IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger HawkeyVictoria’s. The article portrays three new city developments in diverse locations that are all intended toaddress ecological problems. The majority of the text is devoted to describing the innovative featuresof each city in turn: transport, power and irrigation systems.Mathilda reported that she too had found her text on the internet after looking at examples of IELTSmaterial from the IELTS website. Although she would have preferred a more emotionally engagingliterary text, she looked for such popular science topics as ‘the environment’, ‘dreams’ and ‘the future’in the belief that these were closer to the topics of the IELTS texts she had seen. After briefly scanninga large number of possible texts, she saved four to her computer for more detailed consideration.She had considered using a text concerning the evolution of the human skeleton, but rejected this asbeing too technical: ‘pure biology’. She made her choice because she felt it was ‘easy to read’ and hadsufficient information to support a large number of questions. In common with both Mary and Victoria,she found choosing the text the most time consuming element in the process.In editing the text Mathilda cut the attribution and removed the pictures, but left the text itself largelyuntouched. All four of the textual edits that she made involved replacing relatively infrequent wordswith more frequent alternatives: ‘gas-guzzling cars’, which she felt was too idiomatic, became ‘gasconsumingcars’. Relatively technical terms were replaced with more frequent words; ‘photovoltaicpanels’ was replaced with ‘solar technology’; ‘potable water’ with ‘drinking water’ and ‘irrigate’ with‘water’. These changes somewhat increased the proportion of very frequent and AWL words (panels,technology), and reduced the proportion of very infrequent words, but did not affect the length of thetext (748 words) or the readability estimates.Mary’s textThe Rise of the Emotional Robot by Paul MarksFrom issue 2650 of New Scientist magazine, pages 24-25, published 05 April 2008As noted in Section 5 above, Mary eventually chose a source text from New Scientist, the science andtechnology magazine noted by Weir et al. (2009b) as a popular source for IELTS texts. Unlike bothMathilda and Victoria, Mary chose a source text that, at 1,094 words needed to be pruned to bringit within the maximum IELTS word limit of 950 words. This text, like Victoria’s, reports on recentresearch. The writer reports two studies in some detail and cites the views of other researchers. Thesituation of human emotional engagement with robots is described and solutions involving makingrobots appear more human-like are explored. As in Victoria’s text, there is an element of evaluationand different points of view are quoted.Mary was concerned with the authenticity of her text and sought to make as few changes as possiblein adapting it for IELTS. Like Mathilda, Mary, who made 30 edits in all, made a number of changesto the vocabulary of her text. These included changing ‘careering’ to ‘moving’; ‘resplendent in’ to‘wearing’; ‘myriad’ to ‘a multitude of’; ‘don’ to ‘put on’ and two instances of ‘doppelgänger’ to‘computerised double’ and ‘robotic twin’. As in Mathilda’s text, these changes all involved replacingrelatively infrequent words with more frequent alternatives, although, reflecting the nature of thetext, none of these appear particularly technical to the field of robotics. Mary’s changes reduced theproportion of both AWL and infrequent words while increasing the proportion of very frequent words(Figure 1 and Figure 2).Mary explained that the need to reduce the length of the text led her to remove contextualising pointsof detail such as the identity of a researcher’s university (‘…who research human-computer interaction302 www.ielts.org