IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger Hawkey6 ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS ON THE EDITING PROCESSThe participants were mainly left to organise and implement the joint editing session withoutintervention from the research team. The summary here seeks to identify and quantify theoccurrences of key points raised, as informing the investigation of IELTS academic readingtest item writing processes.The analysis of the texts as originally submitted by the three non-experienced participants appears inSection 6 above. This section describes the changes made to the texts and items in the process of jointtest-editing. We begin with the non-experienced group.6.1 The Non-Experienced GroupVictoria text editingAs noted in the text analysis below, Victoria’s text, How the Brain Turns Reality into Dreams,was taken from the online news website MSNBC, describing research into dreams reported in thejournal Science. Victoria, who, it will be recalled, often referred to her process of ‘fixing up’ her text,made 77 edits, revised all her paragraphs and actually increased the length of the original text from897 to 941 words.At the beginning of the editing session on her text and items, it was suggested by her colleagues, whohad just read her text, that Victoria should make the following additional changes to her text:■■■■the deletion of one or two hedging phrases she had added to give the text a moreacademic tonethe shortening of two clauses for compactness.Victoria item editingVictoria had chosen True/ False/ Not Given (T/F/NG), Multiple Choice (MCQ) and Short AnswerQuestions (using not more than three words from the passage) (SAQ) as her task types.The following were the main issues raised over the tasks and items proposed by Victoria:■■■■■■■■■■the possibility, especially in the T/F/NG task, that test-takers may infer differently fromthe item-writer, but plausibly, yet be penalised even when their understanding of the pointconcerned is not wrongthe question whether, in actual IELTS item-writing, there were conventions on thedistribution of the T/F and NG categories in a setthe colleagues themselves found Victoria’s multiple choice items difficultthat having two incorrect alternatives which mean the same (though in different words)was in a way increasing the test-taker’s chance of selecting the right alternativethat the SAQ task should be a test of content rather than grammatical structure.Mathilda text editingAs noted above and confirmed in the text analysis below, Mathilda made the fewest changes, onlyfour, of any writer to her source text, How - and Where - will we Live in 2015? which came fromDiscover, a Canadian science and technology magazine. Her text was relatively short at 748 words.308 www.ielts.org