should it be modified ?
Clearly however, there are important practical considerations in any push to institute changes to a
well-established test such as IELTS. One can point to a number of caveats. The first of these
relates to the broad issue of achieving the right balance between the validity of a test and its
reliability (Wigglesworth & Elder, 1996). For the IELTS academic reading test, this would
include, among other things, ensuring that any modified version of the test fit with the overall
structure of the current IELTS battery eg for the reading test to remain as a separate test of
reading without significant overlap with other modules such as writing (Charge & Taylor, 1997);
and for it to be retained as a clerically-markable module within the battery. A second caveat
relates to the difficulty of accommodating the many different versions of academic reading we
have seen in the study all within the one test. Much of this variety, as was noted, arose from the
quite different reading demands evident in different disciplines and programs. This suggests a
need to be prudent in selecting the type of reading tasks on the test, so as to avoid having items
which may be pertinent in one disciplinary area, but have little relevance to others.
A final consideration is the matter of what one can reasonably expect an objective test of reading
to cover. On this point, Taylor (2007) suggests we need to recognise the limits to which a test
such as IELTS can simulate (and indeed should be expected to simulate) language use in the
target situation. Thus, she notes that “IELTS is designed principally to test readiness to enter the
world of university-level study in the English language”, and does not assume that test takers
have already mastered the skills they are likely to need (original emphasis, p 482). Taylor goes
on to explain that students will often “need to develop many of these skills during their course of
study”, including those “skills … specific to their academic domain”. Such an understanding was
voiced, as we saw, by at least one of the study‟s informants who suggested that the onus was
clearly on academic staff to develop discipline-specific capacities “within courses”.