Sathena Chan

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.

This study investigates both the contextual features of a range of real-life academic writing tasks and reading-into-writing test tasks, and the cognitive processes required to complete the integrated task type successfully. Since its publication, the CEFR has become influential in building a shared understanding of performance levels for foreign language learners but mainly for individual macro skills. A considerable gap remains in the understanding of the integrated reading-into-writing skills, which are so important to the kinds of academic and professional written language use involved at the higher levels of the CEFR.