IELTS Research Reports

Construct validity in the IELTS Academic Reading testQuestion 11 and 12Answer the questions below.Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 11 and 12 on your answer sheet.11 What is produced to help an athlete plan their performance in an event?12 By how much did some cyclists’ performance improve at the 1996 Olympic Games?Sample 6.1: Short answer sampleLevel of engagementLike a number of other ‘specific information’ task types we have seen previously (eg. True/False/ NotGiven; Gapped summary), engagement with the passage in Short answer tasks is at a local level, asshown in the examples below.Question 11:What is produced to help an athlete plan their performance in an event?Relevant section from reading passage:Well before a championship, sports scientists and coaches start to prepare the athlete bydeveloping a ‘competition model’, based on what they expect will be the winning times.Correct Response = ‘competition model’Question 12:By how much did some cyclists’ performance improve at the 1996 Olympic Games?Relevant section from reading passage:At the Atlanta Olympics Games in 1996, these [coolant jackets] sliced as much as two percentoff cyclists’ and rowers’ times.Correct Response = two percentThe requirement of these tasks – that is, to use a minimal number of words in relation to quite specificitems of information – makes these tasks particularly ‘local’ in their orientation, as indicated in Figure 8.Type of engagementThe Short answer format in IELTS reading, as we have seen, has a focus on quite specific items ofinformation (eg the name of a specific performance-enhancement tool; the rate of improvement in asports performance). We would say then that this involves a very basic form of text comprehension,and so this task type is located very much towards the literal end of our ‘literal–interpretative’continuum. The allocated position of this task type on the matrix below suggests in fact that the shortanswer format constitutes the most ‘literal’ and most ‘local’ of all the task types considered so far.IELTS Research Reports Volume 11219