IELTS Research Reports

Tim Moore, Janne Morton and Steve PriceGenre readings of textsA final type of reading evident in the academic corpus is what we have called ‘genre readings of texts’.As noted, a number of reading tasks in the corpus required a focus not so much on the contents oftexts, but rather on the ways in which ‘texts are put together’ (The focus of such tasks was on suchtextual features as rhetorical organisation, sentence structures, lexical choices and so on). In someof these tasks, it was noted, the main purpose was a more utilitarian one; that is, for students to ‘get afeel for the genre’, as one informant described it, so that they might emulate the particular written stylein their own work. In other tasks, the purpose was more a critical or ‘deconstructive’ one, with studentsneeding to identify how language operates in texts to create certain meanings – including ‘ideologicalmeanings’.As was mentioned, these types of ‘genre readings’, which take in both more ‘pragmatic’ approaches(Johns, 1997; Allison, 1996; Swales, 1990) and more critical approaches (Shor, 1999; Street, 2003),reflect the increasing role of textual analysis activities in academic study. It is fair to say that readingssuch as this were not really apparent in the IELTS corpus compiled for the study.An explanation for differencesThe study has identified a number of differences between reading demands in the two domains, evenif they are ones that can be readily accounted for. Arguably, the purpose of a test of reading is to assessstudents’ abilities to process written text. In this context, as we have seen, the actual contents of thereading tend to be somewhat incidental. In university study, by contrast, such content – which relatesto study in a discipline – is of paramount important. Thus, in university study, there is not the sameinterest in the skills of reading per se; instead acts of reading, as we have seen, are tied intimatelyto the acquisition, application, and ultimately to the advancement of disciplinary knowledge. Thiscontrast in the role of knowledge in the two domains necessarily entails some quite basic differencesin the nature of the texts students need to read, and what it is students need to do when they read them.6 IMPLICATIONS OF FINDINGS FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF THEREADING TESTIn considering the implications of the study, there are arguably two key questions that need tobe addressed:1 Is there a case for making some modification to the IELTS Academic Reading Test?2 If so, how could the test be modified?6.1 Should the IELTS Reading Test be modified?In relation to the first question, the general push in language assessment to maximise a test’s‘authenticity’ would suggest that some modification to the IELTS reading test is at least worthconsidering. Bachman and Palmer (1996) define “inauthenticity as that situation where the linkbetween the TLU task and the test task is weak”. Whilst the findings of the task analysis do not suggestoverall a ‘weak’ link between tasks in the two domains, they do suggest that it is one that could at leastbe strengthened. Such a view was also reflected in the responses of some of the academic informantsin our study, where it was felt that the demands of the test might be brought more into line with thetype of reading required on their courses.250 www.ielts.org