IELTS Research Reports

Construct validity in the IELTS Academic Reading testThis lecturer went on to explain that from the outset on his course, he did not want students to see textsfundamentally as “repositories of information and facts”, but rather as the expression of particularways of seeing and constructing the world:MEDIA STUDIES: There’s a need for students to have an argumentative, conceptual, evenideological understanding of material. [I tell them that when] they come to university theyneed to learn how to critique … well everything ... You question all that you read, and all thatyour lecturer gives you, and I can’t see much evidence of this in the test.The concerns of the Linguistics lecturer related more to what she saw as the non-contextual natureof reading on the IELTS test. What was notable about reading at university, she thought, was thatit always operates within a context, one which is shaped by the discipline itself and also by theparticular task with which students are engaged. This, she thought, was a feature strongly lacking inthe IELTS test:LINGUISTICS: There is a broader context for interpreting the reading which universitystudents have because they have a purpose for assignments, and the discipline serves to makeit clear what is important and what is not. … so [in the IELTS test], this is quite strange anddifficult to relate to because the tasks are completely out of context. What is missing is thepurpose for knowing this information.This lecturer thought that a way to improve the test in this regard would be to construct tasks aroundparticular contexts of study (or ‘scenarios’), which could serve to provide this sense of purpose:LINGUISTICS: I think a good way to go would be if students had some backgroundinformation like: “You are a student. You are studying blah blah blah, you need to know X,Yand Z in order to complete a certain assignment. This is the context for your reading. Nowtry and answer some specific questions. How would this information be useful to you andwhy?” Because that is the sort of expectations we have of students.5 SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION OF FINDINGSA range of findings have been presented so far, drawn from the two methodologies employed in thestudy; namely, the analysis of the IELTS and academic tasks, and the interviews with academic staff.In what follows we provide a summary of these findings focusing on:1 main findings, which are those patterns to emerge from the data as a whole, and2 more specific findings, which relate to particular areas of the data.5.1 Main findingsIELTS reading vs academic readingA feature of the study’s design was the development of an analytical framework that would allowsystematic comparison to be made between reading requirements in the two domains – IELTS andacademic study. As discussed, this framework took in two dimensions: i) the ‘level’ of engagementwith text, which distinguished between a more ‘local’ and a more ‘global’ engagement with material;and ii) the ‘type’ of engagement, where the distinction was one between more ‘literal’ and more‘interpretative’ readings of this material. Drawing on this analysis, we can say there is evidence in theIELTS Research Reports Volume 11245