Research and Practice in Assessing Academic Reading: The Case of IELTS

This volume describes approaches to understanding academic reading ability and develops an empirically-grounded framework for validating tests of this skill.

This volume describes differing approaches to understanding academic reading ability that have emerged in recent decades and goes on to develop an empirically-grounded framework for validating tests of this skill. The framework is then applied to the IELTS Academic Reading module to investigate a number of different validity perspectives that reflect the socio-cognitive nature of any assessment event. The authors demonstrate how a systematic understanding and application of the framework and its components can help test developers to operationalise their tests so as to fulfill the validity requirements for an academic reading test.