IELTS Research Reports

Construct validity in the IELTS Academic Reading testThe ever-expanding influence of IELTS – and especially its curriculum effects on programs of Englishfor Academic Purposes – provide additional impetus for modification of some form.Clearly however, there are important practical considerations in any push to institute changes to awell-established test such as IELTS. One can point to a number of caveats. The first of these relatesto the broad issue of achieving the right balance between the validity of a test and its reliability(Wigglesworth & Elder, 1996). For the IELTS academic reading test, this would include, amongother things, ensuring that any modified version of the test fit with the overall structure of the currentIELTS battery eg for the reading test to remain as a separate test of reading without significant overlapwith other modules such as writing (Charge & Taylor, 1997); and for it to be retained as a clericallymarkablemodule within the battery. A second caveat relates to the difficulty of accommodating themany different versions of academic reading we have seen in the study all within the one test. Muchof this variety, as was noted, arose from the quite different reading demands evident in differentdisciplines and programs. This suggests a need to be prudent in selecting the type of reading tasks onthe test, so as to avoid having items which may be pertinent in one disciplinary area, but have littlerelevance to others.A final consideration is the matter of what one can reasonably expect an objective test of reading tocover. On this point, Taylor (2007) suggests we need to recognise the limits to which a test such asIELTS can simulate (and indeed should be expected to simulate) language use in the target situation.Thus, she notes that “IELTS is designed principally to test readiness to enter the world of universitylevelstudy in the English language”, and does not assume that test takers have already mastered theskills they are likely to need (original emphasis, p 482). Taylor goes on to explain that students willoften “need to develop many of these skills during their course of study”, including those “skills… specific to their academic domain”. Such an understanding was voiced, as we saw, by at leastone of the study’s informants who suggested that the onus was clearly on academic staff to developdiscipline-specific capacities “within courses”.6.2 How could the IELTS Reading Test be modified?If any modifications were to be made to the academic reading test, one useful principle to employ,we believe, would be to seek to push test tasks, or at least a proportion of them, in the direction of themore global/more interpretive regions of the analytical matrix used in the study, as shown in Figure 9.In what follows we provide a number of sample tasks, where the intention is to indicate how we thinksome of these less-covered areas of the matrix could have some coverage in the test. The samples havebeen divided up into three areas of ‘extension’, each relating to the three under-represented quadrantsof our matrix viz:1 Extension 1: Local/Interpretative2 Extension 2: Global/Literal3 Extension 3: Global/InterpretativeIELTS Research Reports Volume 11251