IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger HawkeyFigure 3. Results for Flesch Kincaid grade level and Coh-Metrix readability estimates fororiginal source texts and adapted IELTS textsNB lower scores on Flesch Kincaid and higher scores on Coh-Metrix represent greater reading ease.5.1 The Non-Experienced GroupVictoria’s text:How the brain turns reality into dreams: Tests involving Tetris point to the role played by‘implicit memories’ Kathleen WrenMSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com published online Oct. 12, 2001Victoria’s text was a science feature published on the website of online news service MSNBC.It describes research into the nature of dreams recently reported in the journal Science. The text isorganised around a problem-solution pattern. The problem is that of accounting for how dreams relateto memory. The solution is provided by new research, based on the dreams of amnesiacs, identifyingdreams with implicit rather than declarative memories.Victoria made the most extensive changes of all the untrained writers, making revisions to all butone of the paragraphs in her text with a total of 77 edits. Uniquely, among writers in both groups heradapted text was longer (by 44 words) than her source. It also involved an increase in AWL wordsand a reduction in the most frequent words (BNC 1,000 word level) in the text (Figure 1 and Figure2). However, in common with all the writers in the study except Mathilda, the effect of Victoria’sadaptations was to increase the proportion of words with a frequency in the BNC of one in 3,000or higher.Victoria reported that in editing the text she wanted to make it more academic in register and thereforebetter suited to the context of university study. She had achieved this, she said, by increasing the300 www.ielts.org