IELTS Research Reports

Tim Moore, Janne Morton and Steve Price1 most reading tasks in the corpus fitting a local-literal configuration tended to be in theform of short weekly exercise tasks or examination questions, and were set principally forthe purpose of either inputting or testing a student’s understanding of key foundationalknowledge in the discipline. Such tasks were linked very much to readings fromprescribed textbooks in subjects.2 most reading tasks that fitted the other configurations from the matrix (global-literal,local-interpretative, global-interpretative) tended to be related to more extended writtenassignment tasks, and often involved readings from a variety of genres: monographs (orsections of monographs); research articles; newspapers and magazines; internet sites etc.3 the variety of assessment requirements across the disciplines pointed to some disciplinebaseddifferences in reading modes, with local-literal patterns more prominent in the hardertechnical disciplines, and global-interpretative more so in the softer humanities disciplines.4.3 Findings from interviews – Comments on IELTS reading tasksIn this final results section, we turn again to the responses from informants in the interviews. Asdescribed earlier, the interview was divided into three phases, covering discussion of: i) generalreading requirements on courses; ii) reading requirements on specific assessment tasks; and, in the finalphase iii) perceptions regarding the correspondence between reading requirements on courses and thoseon the IELTS reading test. To facilitate discussion in this final part of the interview, informants wereprovided with samples of IELTS reading tasks and asked to comment on perceived similarities anddifferences in reading requirements in the two domains (Appendix 2a). They were also asked to speculateon how useful they thought these sample IELTS tasks were likely to be as preparation for the readingdemands of their courses. Responses to these questions were of three broad types:1 an overall positive view of the relationship between reading in the two domains2 a more qualified view of the relationship3 a critical view of the relationship.As has been the case in previous parts of the study, there was an identifiable disciplinary bias in theresponses of informants, with those more positive about the relationship generally coming from themore technical areas, and those having a more critical view from the humanities disciplines.Those who commented most favourably on the relationship between the test and study on theircourses were the lecturers from Computer Science, Engineering, Biology, Business Studies, andCommunications, comprising almost half the study’s informants (5 out of 12). In general, theseinformants saw a clear connection between some of the IELTS task types and the types of tasks set ontheir courses, as seen in the following comments:BIOLOGY: I think the skills required here [on the IELTS test] would be very closelyaligned to what I would expect a student in first-year biology to come to terms with. There’sa fair bit of reading there and a fair bit of basic comprehension, and that is certainly what ourstudents need.COMPUTER SCIENCE: Our exam questions are not dissimilar to some of the questions[on IELTS]. [This is] certainly true of the multiple-choice format, not so much true or false.One of the questions in our exam also involves the students rearranging lines of code in orderto create a logical program, and that looks like at least one of the items in this material.242 www.ielts.org