IELTS Research Reports

Construct validity in the IELTS Academic Reading testPerceived changes in students’ reading practicesA final area covered in this summary of interview findings is informants’ perceptions of students’reading practices on their courses. Interestingly, this was an issue not directly probed in the interviews.As has been stressed, the primary construct that informed the research was the notion of ‘taskdemand’, and so it was not an imperative of the study to investigate issues of actual student behaviourand performance. We found however, that these were key issues for informants, and ones that manywere keen to air in the course of our discussions. In short, concern was expressed by a number ofinformants – and indeed a degree of disdain by some of these – about the lack of commitment shownnowadays by students towards reading on their courses. The following are some representativecomments on this issue:LINGUISTICS: It is a constant struggle to get students to do the reading these days. Sofor example in the tutorial that I had earlier this week, I asked what I thought was a reallyself-evident question, and the answer was very clearly in the second reading from the week.Nobody got it. Literally nobody had even read the article.COMPUTER SCIENCE: At the end of this semester we asked for a show of hands of howmany of the students actually had a copy of the textbook and it was a slightly depressinglylow proportion. So I think quite a lot of students [aren’t] actually doing the reading.MEDIA STUDIES: I’ve told you about what we expect, but one can’t avoid mentioningwhat actually happens. So reading in fact has become a major problem. Students are justdoing less reading than they’ve ever done before, and that would be local students as muchas international … Many complain that the standard of textbook is just too difficult … Wefeel though that we have to resist dumbing these things down. It’s a university textbook weprescribe; we can’t go looking at something fit for secondary level.Whilst the last informant, from Media Studies, thought vigilance was necessary to avoid any ‘dumbingdown’ of requirements, others thought the pressures to scale things down – both the quantity and levelof reading – difficult to resist at times. The Management lecturer, for example, described how thesubject he taught had been forced in recent years to take a less rigorous, less ‘literary’ turn in responseto changing student cohorts and preferences:MANAGEMENT: I’ve taught the course for about five years. I took the course over fromtwo of the older academics here who are probably well … more literary in their take on theworld. One was a trained historian; the other was an economic historian. But I’ve had to tonedown the volume of reading and that’s in response to the changing student mix and changingstudent behaviour. I have probably shifted it more to use of business press material, lessacademic material.More ominously, another lecturer thought that on some programs, the reading load had to be reducedpartly in response to certain pressures felt through formal processes of student review and feedback:ENGINEERING: Students only have to read the textbook and the PowerPoint slides to besuccessful in this subject nowadays. And this is a lot to do with student expectations, becausewe have found that they are very reluctant to do extra reading. And again this has to do withquality of teaching. If you give them a lot of reading, you are going to get really knockedback on quality of teaching scores.IELTS Research Reports Volume 11227