IELTS Research Reports

Tim Moore, Janne Morton and Steve PriceMention was made in interviews of some of the possible factors underlying this apparent decline inreading, including a general sense of students disengaging from study, financial pressures, time spentin employment and so on. Another clear factor identified – one related to actual literacy practices –was students’ increasing use and reliance on digital resources, and the effect this seemed to be havingon the way they engage with textual material. The view generally was that a lot of online working withmaterial was not encouraging of good reading practices:MEDIA STUDIES: There is a lot of material now that students access that they justtypically browse. It’s a kind of trawling for information. They just don’t read this stuff in anyserious and sustained way.Concern was expressed too that access to the limitless resources available on the web has resulted insome students being less-than-judicious in their use of materials:COMMUNICATIONS: Research is showing that the evaluation and management ofmaterial that’s coming out over the internet is the biggest issue. And some students do nothave particularly well-developed evaluation skills.Some thought however, that the considerable changes in the way that information is now accessedhad major implications for teaching, and that there was need to address these issues positively withstudents. Several for example spoke of the importance of developing students’ ‘information literacy’and ‘media literacy’ skills.HISTORY: The web has been a boon to the study of history. But we have to help students tobe a bit discerning about their use of websites. …. We actually have discussions in tutorials.How can we tell whether this is a reliable site or not? So its evaluation of who is producingthis, in what context, and for what purpose.MEDIA STUDIES: What I try to teach [students] is to get them to be selective in theirreading of the media … So, I want them to understand the context of what [they] are reading,and also the legitimacy of what they are reading.For at least one informant, the lecturer from Linguistics, to resist such developments was really a futilepursuit, and that the onus was very much on the universities to adapt to emerging literacy practices.For her, the shift from a print-based academic culture, to a more digitally-based one, posed a muchgreater challenge for many academics than for students.LINGUISTICS: So I think we in the university have to learn more about student’s readinghabits and practices and to rethink our assumptions. And we are probably going to have tomake big adjustments about what it is that students do these days when they study.Findings from task analysisAlong with the conducting of interviews with staff about reading requirements, the research alsocollected samples of the various academic tasks set by these staff on their courses. Each of the taskscompiled in the corpus involved a reading component of some kind, and included the following formats:1 weekly exercises and questions, set principally for the purpose of lecture and tutorialpreparation/review228 www.ielts.org