in a single noun phrasetitle (i.e. ‘The power of the big screen’), involves a more ‘interpretative’ engagement.IELTS Research Reports Volume 11217