IELTS Research Reports

Construct validity in the IELTS Academic Reading testIn a Keynesian short-run model of a two sector economy, suppose that savings are greater thanplanned investment. This will result in _________ _________ in inventories.a) unplanned, increases b) unplanned, decreasesc) planned, increases d) planned, decreasesSample A13. Gap fill question - EconomicsSuch formats, on the face of it, bear a close resemblance to some of the IELTS reading task types wehave seen. One needs to be mindful however, of an important difference in the processes involved incompleting tasks in these two contexts. On the IELTS test, test-takers have access to the informationrequired to complete tasks i.e. as information contained in the reading passage. This is not normallythe case in subject-based examinations, where students are not usually permitted access to readingmaterials during the exam. Thus the two contexts rely arguably on different cognitive processes – inthe IELTS test, these mainly involve the locating and comprehending of specific information to befound in the reading materials; in the examination format there is a distinctive “memory and recall”component to the required form of engagement.Such differences relate very much to the very different purposes of reading in the two domains. Ina reading test such as IELTS, the focus is more on assessing the extant skill level of tests takers; inuniversity exam items, such as in the examples we have seen above, the focus is less on skill, andmore on the extent to which students have acquired key knowledge in the discipline area. In short,in the university context, content is salient; in a language testing context, it is largely incidental. Theimplications of this difference for test design are discussed in more detail in Section 5 of the report.GLOBAL and LITERALAccording to the study’s analytical schema, tasks of a ‘global-literal’ configuration are those thatrequire primarily basic comprehension of textual material (literal) in relation to larger textual units– i.e. whole texts as well as multiple texts (global). It was noted that almost all tasks in our corpusfitting these patterns were assignment tasks (i.e. out of class tasks, set as part of the major assessmentrequirements on courses). Most, but not all, came from the ‘softer’ humanities disciplines. Examplesof such task types are presented and discussed below.Summary tasks - single textWe saw in the previous section (‘local–literal’), a number of tasks requiring the summary of a singleconcept (eg ‘thermal energy’ in Physics; ‘speech acts’ in Linguistics). Tasks requiring the summary ofa single whole text were relatively uncommon in the corpus. The following from the History subject,involving here the summary of a book chapter, was a rare example.Secondary source summaryOne of the most important skills in conducting research in history is the ability to comprehend aparticular text, and then to summarise its major arguments and conclusions in your own words.For this exercise, you need to read chapter X of The path to genocide by Christopher Browning,and then write a 500 word summary.Sample A14. Assignment task – HistoryIELTS Research Reports Volume 11233