IELTS Research Reports

Construct validity in the IELTS Academic Reading testFor the History lecturer, seeking out a range of sources and a variety of interpretations on a topic wasan indispensable part of engaging with the discipline:HISTORY: To properly engage with the subject is very much dependent on having a certainlevel of knowledge which … is why we say to students you must do adequate readingotherwise you cannot respond to the questions [that we pose]. You might find a perfectlyreasonable answer in a single book on this topic, but you’re in no position to evaluate thatunless you’ve read alternatives.Other informants in the softer disciplines said they were quite precise to students about the quantityof materials that needed to be read each week, and the time that should be put in. The Linguisticslecturer, for example, said she advised students they should be reading the prescribed material from thetextbook each week, and at least two relevant journal articles. The lecturer in Communications insistedto her students that they should devote at least 3-4 hours per week to reading in her subject.In general, whereas the softer humanities disciplines required extensive reading, and from a range ofdifferent sources and genres, in the harder more technical areas reading was found to be less extensive,and mainly confined to the reading of the prescribed textbook in a subject:COMPUTER SCIENCE: There is a textbook. Students are expected to read a chaptera week, but not every week, just for the first eight weeks or so. That’s the first half of thetextbook – which amounts to only about 150 pages for the course.It was explained that in these harder disciplines the main purpose of weekly readings was to supportthe content of lectures.PHYSICS: The textbook would be the main form of reading that students would do. We likestudents to be prepared for lectures and so we ask them to read the sections of the textbookthat are relevant for a particular lecture.Whilst in this case, the textbook material was intended to be read in advance of lectures, in othersubjects, the purpose of textbook reading was mainly for review:ENGINEERING: We have a textbook in the subject and after every lecture at the end ofevery lecture we put up the relevant pages of the textbook that they should read. So the ideais for them to read the PowerPoint slides, read the textbook and then write up their notes.Several lecturers from other hard fields went on to explain that it was the nature of their discipline thatthe reading of texts was not always the only means of engaging with disciplinary knowledge.ARCHITECTURE: Reading is important in this subject, though because of thenature of the discipline there are other literacies that come into play – visual literacy,kinesthetic literacy – to the extent that students are actually building things. Numeracyis also very important.COMPUTER SCIENCE: We have a specialist type of reading in this subject which isrelated to the programming component. Students have to spend a bit of time reading otherpeople’s code, and this is a new type of reading for most.IELTS Research Reports Volume 11223