IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger Hawkeymatter. She had then searched in magazines such as the New Statesman, the Economist and the NewScientist, as well as newspaper magazine sections. Articles from these sections she rejected becauseof their length (Mary ‘would have struggled to edit down’), complexity or cultural bias. Mary pursuedthe topic of robots online after reading a newspaper article on the subject, although this had been muchtoo short for IELTS purposes. Mary then searched the BBC website without finding texts she feltshe would not have to edit too heavily -something (see below) Mary expressed particular antipathytowards doing. Finally, through Google News Mary found an article on robots which she consideredat the right level of difficulty, grammar and range: expressing opinions, yet with an appropriatedescriptive element. The piece Mary said ‘would have been something I would have read at uni. had Istudied anything like this!’4.1.3 Participant focus group discussionsThe non-experienced group participated next in a focus group discussion structured around a setof nine semantic differential continua (Osgood, 1957) using the unlabelled scale format (comparedwith other formats by Garland, 1996) and as seen in Table 4 below. In the table, summaries of thecomments made by the participants in their 25 minutes of unmediated discussion are placed in theirapproximate location on the continua for the nine scales. The adjectives for the continua were selectedby the researchers.ClearChoosing texts(victoria, mary)IELTS readingtexts supposedto be at threedifferent levels(victoria)Balancing generalvs specific items(mary)Getting textsthe right level(mathilda)Whether itemsshould be in orderof the text (mary)Guidelines on thetarget readingconstruct?Designing 4 goodmcq distractors(mary, victoria,mathilda)Lack of guidelineson how tasksare made andassessed(mathilda, mary,victoria)CONFUSINGInterestingAchieving goodtext and items(victoria, mary)Writing items(mary)Literary, fictiontexts would be(mathilda)Trying to drivethe process, notletting the textdrive it (victoria)Finding the text(mary)Informative texts(mathilda)Finding items(mathilda)DULLBut might not beappropriate (mary,victoria)Everything! (Mary)Time-consumingLooking for texts(mathilda)Developing items(mary)Editing (mary,victoria)Editing (mathilda)QUICK284 www.ielts.org