IELTS Research Reports

An empirical investigation of the process of writing Academic Readingtest items for the International English Language Testing System4 ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS FROM INTERVIEWS AND FOCUS GROUPDISCUSSIONS4.1 Non-Experienced IELTS Item Writer GroupSession 1: participant discussion of their experience with their commission to select anappropriate IELTS academic reading text, edit and adapt for testing purposes and generatetest items.This first information collection exercise was organised as a researcher-led discussion session. Hereparticipants discussed their experience with their commission to select an appropriate IELTS academicreading text, edit and adapt it for testing purposes and generate test items. Each of the participants inturn (see Table 10 in Appendix B for cv and other information on them) was first invited to describethe processes through which an ‘IELTS’ text was selected and adapted, then reading test itemscreated. The intended ethos was participant-centred and informal, with discussion welcomed of eachparticipant’s initial account of the experience concerned. Both researchers were present but played alow-key role, intervening infrequently and informally. All proceedings were recorded (see above).4.1.1 IELTS Text search, selection and characterisationThe experiential information provided orally by the three participants on the selection of potentialreading texts for IELTS use during the first discussion session of the day is summarised in Table 1,which analyses responses by the three participants according to criteria emerging from the analysis ofthe transcripts made by the researchers.Source/ Influence?Item WriterVictoria Mathilda MaryOwn interest √ √Other’s interest√Web √ √ √IELTS website √ √Published IELTS papers √ √ √Magazines, journals √ √NewspapersBookshops√√Environment topics√Table 1. Non-Experienced Participants: Sources of, and influences on IELTS academicreading module text selectionTable 1 may be read, for example, as indicating that, in their accounts of IELTS text selection, bothVictoria and Mathilda (all participant names used throughout this report are pseudonyms) referredin the discussion to using, among other sources, magazines and journals in their selection of suitabletexts. For all three participants, it will be noted from the table (and the three non-experienced itemIELTS Research Reports Volume 11279