Washback is considered harmful then when there is a serious disjunct between a test‟s construct of reading and the broader demands of real world or target language tasks.
The IELTS test is an example of a public test that is used to make crucial decisions about large numbers of people – that is, whether they are eligible for English-speaking university entrance or not based on their English language abilities. An increase in the numbers of international students wanting to study at English-speaking universities and a concomitant increase in the number of universities requiring IELTS scores has led to a significant expansion of the IELTS test in recent years. This in turn has resulted in IELTS preparation programs being an important focus of many EAP courses taught in language centres throughout the world (Saville and Hawkey, 2003; Read and Hayes, 2003). The increased influence of IELTS and possible concerns about test washback suggest the need for, in this case, the reading construct underlying the test to be firmly based on a thorough understanding of the nature of reading demands in university study. It is this issue – the importance for the reading test to be as authentic as possible given practical and other constraints – that has motivated the present study.