IELTS Research Reports

Learning to play the ‘classroom tennis’ well:IELTS and international students in teacher educationargued that because New Zealand universities accept the IELTS test as a valid measure of students’ability to cope with university demands, that IELTS preparation materials might include both nativeand non-native accents in their listening exercises.Carpenter (2005), in reviewing previous studies, particularly highlighted NESB students’ difficulties inunderstanding the content and intent of their lectures, difficulties in understanding everyday languageand problems with oral language comprehension and competence.Moore and Morton (2005) analysed the type of writing required in the two domains of university studyand the IELTS test. They compared the standard IELTS Task 2 rubric with a corpus of 155 assignmenttasks collected at two Australian universities. They found that whilst IELTS writing bears somesimilarity with the genre of the university essay, there are also significant differences. Their findingssuggest that the type of writing IELTS elicits seems to have more in common with certain public nonacademicgenres, rather than testing what is thought of as appropriate models for university writing.Mayor’s (2006) research indicates that there are recurrent features in the writing of candidatesfrom Chinese language backgrounds under IELTS test conditions. These include a high level ofinterpersonal reference, combined with a heavily dialogic and hortatory style. Chinese candidatesin Mayor’s study used more interrogatives and imperatives than a similar sample of Greek candidates,along with grammatical devices which call for a response on the part of the reader or others.These features gave a polemical tone to the English-medium writing of these Chinese candidates.Mayor argues that it is important to recognise that some Chinese students who performed well in theChinese education system may import into their English writing a range of practices valued in China,but which may have a negative affect on their scores. For Chinese students to succeed in Englishmediumuniversities they need to learn, and to be taught, the models of writing expected of studentsin those institutions.Mahdavy (2008) argues that TOEFL and IELTS listening tests differ with respect to their history,theoretical basis, research support and form, leading to suggestions that IELTS is more content-based,task-oriented and authentic. Mahdavy undertook a comparative study of the cognitive demands ofthese two tests by giving 151 participants a TOEFL listening test and 117 of these same participantsan equivalent IELTS test. The participants also completed the Multiple Intelligences DevelopmentAssessment Scales questionnaire. Despite the differences between these listening tests, Mahdavyshowed that intelligence scores positively correlated with listening scores on both tests and thatlinguistic intelligence has a significant correlation with listening ability as calculated by these tests.Mahdavy suggests that English language teachers should provide further assistance to languagelearners who might not enjoy a high level of linguistic intelligence.2.4 English language proficiency and academic resultsIn 1993, Vinke and Jochems investigated the question of whether learning in a foreign languageaffected academic performance, arguing that the precise nature of the relationship between foreignlanguage proficiency and academic success had not been established. Focusing on Indonesianengineering students at the IHE in Delft and using TOEFL scores as their baseline data, they found acut-off point in the relationship of English proficiency and academic success. They then hypothesisedthat there was a range of TOEFL scores within which a better command of English increases thechance of academic success to a certain extent and within which a limited lack of proficiency canbe offset by other factors (age, effort, mathematical ability). If this was correct, then it would notmake a difference whether TOEFL scores were below the lower limit or above the upper limit - inIELTS Research Reports Volume 1183