IELTS Research Reports

An empirical investigation of the process of writing Academic Readingtest items for the International English Language Testing Systemat the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta’), reporting ‘…presented at the Human-RobotInteraction conference earlier this month in Amsterdam, the Netherlands’, or the location of a researchfacility (‘in Germany’) and references to other texts ‘(New Scientist, 12 October 2006, p 42)’.Mary also chose to summarise stretches of text. For example, she reduced ‘But Hiroshi Ishiguro ofOsaka University in Japan thinks that the sophistication of our interactions with robots will have fewconstraints. He has built a remote-controlled doppelgänger, which fidgets, blinks, breathes, talks, movesits eyes and looks eerily like him. Recently he has used it to hold classes…’ to ‘Scientist Hiroshi Ishigurohas used a robotic twin of himself to hold classes…’ However, she chose to introduce this section of thetext with three sentences of her own composition, ‘Whether robots can really form relationships withhumans and what these can be is much disputed. Only time will really tell. However, despite the negativecriticism there is one scientist with strong evidence for his view.’ This would seem to reflect the focus ofher tasks on the identification of views expressed by different experts mentioned in the text.There is evidence that Mary was aware of the need to avoid potentially sensitive topics in IELTS whenchoosing her cuts as well as in the initial text selection. Three of the four sentences in a paragraphconcerning the emotional attachment formed by American soldiers to robots employed in the Iraq warwere deleted from the IELTS text.Although expressing the most concern for authenticity and favouring a light editorial touch, of all thewriters, Mary was the only one to substantially reorder her text. She reported that she had found theoriginal text poorly organised. She wanted to focus in her questions on opinions expressed by differentresearchers, but found that these were distributed across paragraphs and felt that her questions wouldbe more effective if the paragraphing was addressed.The first four sentences of the fifth paragraph in her source text, which quotes the views of a namedresearcher, are cut, and appended to the sixth paragraph. The final sentence is removed altogether.The change, which brings together two quotations from the same expert, reflects Mary’s words (seeSection 6 above) concerning the influence of the task type (matching views to protagonists) and theneed to avoid diffusing the views of the experts across the text. Taken together, Mary’s changes hadthe effect of making the text easier to read according to both the Flesch-Kincaid grade level estimateand the Coh-Metrix readability formula (Figure 3).We now turn our attention to the texts submitted by the experienced item writers.5.2 The Experienced GroupJane’s textWildlife-Spotting Robots by Christine Connolly,Sensor Review: Volume 27 Number 4 pages 282-287 published in 2007Uniquely among the writers in this study, Jane chose a text originating in a peer reviewed journal,albeit one directed more towards an industrial than an academic audience (Sensor Review: Theinternational journal of sensing for industry). The text concerned the use of remote robotic sensors inwildlife photography exemplified by a secondary report on an application of this technology to captureevidence of a rare bird. The text describes the role of robotic cameras in wildlife observation withexamples of the equipment used. There is an extended description of the use of an autonomous roboticcamera system in a search for a rare bird, and of a further development of the technology which allowsfor remote control of the camera over the internet.IELTS Research Reports Volume 11303