IELTS Research Reports

An empirical investigation of the process of writing Academic Readingtest items for the International English Language Testing SystemThrew away only one or two items butmodified about half or her original itemsThought the Website said all the itemsare in the order they are in in the textShort answer questions (SAQs) may begood for definitions, tooWhich of your sections you happiest with?Victoria Mathilda Marylikes her T/F NG – it worksStylistically her MCQ wrong becausethe items are of uneven length, thoughthe questions are ‘sort of OK’In her SAQs she is not convinced theanswers are the only ones possibleMCQ strongest, not a NS so can‘imagine what it’s like’ so easier to‘make up the wrong ones’!Task type 7, summary info to matchparas, too vague, so her worstmatching (sentences to researchernames) the best.summary completion task the easiest towrite so perhaps the worst!MCQ task actually the worst because ofher difficulty finding the final distractorssummary completion the easiest – sothe worst No her first section (thematchings)Table 3. Non-Experienced Participants descriptions of the item writing processItem writer Victoria had begun by visiting the official IELTS website for information and samplesof academic reading module topics and task types. She then, like all the three untrained participants,carried out an internet search for potential topics which she had already identified (there were six ofthese) and selected the one of most interest to her, i.e. neuro-linguistic programming. The text on this,however, she rejected as ‘too technical, too specialist’, as she did her next text, on the Japanese teaceremony, which though ‘a really pretty text’, she found too ‘instructional’, and - a common themein text selection - biased in favour of particular candidate groups. Victoria’s final choice she ratedimmediately as the kind of ‘really studious’ topic ‘that IELTS uses’, namely: How the Brain TurnsReality into Dreams (see Section 7 below for the full description of the text concerned). For Victoria,the search was about ‘choosing a text, looking at it, deciding what I can do with it’.Victoria, as we shall see emphasised in the next section, was from the outset viewing prospective textsin terms of what she could do with them to make them suitable as IELTS texts with appropriate tasksto go with them. The Dreams text she found right because it was ‘pseudo-scientific’, a view shared byall three in the group as characterising IELTS texts (see below) and, significant for our discussions oftest text adaptation in the section below, because it ‘lent itself to being fixed up’ (Victoria’s frequentterm for adapting texts).Mathilda confessed to being initially unsure of the level of difficulty and complexity of IELTS readingtexts. Her visit to the IELTS Website suggested to her ‘sort of’ scientific texts but not too specific,specialist; ‘a bit more populist, kind of thing’. She then carried out a search, guided by topics fittingthis construct, and which were ‘very up-to date’ and which ‘nowadays should interest most people’.She thus used search terms such as ‘environment’ and ‘future’ but rejected several texts as toospecialist, too material-intensive given the IELTS reading time limit. Mathilda saved four possibletexts and made her final choice, of the one on environmentally friendly cities of the future, which shefound engaging, information rich and apparently suitable for test questions.Mary found the text search time-consuming and quite difficult. She had started by checking withIELTS tests in the Cambridge Practice Tests for IELTS series, focusing in particular on their subjectIELTS Research Reports Volume 11283