An Analysis of IELTS Academic Reading Texts through A Corpus-based Approach
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Abstract
The IELTS academic reading test is an important gatekeeping device for second language learners. However, few studies have compared the language used in the test’s reading passages and their accompanying questions. Accordingly, this study explores 12 IELTS reading passages and accompanying questions from a corpus-based perspective. Specifically, I focus on eight types of four-word lexical bundles (LBs) and five sentence patterns (S-patterns) in a corpus of 444 sentences. Results showed that doing/seeing and being S-patterns accounted for 170 and 130 sentences, respectively, where other noun phrases (NPs), other prepositional phrases, NP + of, and be + NP/ Adjectivial phrases were the most prevalent LBs. To improve candidates’ use of reading strategies, I highlight the significance of the most frequent four-word LBs found in the texts. Moreover, by drawing on existing work that looks at how student writers revise academic texts, I show how an IELTS exam writer can design questions that are perhaps clearer and more tightly tied to the language of an accompanying reading. I close by further clarifying how an analysis of S-patterns and LBs can be used to guide both the reception and production of answer-question combinations in academic reading tasks.
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