IELTS Research Reports

An empirical investigation of the process of writing Academic Readingtest items for the International English Language Testing SystemAnne’s textThe Funny Business of Laughter by Emma BayleyBBC Focus: May 2008, pages 61 to 65Anne’s text was taken from BBC Focus, a monthly magazine dedicated to science and technology.This expository text, which draws on a range of research from different disciplines, describes andelaborates the functions and origins of laughter and their implications for our understanding of thehuman mind. She reported that she had found this text in a file she kept for the purpose of itemwriting, storing suitable texts between item writing commissions.Like all the experienced writers, Anne took a relatively lengthy source (1,606 words) and cut itextensively (her edited text was 946 words long), making 57 edits altogether. She discarded 15 of the31 words in the source text that fell outside the 15K frequency level and 31 of 82 from the AWL. Thisresults in a slightly higher proportion of academic words and a lower proportion of very infrequentwords in the edited text than in the source (Figure 2).In common with all the other writers Anne chose to cut a number of technical terms including‘neurological’ and ‘thorax’ (replaced with ‘chest’) although she retained ‘bipedal’ and ‘quadrupedal’as well as other technical words such as ‘neuroscientist’, ‘primate’ and ‘stimulus’. She also exciseda number of infrequent words including synonyms for laughter (the topic of the text) such as‘chortle’, ‘yelping’ and ‘exhalations’, replacing this latter word with another infrequent (though moretransparent) word borrowed from the deleted opening section of the original: ‘outbreath’.One means of reducing the length of the text that Anne exploits is to cut redundancy in word pairssuch as ‘rough and tumble play’ or restatements such as ‘laboured breathing or panting.’. Somechanges seem to reflect an editor’s desire to improve the linguistic quality and accuracy of the text:she inserts the conjunction ‘that’ in the sentence ‘It is clear now that it evolved prior to humankind’and replaces ‘most apes’ with ‘great apes’, presumably because the text has cited only orang-utan andchimpanzee behaviour.Anne eliminated references to a ‘news’ aspect of her story by deleting the first and last paragraphs: theoriginal article opened and closed with references to the forthcoming ‘world laughter day’. Anotherchange that makes the text less journalistic, in line with Anne’s stated desire to reduce ‘journalese’, is theincrease in formality. The idiomatic ‘having a good giggle’ is replaced by ‘laughing’; some abbreviationsand contractions are exchanged for full forms so that ‘lab’ becomes ‘laboratory’, ‘you’ve’ becomes ‘youhave’ and ‘don’t’ is replaced with ‘do not’. However, unlike Victoria, Anne chooses to retain contractionssuch as ‘that’s’ and ‘it’s’ and even modifies one occurrence of ‘it is’ in the original to ‘it’s’. In her finalIELTS text, ‘it’s’ occurs three times and ‘it is’ four times. Whimsical, informal and perhaps culturallyspecific references to aliens landing on earth and to the ‘world’s worst sitcom’ are also removed.Through her deletions Anne relegates one of the central themes of her original text – the role oflaughter in the evolution of socialisation and the sense of self. As a result, the IELTS text relative tothe source, although less journalistic, seems more tightly focussed on laughter as a phenomenon perse than on its wider significance for psychology or, as expressed in a sentence that Anne deletes, ‘suchlofty questions as the perception of self and the evolution of speech, language and social behaviour’.However, elaboration is the primary rhetorical function of the IELTS text as it is for the source. Theeffect of Anne’s changes on the readability of the text is to make it somewhat more difficult accordingto both the Flesch Kincaid and Coh-Metrix estimates.IELTS Research Reports Volume 11305