IELTS Research Reports

An empirical investigation of the process of writing Academic Readingtest items for the International English Language Testing Systemcomplexity of sentences, using passive forms and hedges to create academic distance and by adding amethodology section to the article.There are a number of changes that would seem to be directed at making the text appear lessjournalistic. A reference to ‘Friday’s issue of Science’ in the opening paragraph, which reflects thenews value of the article, is removed (although this is the only reference in the article to another text).These changes include reframing the relationship between writer and reader. The original textaddresses the reader as ‘you’, while the revised version instead employs ‘we’, passive constructionsor, in one case, ‘subjects’ (in the sense of research subjects). Contractions are replaced with full formsor alternative constructions, as in, ‘the hippocampus isn’t is not active during REM sleep’ or thesubstitution of ‘people with amnesia shouldn’t dream’ by ‘individuals suffering with amnesia shouldnot be capable of dreaming’.Further changes to the text seem to reflect the intention to achieve a more formal, academic register.These include the use of less frequent vocabulary – ‘different parts of the brain’ becomes ‘a regionof the brain’; nominalisation – ‘But they can still affect your behavior’ becomes ‘But they still havethe potential to affect behaviour’ (note that Victoria changes behavior to behaviour to reflect Britishspelling conventions); use of reporting verbs – ‘said’ becomes ‘states’, ‘believes’ becomes ‘upholds’;references to research procedures – ‘therefore’ becomes ‘from these results’, ‘the people in thestudy…’ becomes ‘The methodology designed for Stickgold’s study had two groups of subjects…’;and hedging – ‘Much of the fodder for our dreams comes from recent experiences’ in the original textis prefixed in the adapted version with ‘Such research suggests that…’.Pronoun references are made more explicit: ‘That’s called episodic memory’ becomes ‘To differentiatethis information from declarative memory, this particular [form] of recollection is referred to byscientists as episodic memory’ and ‘…the procedural memory system, which stores information…’is expanded to give ‘…the procedural memory system. This particular system stores information…’Victoria does not generally choose to replace technical vocabulary with more frequent alternatives,but in one case does add a gloss that does not occur in the source: ‘amnesia, or memory loss’. Shereplaces one instance of ‘amnesiacs’ with ‘people suffering from memory loss’, but in three otherinstances she chooses to use ‘amnesiacs’ directly as it appears in the source text and in a fourthreplaces it with ‘the amnesiac group’. She also follows the source text in glossing such terms suchas ‘neocortex’, ‘hippocampus’ and ‘hypnogagia’, but (again following the source) chooses not togloss ‘REM sleep’. Victoria’s changes make the text more difficult to read by the Flesch-Kincaidgrade level estimate, which is based on word and sentence length, but easier according to theCoh-Metrix readability formula (Crossley et al 2008), which reflects vocabulary frequency,similarity of syntax across sentences and referential cohesion. (Figure 3).Mathilda’s TextHow—and Where—Will We Live in 2015? The future is now for sustainable cities in theU.K., China, and U.A.E. by Andrew Grant, Julianne Pepitone, Stephen CassDiscover Magazine: http://discovermagazine.com, published online October 8, 2008Mathilda made the fewest changes of any writer to her source text, which came from Discover, aCanadian magazine concerned with developments in science, technology and medicine. This text alsohas a problem-solution structure, although it is more factual and descriptive and less evaluative thanIELTS Research Reports Volume 11301