IELTS Research Reports

An empirical investigation of the process of writing Academic Readingtest items for the International English Language Testing System■■■■■■■■agreed and the change was made. She also questioned whether the last sentence ofthe second paragraph should be moved to the third paragraph. This was not agreed.Elizabeth suggested removing the sentence ‘They also use ultra-light aircraft to conductaerial surveys’ in the third paragraph as it seemed to contradict statements about theentirely automated nature of the ACONE system. This was agreed.The first sentence of the fourth paragraph was reworded. The original wording was:‘In February 2007, the University of California, Berkeley announced the installationof a high resolution intelligent robotic video system…’.This was revised to give ‘In February 2007 a further stage of the project began whenthe University of California, Berkeley announced the installation of a high resolutionintelligent robotic video system…’, This was felt to clarify the relationship betweenthe installation of the video system described in the fourth paragraph and the researchdescribed in the third paragraph.Elizabeth suggested that, as the acronym had already appeared, CONE in the finalparagraph did not need to be expanded again here. This was agreed.Jane item editingOn the True/ False/ Not Given items:Item 1Item 2Item 3Item 5Item 4Anne questioned whether the first item was sufficiently precise as it could be taken to referto all wildlife experiments. Elizabeth pointed out that the whole task covered the use ofequipment in wildlife experiments and that the necessary information might therefore bedifficult to locate. Suggested rewordings were not satisfactory and, following discussion,the item was rejected. As a result, a new item needed to be written.Elizabeth suggested that ‘only a few occasions’ might better reflect the sense of the text thanthe more negative ‘little chance’ in the item. Jane wanted to replace ‘chance’ as this repeateda word in the text. The word ‘record’ was preferred to ‘capture’ which seemed ambiguouswhen discussing wildlife.William objected that the text implied that this ‘Not Given’ statement was true. Elizabethqueried the meaning of ‘examine the different species’: in the text it was recordings that werebeing examined. These two objections were dealt with by rewording the item as, ‘Thoseexamining the data on target species would benefit from further training’ which was felt tobe more clearly ‘Not Given’ in the text.Anne queried the order of items 4 and 5. Jane confirmed that these should be reversed.The tense of ‘will activate’ was changed to ‘activates’ and ‘some’ was replaced by ‘certain’.This was accepted with little discussion.Additional ItemThe group agreed that a new item could be generated from the untested material at the end of thesecond paragraph. The distinction that had been discussed earlier between CONE and ACONE wasidentified as important information. The group arrived at ‘CONE relies entirely on input from nonhumansources’. William suggested that the word ‘entirely’ could be a trigger to test wise candidates,but this objection was overridden. Nonetheless the group was unable to arrive at an agreed wording.IELTS Research Reports Volume 11313