IELTS Research Reports

Construct validity in the IELTS Academic Reading testit, such a context – which is created at once by the broader knowledge base of a discipline, and alsoby the immediate demands of tasks and assignments set within courses – “serves to make it clear tostudents what [information] is important and what is not”.This disparity between reading in the testing and academic domains has been commented on in theliterature. Alderson (2000) notes after Barton (1994) that it is rarely the case in academic study,that reading as an activity is performed in vacuo; that is, without being related in some way to otheracademic activities. A concept invoked to capture this idea is ‘literacy event’, described by Barton andHamilton (1998, p 9) as a series of observable activities mediated by text. As Alderson explains it:Often literacy events – TLU reading tasks – are not undertaken in isolation. .. A courseworkreading assignment leads to note-taking, which leads to further reading, to drafting a writtenpaper, re-reading the draft critically (Alderson, 2000, p 148).To accommodate this feature of academic study within the IELTS test is undoubtedly a challenge;as Weir et al (2009) suggest, full contextual authenticity “is generally unrealistic for languageassessments” (p 12). The suggestion from one of the study’s informants was to construct tasks aroundspecific study ‘scenarios’, ones that would seek to place the reading of test passages into some realworldcontext for students.The reading – writing nexusArguably one of the more significant literacy events in academic study is that which involves theintegrating of one’s reading on a topic into some related writing activity (Horowitz, 1986; Moore &Morton, 2007). This was evident in many of the academic tasks analysed in the study, with virtually allof the assignment-style tasks in the corpus having a substantive reading component attached to them.A number of informants commented on the importance of this reading–writing nexus, seeing it as anarea of particular challenge to students. Concern was expressed here about students’ abilities to useand document sources appropriately, along with perceptions about the growing incidence of plagiarismon courses. Several informants noted the absence of these reading–writing connections in the sampleIELTS materials provided, and wondered whether this dimension of academic reading could beincorporated into the test somehow.Information literacyAnother area thought to have limited coverage in the test related to the skills involved in locating,selecting and evaluating information sources. In their discussions of the reading practices of students,a number of informants noted the opportunities, but also the considerable challenges created forstudents by the increasing online environment of academic study. As we saw, concern was expressedthat students did not always bring a particularly ‘discerning’ attitude to the vast textual resources nowavailable to them. The response of some of our informants to this situation was increasingly to adoptan ‘information literacy’ approach in their teaching, with students called upon to appraise texts in somebroader social context, and to develop an awareness of such matters as the context of their production,their authorship, communicative purpose, and ultimately their ‘reliability’ as sources.It was noted by some informants that the increasingly important skills related to the searching andselecting of sources appeared to have little or no coverage in the IELTS reading test. Indeed, thetendency of IELTS tasks to focus on quite specific items of information in reading passages, wouldseem to limit the possibilities of appraising texts in the broader social and contextual terms of an‘information literacies’ approach (Shapiro & Hughes, 1996).IELTS Research Reports Volume 11249