IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger HawkeyItem writingVictoria Mathilda MaryKnew the 10 task types, returned toIELTS Website hand out re format andstylistic aspects of task typesLooked at task types (IELTS websitesays 10 different types) checked whichwould suit the textMatching task (paras with researchernames) selected to test summary ofmain text topicsher ‘fixing up’ of the text ‘summons upthe kind of task types there are’; so shecould see e.g. MCQ, wanted to do aY?N?NG (students ‘have a hard timewith NG’; ended up doing another typeas well she ‘forgot to stop’.text very ‘driven by definitions, whichlend themselves to ‘confusing testtakers’;so a lot of her MCQ definitional;test-takers can be led astray by MCQtext bits adjacent to the term;MCQ items testing whether Cs ‘havekept up with the order’;linked items with reading purposese.g. careful reading where you haveto ‘go back to text and work hard tounderstand it’MCQ distractors of similar lengths butnot necessarily the same style?tried to keep the items in the order ofthe text as with IELTSwished there were only 3 alternatives;4th just an ‘add on’, ‘just rubbish’, easyfor test-taker to spotasks ‘can you use words that you know,not in the text’; Must it be ion the text?What’s the rule?Victoria not much practice in SAQs; toomany alternative responses; hard togenerate all possible answersdeciding which bits of info in text orwhich passages to summarise, makingdecisions on that in parallel; back andforth at same timedecided to use matching paras withshort summaries task as …moresuitable’ for this type of textused true / false / not given task …’putin a few correct ones, made up a fewothers’ e.g. collapsing info ‘that did notreally go together …’ to reveal lack ofunderstandingTested vocab. e.g. ‘if you don’t knowthat adjacent means next then you don’tknow whether that info is correct ornot…’ iMCQ suitable task for text as it has textlots of straightforward info suitable?relatively easy finding distractors:easy to find similar info which could beselected ‘if you don’t look properly or ifyou understood it half way’found a fine line between good andbad distractors, and also betweendistractors ‘which could also be correct… because the text might suggest itand also because …. you could actuallyaccept it as a correct answer’marked up text suitable for items i.e.that seemed important for overallunderstanding and ‘for local, smallerbits of info where I thought I would beable to ask questions’; then made upitems, vocab, others asking for longerstretches as text ‘sort of like offereditself’.Adjusting if she felt that they wereeither too easy (distractors obviouslywrong , didn’t really test anything oritem wording did not make clear what Imean)Regrets not testing items with someone.‘if you …. word them and reword themand go over them again you ….losetouch with it and don’t really understandit yourself anymore’.summary completion task suited densityof description of an experimentshort paraphrasal text with candidatesto use words from text in new context,to check their understandingdidn’t just want to test vocab. meaning;tried to elicit specific answersfavoured the control offered by multiplechoice (MCQ) but now felt she shouldhave been more careful in designingdistractorsoften had difficulty finding the 4thalternativeshould there be distractors not actuallyin the text but from test designer’smind?should we actually add to text to getdistractors? Mary thinks no as it impairsauthenticitynever threw any questions away, but diddispense with ‘a couple of distractors’IELTS items do not have to be in theorder the item topic appears in the text?282 www.ielts.org