چكيده
The International English Language Testing Service (IELTS), which is a
high-stake English language proficiency test, is used nowadays for a variety
of purposes and its results are accepted by many universities and institutions
worldwide. Due to the importance of making sound decisions based on its
results, various studies have embarked on identifying and doing away with
factors leading to error score, which may contaminate the results and the
interpretations made based upon them. The present study investigates the
potential effect of the sequence in which the listening, reading, and writing
modules are presented on the applicants’ performance on the individual
skills as well as the overall score achieved on the examination. The study
consisted of two parts. In the first part, a questionnaire was developed,
piloted and distributed among a number of prospective and former IELTS
candidates. The purpose of this questionnaire was to elicit the respondents’
beliefs about the sequence of testing skills and to find out what sequences,
other than the standard sequence, are favored by them. In the second part of
the study, three groups of thirty participants were asked to participate in the
General Training module of the IELTS proficiency test. For each group of
participants, the test was administered with a different sequence. The
