Modern Journal of Language Teaching Methods (MJLTM) Vol. 4, Issue 1, March 2014 Page 337 ON THE VALIDITY OF IELTS WRITING COMPONENT; DO RATERS ASSESS WHAT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO? Masoud Azizi University of Tehran m.azizi@ut.ac.ir Khadijeh Majdeddin University of Tehran, Kish International Campus m.majdeddin@ut.ac.ir ABSTRACT Validity is a crucial test quality, and presenting a strong validity argument is a must and an ongoing process in the development of large-scale language tests such as IELTS and TOEFL. However, the presented validity evidence for writing and speaking skills, whose evaluation is subjective by nature, is somewhat shaky in comparison with other two skills. The present study was an attempt to examine whether raters are actually assessing test takers’ writing samples based on the constructs defined in the scoring rubric. Using a standard multiple regression, the predictive ability of three objective measures, namely Fluency, Grammatical complexity, and Accuracy, were checked for learners’ scores in IELTS task 2 in writing. The preliminary analysis showed no violation of the assumptions underlying the use of the multiple regression test. The results indicate that the model explains 50% of the variance in the dependent variable, i.e., learners' scores in IELTS Task 2 in writing (adjusted R 2 = .501) which was found statistically significant: F (3, 37) = 14.40, p < .001. However, among the independent variables, only the accuracy measure had a statistically significant unique contribution to R 2 by 40 %, indicating that accuracy of the texts written by L2 learners is the most important factor affecting the scores they receive in the writing task in IELTS. It seems that raters are so heavily affected by the accuracy of texts written by test takers that they ignore other text qualities specified in the scoring rubric. KEYWORDS: IELTS writing test, Validity, Fluency, Grammatical complexity, Accuracy Introduction L2 construct and ability has been defined differently throughout time, and test design has continuously been adapted to the way the definition and conceptualization of L2 construct and ability has been presented. At the moment, it is held that communicative L2 ability consists of a number of subcompetencies which interact with each other in a language use situation; however, the exact number of these factors and the nature of their interaction is still a matter of dispute (Chalhoub-Deville, 2003). [ Downloaded from mjltm.org on 2023-07-03 ] 337 / 401