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

Anthony Green and Roger Hawkey
robots appear more human-like are explored. As in Victoria’s text, there is an element of evaluation
and different points of view are quoted.
Mary was concerned with the authenticity of her text and sought to make as few changes as possible in
adapting it for IELTS. Like Mathilda, Mary, who made 30 edits in all, made a number of changes to
the vocabulary of her text. These included changing ‘careering’ to ‘moving’; ‘resplendent in’ to
‘wearing’; ‘myriad’ to ‘a multitude of’; ‘don’ to ‘put on’ and two instances of ‘doppelgänger’ to
‘computerised double’ and ‘robotic twin’. As in Mathilda’s text, these changes all involved replacing
relatively infrequent words with more frequent alternatives, although, reflecting the nature of the text,
none of these appear particularly technical to the field of robotics. Mary’s changes reduced the
proportion of both AWL and infrequent words while increasing the proportion of very frequent words
(Figure 1 and Figure 2).
Mary explained that the need to reduce the length of the text led her to remove contextualising points
of detail such as the identity of a researcher’s university (‘…who research human-computer interaction
at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta’), reporting ‘…presented at the Human-Robot
Interaction conference earlier this month in Amsterdam, the Netherlands’, or the location of a research
facility (‘in Germany’) and references to other texts ‘(New Scientist, 12 October 2006, p 42)’.
Mary also chose to summarise stretches of text. For example, she reduced ‘But Hiroshi Ishiguro of
Osaka University in Japan thinks that the sophistication of our interactions with robots will have few
constraints. He has built a remote-controlled doppelgänger, which fidgets, blinks, breathes, talks,
moves its eyes and looks eerily like him. Recently he has used it to hold classes…’ to ‘Scientist
Hiroshi Ishiguro has used a robotic twin of himself to hold classes…’ However, she chose to introduce
this section of the text with three sentences of her own composition, ‘Whether robots can really form
relationships with humans and what these can be is much disputed. Only time will really tell.
However, despite the negative criticism there is one scientist with strong evidence for his view.’ This
would seem to reflect the focus of her tasks on the identification of views expressed by different
experts mentioned in the text.
There is evidence that Mary was aware of the need to avoid potentially sensitive topics in IELTS when
choosing her cuts as well as in the initial text selection. Three of the four sentences in a paragraph
concerning the emotional attachment formed by American soldiers to robots employed in the Iraq war
were deleted from the IELTS text.
Although expressing the most concern for authenticity and favouring a light editorial touch, of all the
writers, Mary was the only one to substantially reorder her text. She reported that she had found the
original text poorly organised. She wanted to focus in her questions on opinions expressed by different
researchers, but found that these were distributed across paragraphs and felt that her questions would
be more effective if the paragraphing was addressed.
The first four sentences of the fifth paragraph in her source text, which quotes the views of a named
researcher, are cut, and appended to the sixth paragraph. The final sentence is removed altogether. The
change, which brings together two quotations from the same expert, reflects Mary’s words (see above)
concerning the influence of the task type (matching views to protagonists) and the need to avoid
diffusing the views of the experts across the text. Taken together, Mary’s changes had the effect of
making the text easier to read according to both the Flesch-Kincaid grade level estimate and the Coh-
Metrix readability formula (Figure 3).
We now turn our attention to the texts submitted by the experienced item writers.
IELTS Research Reports Volume 11 www.ielts.org 32