IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger Hawkeyearlier. After discussion, ‘they are able to eke out the very last quantum of sleepiness’was replaced with ‘participants are able to exploit their opportunity to sleep to the full’.As a result of the change, ‘unnoticeable’ at the end of the sentence became problematic.This had modified ‘sleepiness’. The issue was resolved by substituting ‘unattainable’ for‘unnoticeable’. Elizabeth then suggested reversing the order of options C and D so that thekey (originally D) would not come last in the set. This was agreed.Item 3Item 4Item 5Item 6Item 7No suggestions were made and the item was accepted.No suggestions were made and the item was accepted.All distractors dealt with the issue of the relationship between sleep and obesity and were feltto be acceptable.William suggested that confusion that might be caused by using the negatively worded‘underestimating how little sleep’. The alternative ‘overestimated the amount of sleep’was preferred.The use of the vague ‘a particular type of question’ in the stem was queried. This wasreplaced with ‘a question like “would you like more sleep?”’ which had the advantageof being both more explicit and matching exactly the relevant section of the text (the eighthparagraph). However, the implications of making the relationship between item and textso much more explicit were not discussed. Option B was then felt not to work with therevised stem. This was replaced with ‘may give rise to answers on other topics’. The optionswere then reordered to make D the key, balancing the number of each option that appearedas the key.Conclusions from the day’s activities and discussionsReflecting at the end of the day, the group felt that the meeting had represented a typical editingmeeting, working at what Anne described as a ‘realistic pace’, at least on Jane’s material. However, thepoint was made that the pre-editing stage would probably have helped to eliminate some of the textualissues that had emerged.William’s submission had highlighted the difficulties of exploiting arts texts, answering, in a sense,the question raised by Mathilda during the inexperienced item writers’ deliberations. Arts texts oftenincluded a number of culture-specific elements. Elizabeth suggested that it was also an issue thatsuch texts assumed background knowledge: ‘they always assume you have read the work or seen thepicture’. William was reminded that the editing meeting would always throw up problems that he hadfailed to find when reviewing the text: ‘I always find things at editing that I hadn’t noticed before’.Aspects of Elizabeth’s text such as ‘trotted out’ had highlighted the need to remove journalistictouches from the text to achieve a more neutral academic style. Magazine articles often began withan attention grabbing anecdote or example before moving to a more general point, while, Williamsuggested, academic texts more often started from a generalisation. Anne had cut the first paragraphfrom her source text for this reason.There was a contrast between the length of IELTS texts and the length of the texts that students wouldneed to read ‘900 words versus a book’ as Elizabeth put it. Elizabeth defended the use of relativelyshort tests in IELTS, stating that ‘we are not testing what they may be able to do after a few months316 www.ielts.org