IELTS Research Reports

Tim Moore, Janne Morton and Steve PriceMEDIA STUDIES: All of the skills are important – having a basic comprehension,summarizing (item 1) is obviously important. On my course however, students being criticalin their reading is absolutely essential (item 5). Students need to assess arguments, and partof this is identifying where arguments and ideas have been left out.MANAGEMENT: the aim [on my course] is for [students] to develop an awareness ofmultiple types of sources, multiple viewpoints and to build confidence in their writing todraw on these different viewpoints in advancing their own view (item 7).Among the more humanities-oriented areas, additional distinctions were observed at the individualdiscipline level. Our History informant, for example, attached special significance to students beingable to “understand the purpose for why a text may have been written” (item 4). For him, such anability related to a crucial part of the training students needed to undergo as novitiate historians –namely the ability to read and interpret primary source material.HISTORY: working with primary source material is, I suppose, a specialist kind ofreading in history, and we spend a lot of time on that. Students need to be able to see what’ssurrounding a document, why it was created, what the author of the document is trying toachieve through it.Additional variation was also found in the more applied disciplines. For informants in these areas, akey skill emphasised was the ability to draw on concepts in one’s reading for “the purpose of applyingthem to a particular situation or context” (item 3). Thus, the informant from the new applied Businessdiscipline of E-commerce was keen to stress the essentially utilitarian nature of reading in the field:BUSINESS STUDIES: The focus of E-commerce is very much about finding solutionsto practical problems, and to develop electronic means to advance existing ways of doingthings. Our sense of students learning is really about them grasping a concept, and then beingable to apply it. Later on they might want to be critical of the concept, but in the first instancewe just want them to focus on using it in some practical way.In another of the applied disciplines, Communications, a similarly utilitarian conception of readingwas emphasised. In this case, the focus was not so much on students being able to draw on conceptualresources for the purpose of solving real-world problems; but instead to draw on linguistic resourceswithin texts for a different practical purpose – namely, the development of their writing. The lecturerin the subject explained this particular type of reading thus:COMMUNICATIONS: Students need to write in a variety of genres, say for examplethe book review, and we get them to look at samples of these genres as a resource for theirown writing.INTERVIEWER: So how would you describe the nature of the reading that students haveto do in this situation?COMMUNICATIONS: Well, I tell them in the beginning that they are not reading so muchas consumers anymore, but that they are reading it like a carpenter might look at a chair – notso much to sit in it, but to see how it is put together.226 www.ielts.org