Iranian Students' Performance on the Ielts: a Question of Achievement

Reading comprehension has won much effort on the part of teachers, testers, and researchers in Iran due to the fact that the immediate need of Iranian students at different university levels is the ability to read in order to get new information on the topic they are studying. The question raised is how much reading practice can move learners along the horizontal axis of development predetermined by high stake tests like the IETLS. To this end, this study tried to investigate the relationship between Iranian students' reading ability varying in their level of education (sophomore, junior, and senior) and their IELTS band score. Data from 431 Iranian students taking the IETLS were collected and analyzed descriptively and inferentially. The results showed that there was no significant relation between learners' level of education and the IETLS band score within the present data; that is learners were not different in terms of their level of education. Surprisingly, the highest band scores of 7 and 8 on the IELTS belonged to students in the lower levels of