IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger HawkeyCompared with Anne, William includes more direct phrasal matches - lexical repetition - in his itemswith the relevant information in the text. His items also involve more direct word matches than Jane’s.Item 1 has ‘Blake and Wordsworth’ and ‘expressing’; item 2 has ‘industrial revolution’ (‘IndustrialRevolutions’ in the text) and ‘social problems’ matching ‘social, political and especially intellectualproblems’ in the text. Item six (False) has the most extensive cues with almost half of the words alsooccurring in the text including ‘the 19th century’ and ‘the concept of the innocence of children’which repeat elements of their co-referents in the text: ‘the nineteenth century’ and ‘the conceptof the child as a symbol of innocence’. As in Anne’s items, William’s questions make extensiveuse of paraphrase, synonymy and antonymy. Item 1 (False), for example, would seem to requireunderstanding the contrast between ‘adapted a tradition’ in the item stem and ‘an essentially newphenomenon’ in the text.Perhaps because so many phrases recur in the text, a number of William’s items might appearto a candidate plausibly to relate to several locations. Item 6 contrasts ‘retained its power’ with‘deterioration’, although this proposition is echoed in the following sentence: ‘only a residue’,‘retaining little or nothing’. Similarly, there are several clues to the answer to item 4 (True): theproposition that serious writers were marginalised by the growth of mass literature is effectivelyrepeated three times: ‘mature voice… diminished’, ‘art was on the run’ and ‘ivory tower… arena’- a fact exploited in the editing meeting when the team decided to eliminate the reference to ‘ivorytowers’. Item 5 (True) seems to paraphrase a sequence of three related sentences which repeat theidea that nineteenth century authors used the image of the child to express their alienation fromindustrial society.William’s two Not Given items both repeat lexis from the text to point to the location of the necessaryinformation. In each case one phrase in the text is inaccurately paraphrased in the item stem so that inboth cases, substitution of one phrase would yield a True item. For item 2, in the text, it is the authorof the text, rather than ‘a number of writers’ who identifies the industrial revolution as a ‘cause ofsocial problems’ while in item 3 the phrase ‘was proportionally diminished’ - paraphrased in the itemby ‘featured less often’ - relates to the ‘creative voice’ of the serious writer rather than ‘children’.The variation in the relationship between the items and the text found among these writers isconsistent with and so perhaps might help to explain the variation found in the strategies used by testtakers responding to four T/F/NG test sections by Weir et al. (2009b). In that study, test takers madegreater use of word matching strategies and knowledge of vocabulary in some T/F/NG sections ofthe tests they took than in others. There were also differences in whether the information necessaryto answer the question was most often reported as being found within sentences or across sentences.Thus different interpretations of the guidelines appear to lead writers to produce items that targetdifferent types of reading on the part of test takers. We note that there was no discussion among theitem writers of how changes in the items might affect the reading skills being used by test takers or ofthe implications of variation in T/F/NG items for the nature of the test.Of the three non-experienced writers, Victoria and Mathilda employed T/F/NG items. Victoria’s T/F/NG items are closer to the experienced item writers’ than are Mathilda’s in their use of paraphrase andsynonymy. She prefers to reorder or rephrase constituents from the text in her items so that in item1 (False) ‘dreams seem to make perfect sense to people…’ is rephrased as ‘people tend to make themost sense of their dreams…’; in item 4 (True), ‘loss of memory’ becomes ‘memory loss’; in item 6(True), ‘much like [a], [b]’ is replaced with ‘both [a] and [b]’. There are lexical repetitions betweentext and item - ‘experiences’ (Item 3), declarative’ (Item 4), ‘the hippocampus’ (Item 5), but these are320 www.ielts.org