An Investigation of B2 Level Chinese Learners’ Reading Comprehension Difficulties in IELTS Reading Test

This dissertation focuses on Chinese B2 level learners who are preparing for the IELTS Academic reading test. It investigates the difficulties that Chinese learners encountered and learners' response strategies during the test. Although many studies have been conducted on IELTS, few of them explore students' performance in the test, especially Chinese B2 level students. Thus, this research fills these gaps. Khalifa and Weir's (2008) cognitive processing model of reading is applied as guidance for this study. To better detect learners' difficulties, an IELTS sample test from Cambridge English Book test 16 is selected and administered to learners for identifying difficult items. Semi-structured interviews are conducted to gain more information about the difficult items and explore factors affecting test takers' performance and their response strategies. There are 25 Chinese B2 learners participating in this study, who are recruited through an online advertisement. 22 are females and 3 are males. All 25 participants take the IELTS sample tests, with five of them attending the online interviews. The data gathered from the IELTS sample tests and semi-structured interviews is combined and analysed together through thematic analysis. The results identify five main factors related to learners' difficulties, including word recognition, syntactic parsing, inferencing, background knowledge, and assessment factors. Two types of strategies that participants used are found, including reading strategies and test-taking strategies. There are six reading strategies and five test-taking strategies utilised by participants. The reading strategies are found could facilitate participants’ test performance but at the same time reveal the difficulties they faced, including word recognition and time pressure. The test-taking strategies are found could to some extent increase participants’ test scores under time pressure but no significant effect on their total test scores. The findings indicate the need for IELTS candidates to pay more attention to vocabulary learning during test preparation. In addition, IELTS instructors need to introduce effective vocabulary learning strategies to assist learners’ vocabulary learning.