چکیده:
The purpose of this paper was to investigate the authenticity of IELTS academic tests. Bachman and Palmer (1996, p. 23) define authenticity as “the degree of correspondence of the characteristics of a given language test task to the features of a target language task”. Authenticity is then an important aspect of testing since it describes the relationship between the test and the real world. The participants of this study included 80 Iranian IELTS test takers who took IELTS academic test in 2014 and 2015, and 100 lecturers of university and IELTS teachers. Twenty IELTS test takers also were interviewed to collect the required qualitative part of data. The data were gathered through a semi-structured interview and authenticity checklist. Descriptive statistics used to analyze the collected data. The findings of the study showed that IELTS academic tests are not authentic in terms of tone, format, channel, form and scope of interaction. Moreover, mostly the interviewees stated that answering the items in IELTS academic test requires specific techniques and test takers can not succeed without mastering these techniques.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Bachman and Palmer (1996) show the relationship as following: Characteristics of the TLU J characteristics of the test task They also consider the authenticity as a critical aspect of language test usefulness alongside validity, reliability, impact, interactiveness, and practicality.
More specifically, the first question was: “to what extent are the contents and tasks of the current IELTS academic tests practiced in Iranian authentically representative of the tasks in target language situation?
2. The Participants’ Perceptions of IELTS academic Tests Input Authenticity Items Very weak Weak Average Good Very Good 4 8% 44% 44% 4% 0% 5 16% 28% 36% 16% 4% 6 16% 40% 32% 12% 0% 7 12% 8% 56% 20% 4% 8 4% 36% 24% 32% 4% The results indicate that approximately 12% of the participants were strongly agree that tone, format, vehicle of delivery, and language length of IELTS academic tests are good representative of TLU situation tasks.
4. Participants’ Perception of Interaction between Response and Input Items Strongly agree Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly disagree 14 4% 40% 24% 20% 12% 15 0% 36% 36% 24% 0% 16 4% 40% 32% 16% 8% The results indicate that approximately 3% of the participants strongly agreed and 40% agreed that there is similarity between three dimensions of interaction of IELTS academic test tasks which they took and TLU situation tasks.
Therefore, it could be strongly argued that IELTS academic tests are not authentic in terms of the following items of authenticity checklist: - There is correspondence between the main objectives of IELTS test tasks and target language use (TLU) situation tasks.