IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger Hawkeyreported feeling ‘nervous about IELTS in particular because there are so many rules that arise,sometimes unexpectedly’ and so he usually sought to ‘play safe’ with the topics he chose.William scanned the text from the source book and worked with it on his PC. He reported that he wouldusually shorten the text by cutting it at this point to ‘a little over the maximum’. He would then workon the items and text together with a split screen, adapting the text ‘to make sure it fits the tasks’. Inchoosing the tasks, he would ask himself which tasks ‘fit the specifications’ and, ideally, ‘leap out fromthe text’, but also which are ‘worth the effort’ and ‘pay better’. On this basis ‘if I can avoid multiplechoice I will’ because he found that multiple choice items (in fact the item type with the highest tariff)took much longer to write than other types. He would ensure that the tasks ‘work’ and would change thetext ‘to fit’ as necessary. The text was not ‘sacrosanct’, but could be adapted as required.Jane, reported that she did not ‘normally’ store texts on file, but went to certain sources regularly onreceiving a commission. On this occasion she looked for a new source. As ‘case studies’ had beenrequested in a recent IELTS commission, she took this as a starting point and searched for this phraseon the internet. There were ‘quite a few texts’ that she looked at before taking a decision on which touse. Typically, Jane takes an early decision on the task types that would best suit a text: ‘somethinglike multiple choice requires a completely different text to True/False’. As she first scanned it, sheidentified the text she eventually chose as being suitable for ‘certain task types, not really suitablefor others’. She also noticed that it contained too much technical detail, which she would need to cut.She claimed that texts are ‘nearly always three times, if not four times the length that we need’. Therewas then a process of ‘just cutting it and cutting it and cutting it, deciding which information you cantarget and which bits of the text will be suitable for particular task types’. Like the others she used asplit screen to work on the items and text simultaneously.290 www.ielts.org