IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger HawkeyTable 6 summarises the characteristics of target IELTS-type texts as interpreted by the four participants.The experienced writers seemed to share with the non-experienced group the perception of IELTStexts: subjects of popular interest presented in a formal, report-like format, academic in tone but not sotechnical that non-specialist readers would be handicapped in understanding them. As with the nonexperiencedgroup, there were differences between participants in the attention given to different textfeatures. William was particularly concerned with issues of bias and cultural sensitivity while Janeseemed to pay most attention initially to the suitability of a text for supporting certain item types.Perceived IELTS text characteristicsItem WriterJane Anne William ElizabethAcademic 1 2 2 3Including a number of ideas/ opinions 2 1 1Factual 1 1Not too specialist 1 1 1Accessible to the general reader 1 2 2Not too technical (for item writer to understand) 1 2Avoidance of bias, offence 1 2 5 1Small and specific rather than big and general 1Cohesion 1 1 1 1Range/ complexity 1Suitability for (multiple) task types 3 1 1 2Table 6. Experienced Participants: Perceived characteristics of IELTS academic readingmodule textsAs with their non-experienced counterparts, the four experienced item-writers were asked to sketchflowcharts of the ways they had located, edited and prepared items for their IELTS academic readingtests, after which they were invited in turn to explain their flowcharts. In the following section weanalyse the four experienced item writers’ discussions. As above, these were transcribed and coded fortopic before the semi-quantitative summary analysis as presented in Tables 5 and 6. The discussion issummarised in Table 7.Three of the four item writers involved were able to use texts that they already had on file, although inWilliam’s case, this was because his initial effort to find a new text had failed. Anne reported that inbetween commissions she would regularly retain promising IELTS texts that she had found and that inthis case she had found a suitable text on the topic of laughter (although actually finding that she hada suitable IELTS text on file was rare for her). From the outset, the potential for the text to generateitems was a key concern. An ongoing challenge for Anne was to locate texts that included enoughdiscrete points of information or opinions to support enough items to fulfil an IELTS commission:‘with a lot of articles, the problem is they say the same thing in different ways’.The propositional ‘complexity’ of the text seemed to be of central concern so that a suitable text ‘maynot be for the academic reader, it may be for the interested layperson… if the complexity is right’.On the other hand there was a danger with more clearly academic texts of what Anne called ‘overcomplexity’:‘over-complexity is when the research itself or the topic itself needs so much specialist288 www.ielts.org