TITLE:
What Factors Most Impact on Chinese Students’ Performance in the IELTS Academic Reading Sub-Test?
AUTHORS:
Ruwen Zhang, John Hope
KEYWORDS:
The IELTS Academic Reading Sub-Test, Contributing Factors of Candidate Performance, Various Reading Tasks, Chinese Students
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.11 No.6,
December
29,
2021
ABSTRACT: A good IELTS (The International English Language Testing System) result is the evidence of non-native speakers’ language proficiency for entering foreign universities, so attaining the required score in each band of the IELTS is extremely important for Chinese test takers. As there is limited research directly related to either the IELTS Academic Reading Sub-test or for the Chinese students preparing to take an IELTS test, our research is dedicated to investigate the factors that could influence Chinese students’ performance in the reading sub-test. The four possible factors are identified via the past relevant literature, which are the size of the English vocabulary known by the students, the ability to identify keywords, the ability to understand long sentences, and the ability to find the topic sentence. Through a mixed methodology approach, our study found that all these factors could impact the Chinese student performance and test outcome in the IELTS Academic Reading Sub-test. In addition to adding to the relevant literature on this subject, the significance of our study is that these findings could help EFL teachers better prepare their students for the IELTS test by focusing more of their teaching on these four factors.