IELTS Research Reports

Tim Moore, Janne Morton and Steve Pricewe typically [want students] to pick out … the key points in the reading. But we also wantthem to reflect on what they have read and always relate it to their … work somehow.In the academic corpus, it was noted that two types of interpretative reading tasks predominated– what we have termed application and evaluation. In application-related tasks, students weretypically required to show how a concept or idea in their reading could be utilised in their workin the discipline; in evaluative tasks, the focus was more on making some explicit assessment ofthese concepts (eg with respect to their validity, worth etc). Of these two interpretative modes, theapplication-related tasks were found to be the more common.We note in passing that interpretations such as these tend to be very much discipline-based (McPeck,1992), evident not only in the specific concepts and ideas that students need to engage with, but alsoin the types of ‘interpretations’ they need to make of these concepts along the way. Indeed for somescholars, the process of being trained in a discipline is often characterised in these precise terms;that is, to learn the particular ways in which certain concepts are ‘applied’ and ‘evaluated’ within afield (Lave & Wenger, 1991). As Bourdieu (1990) points out, such practices are not only cognitive innature, but are effective when assimilated into habituated dispositions. The strong discipline-base ofthese more interpretative forms of reading may provide some explanation for the apparent absenceof these modes among the various IELTS tasks collected for the study. We can also recognise in thissituation, the challenges that would be involved in incorporating such modes into any possible adaptedversion of the test.Readings of multiple textsAnother difference noted between the two domains was the quantity of reading required to completesome tasks. As we saw, all tasks in the IELTS corpus were focused on engagement with a singletext (the relevant reading passage), and in the case of some task-types, a focus on relatively smallcomponents of the text. In contrast, a feature of some of the academic tasks, especially in the morehumanities areas, was the need for students to engage with a range of texts. Examples of such taskswere: i) summary tasks which required students to give an account of a variety of sources in relationto a particular topic; and ii) essay tasks requiring the exploration of a range of views as a prelude tostudents presenting their own views on the topic.Some of the academic tasks, as we saw, alluded again to a particular conception of knowledge,one that sees knowledge in a discipline being advanced through processes of debate and dialoguebetween scholars, as opposed to the furnishing of single, definitive answers to issues and problems.Several informants were sure that it was only through the engagement with multiple sources thatstudents could develop a suitably critical frame in their studies. As one informant explained it,students might feel they have come across “a perfectly reasonable answer” to a question, but that theyare in fact only in a position to presume this if they’ve had the opportunity to “measure this answeragainst alternatives”.The contextual nature of readingReading in the two domains was also seen to differ around the notion of context. One observationmade about the IELTS samples provided to informants was the apparent lack of an underlyingintellectual purpose for the particular questions posed in tasks; that is to say, that in many tasks, theparticular items of information needing to be focused on appeared, on the face of it, to be ratherarbitrary. In contrast, it was suggested that it is the nature of university study that there is usually aclear purpose and context for the type of reading that students need to do. As one informant explained248 www.ielts.org