IELTS Research Reports

An empirical investigation of the process of writing Academic Readingtest items for the International English Language Testing SystemAt the beginning of the editing session on her text and items, Mathilda wondered whether her text wasperhaps too easy, being straightforward and factual, with no complex argument and a sequential keypoint structure. Mathilda was reminded by her colleagues that a straightforward text might well beaccompanied by difficult questions. In fact, this would not be in accordance with IELTS practice.Mathilda item editingThe following matters were raised in discussions of the tasks and items proposed by Mathilda:■■■■■■whether it was legitimate test practice to include, for example in the multiple choicedistractors, information which is not actually in the textthe ‘give-away’ factor when a distractor is included that clearly comes from a part of thetext distant from the one on which the question set is focusingthe possible bias of items concerning a project in countries from which some candidatesand not others, actually came, and who might know more from personal experience.In the editing discussion of items here, as for all three texts, colleagues were able to point out oneor two items which were flawed because of a falsifying point in the text unnoticed by the actualitem-writer.Mary text editingMary’s text, The Rise of the Emotional Robot, had been taken from the New Scientist. She had herselfreduced the original by 15% to meet the 950 word maximum for an IELTS text. Mary was found(see next section) to have made 30 edits in all, including vocabulary changes - (more changes infact than Mary herself had indicated, feeling, as she claimed, that texts should not, in the interests ofauthenticity, be changed too much - see Table 3 above).At the beginning of the editing session on her text and items, Mary made the following additionalpoints regarding changes to her original text:■■■■■■modifications to render the text more academic, ‘cohesive’ (and ‘IELTS-like’) throughorder change.changes to the final paragraph to add strength and self-containedness to the end of thetext.one deletion from the original had been both to shorten the text to within IELTS limits(950 words) and because the experiment concerned was not one she intended to askquestions about.After discussion with Victoria and Mathilda, who had just read her text, two further modificationswere made to Mary’s text:■■■■■■one sentence was deleted from the text, as repetitive.reference to the theory of mind was reinstated from the original text.the order of sentences in the final paragraph was modified for stylistic reasons.Mary item editingIn the context of the research, the discussions of the tasks and items drafted by Mary, Mathildaand Victoria should be informative with regard to both the item writing and editing processes. Thefollowing were the main issues raised over the tasks and items proposed by Mary:IELTS Research Reports Volume 11309