IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger HawkeyRanging from 1,592 to 2,518 words, the source texts used by the experienced writers were all verymuch longer than those of the non-experienced group (748 to 1,094 words). At 1,870 words the lengthof Jane’s source text was typical for the experienced group. She cut it by 50%, making 43 edits, to givean IELTS text of 937 words.This was the most technical of all the texts and like other writers Jane cut a number of technical terms.These related both to wildlife and animal behaviour (‘hawks’, ‘herons’, ‘double knock drummings’)and to the technology being used to record it (‘RECONYX cameras’, ‘XBAT software’, ‘auto-iris’).However, she also retained many such words in her IELTS text including, ‘ornithology’, ‘geese’,‘fieldwork’, ‘vocalisations’, ‘actuators’, ‘teleoperation’ and ‘infrared’. In spite of the changes, Jane’sfinal text included the lowest proportion of high frequency words of any writer. The most frequent3,000 words of the BNC accounted for just 88.6% of her IELTS text while the 95% coverage said tobe required for fluent reading (Laufer 1989) came only at the 8,000 word frequency level of the BNC.Some of Jane’s edits appear to be directed at clarification or at improvement of the quality of thewriting. Compare the original and edited versions of the following:Original text: ‘More than 20 trained field biologists were recruited to the USFWS/CLOsearch team, and volunteers also took part’.IELTS text: ‘The project started in 2005 with over 20 trained field biologists taking part inthe search team, and volunteers also being recruited’.Original text: ‘The search also made use of… cameras … for monitoring likely sites withoutthe disturbance unavoidable by human observers’IELTS text: ‘The search also made use of… cameras … for monitoring likely sites.This method was ideal since it did not lead to the disturbance that is unavoidable withhuman observers’Jane expanded some abbreviations (‘50m to 50 metres’, ‘8h per day’ to ‘8 hours per day’), but notothers (‘10 m to 40 mm’ is retained to describe a camera lens focal range, and sound is ‘sampled at20 kHz for up to 4 h per day’). ‘UC Berkeley’ is expanded to ‘University of California, Berkeley’ on itsfirst occurrence, but not on its second. Three occurrences of ‘Texas A&M’ are retained unchanged.The deletion of the abstract, subheadings and the two citations had the effect of making the finaltext appear less like a journal article. The removal of a block of 653 words in five paragraphs thatdescribed the technical attributes of robotic cameras, together with the cutting of photographs ofthe equipment and examples of the images captured, had the effect of foregrounding the applicationto wildlife research (problem-solution) and diminishing the attention given to the attributes of theequipment (description/ elaboration): the central concern of the journal. One paragraph within thisblock explained why the equipment qualified as ‘robotic’ and its deletion modifies and diminishes therelationship between the title (Wildlife-spotting robots) and the adapted text. In the IELTS the ‘robotic’nature of the cameras is not explicitly explained, although three uses of the term do remain. Thisbecame a source of some confusion for the editing team (see Section 7).Jane’s edits had little effect on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of the original text, but did make iteasier to read according to the Coh-Metrix readability formula. However, by both measures her IELTStext was the most difficult of all the edited texts in this study.304 www.ielts.org