An investigation of the process of writing IELTS Academic Reading ...

Anthony Green and Roger Hawkey
4.1.2 Participant text search treatment and item development: flowcharts and discussions
We now analyse more qualitatively the non-experienced item writers’ discussion session of their item
writing processes. These deliberations had been recorded, transcribed and coded by topic before the
quantitative summary analysis as presented in Tables 1 and 2 above. Table 3 below summarises the
more qualitative inductive description here, allowing further inferences to be drawn on the processes
involved in efforts by the three non-experienced item writers to locate and select potential IELTS
academic reading texts. The submitted materials – texts and accompanying items – are provided in
Appendix C.
Perceived IELTS text characteristics
Item writer
Victoria Mathilda Mary
Academic 7 2
Report 1
Descriptive /conceptual 2 1 3
Impersonal, hedging 2 1
Pop-scientific/current 1 2 1
Not too specialist 1 2
Technical but not too 2 1
Literary 1 2
Not journalistic / news
item
Avoidance of bias,
offence
1 1
4 2
Of an assumed difficulty 3
Length 3
Grammar
Cohesion 1 1
Range/ complexity 2
Table 2: Non-experienced participants: Perceived characteristics of IELTS Academic Reading
module texts
The three were asked to sketch flowcharts of the ways they had located, edited and prepared items for
their IELTS Reading tests, after which they were invited in turn to explain their flowcharts (see Table
3). It was intended in the design of the study that this activity would provide internal triangulation for
the findings of the previous discussion by the participants of their experience in selecting and
characterising an appropriate IELTS Academic Reading text, editing and adapting for testing
purposes. This proved indeed to be the case. The main points made by the three participants in their
discussions of their flowchart are summarised in Table 3 under the headings: text search, editing and
item writing, with a final question on their preferred items. The table should be read both for the
similarities and for the differences in the processes engaged in across the three participants.
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