IELTS Research Reports

An empirical investigation of the process of writing Academic Readingtest items for the International English Language Testing Systemat university; we are testing whether they will be able to cope, I think’. William pointed to the greatvariety of texts that could be encountered at university, some of which would be more straightforwardfor students than IELTS texts. He suggested that ‘somebody who struggles with texts like these mightbe able to cope perfectly well with physics texts’ which might contain more technical vocabulary, butless subordination.Anne felt that IELTS, by moving between topics and by moving from fact based to more discursivetexts might ‘reflect in miniature what [students] have to do… look at a variety of sources, get keyideas, get attitudes, get opinions’ while Elizabeth countered that, given the practical restrictions onwhat could be covered in a one-hour test ‘there is a huge amount we don’t do of course: dealing withcontents, dealing with indexes, dealing with chapters and all that sort of macro stuff. We can’t do it.’Preparation courses were considered to be helpful in improving reading skills and in building examtechnique. Elizabeth reported that students she had taught had found learning for IELTS useful inpreparing them to read longer texts. Elizabeth believed that there was a ‘core vocabulary’ for the testthat could be taught and there was general agreement that the strategies used in IELTS would transferto reading texts for academic purposes.6.2.1 Analysis and findings on the itemsAs with the texts in Section six, the analysis here is applied to the items as they were submitted by theseven participants, before any changes made during the public editing process. Again, links are madewith the comments from the participants and the edits made during the meetings.Table 9 shows the task types selected by the three writers for their commissioned items. No writerschose Types 3 (Sentence Completion), 5 (Labelling a Diagram), 6 (Choosing Headings for Paragraphsor Sections of a Text) or 9 (Classification). This may reflect the difficulty, discussed by the experiencedwriters, of finding or creating suitable diagrams. It is also of interest, given William’s comments onthe cost-benefit of multiple choice items and the reservations expressed by Jane that all three nonexperiencedwriters attempted these, but only one of the four experienced writers did so. However, thismight also reflect the relative familiarity of this item type for the non-experienced group.TaskVictoria Mathilda Mary Jane Anne William ElizabethTypesType 1 Multiple Choice √ √ √ √Type 2Short-answerquestionsSentence Completion√√Type 3Type 4Notes, Summaryor Table/Flow-chartCompletionLabelling a Diagram√ √ √ √Type 5Type 6 Choosing Headingsfor Paragraphs orSections of a TextType 7 Locating Information √ √ √ √IELTS Research Reports Volume 11317