1. .

Assessment of Reading Argee Abadines

2. 2. Outline• Nature of Reading – Tests have been created based on the beliefs of researchers
and practitioners regarding reading• Strategies in Assessing Reading
3. 3. Nature of Reading• Reading Skills (Davis, 1968)- 8 skills – Word Meanings – Inferences –
Paraphrasing – Recognizing Writer’s Purpose, attitude, tone and mood – Weaving Ideas
together – Following Structure of Passage – Identify writer’s technique
4. 4. Nature of Reading• Munby (1978): Reading Microskills (19 skills) – Deducing meaning and
use of unfamiliar lexical items – Skimming – Scanning – Extracting relevant points from a
text selectively – Summarizing – Main Idea and supporting details – Conceptual Meaning
5. 5. Other Views• Lunzer et al (1979): No evidence that distinct separate skills exist; Reading
consists of one single, global integrated aptitude.• Alderson (1990): At least part of the
reading process probably involves the simultaneous and variable use of different and
overlapping skills.
6. 6. Other Views• Matthews (1990): “Reading skills” are merely aspects of knowledge. –
Speed and flexibility needs to be tapped in reading tests.• Reading has two components:
decoding and comprehension. – Comprehension skills also lies in the field of listening, not
just reading. Thus, these are linguistic skills, not reading skills.
7. 7. Other Views• Carver’s Simple View of reading – Word recognition skills – Reading rate or
reading fluency – Problem-solving comprehension skills• Carver: Reading speeds increase
with reading development.
8. 8. Other Views• Grabe (1991): 6 components in the fluent reading process – Automatic
recognition skills – Vocabulary and structural knowledge – Formal discourse structure
knowledge – Content/World background knowledge – Synthesis and evaluation
skills/strategies – Metacognitive knowledge and skills monitoring
9. 9. Other Views• Abdullah (1994): Subskills in Critical Reading – Evaluate deductive
inferences – Evaluate inductive inferences – Evaluate soundness of generalization –
Recognize hidden assumptions – Identify bias in statements – Recognize author’s motives –
Evaluate strength of arguments
10. 10. Assessment Techniques
11. 11. Guidelines• No best method for testing reading.• No single test method can fulfill all the
varied purposes for which we might test.• Objective methods can be supplemented by
subjective evaluations.
12. 12. Assessment Techniques• Multiple Choice (four-option) – Most common technique in the
1960s – Need to design excellent distractors in options• 1970s: Cloze Tests – Easy to
prepare and score – Validity is still being questioned
13. 13. Current Trends• Multiple Techniques (E.g. in IELTS) *Multiple methods used for each
passage, not just one – Multiple choice – Short-answer questions – Sentence completion –
Notes/Summary/Diagram/Flow chart/Table completion – Matching lists/phrases –
Yes/No/Not given – Classification
14. 14. Cloze Test• Deleting from selected texts every n-th word (n being between 5 to 12) and
asking the test taker to restore deleted word.• One or two sentences in the beginning and
end provide contextual support.• *Gap Filling Tests: Words are removed on a rational basis
(e.g. removing content words: test overall meaning of text; removing function words: test
grammatical sensitivity)
15. 15. Multiple Choice Questions• Students can be coached to become test wise when it comes
to MCQ.• Constructing MCQs is a skilled and time consuming activity.• Tester does not know
why the test taker responded the way he or she did.• Guessing
16. 16. Cloze Test• Research shows that varying the deletion procedure creates various
versions of a cloze tests and thus produce different test results.
17. 17. Other Objective Techniques• Multiple Matching• Ordering Tasks – Difficult to construct
satisfactorily – Test Constructors are obliged to accept unexpected orderings or to rewrite
the text to make only order possible.• True/False – Guessing problem• 3 Category Option:
E.g. Right/Wrong/Doesn’t Say
18. 18. Ordering Task Example (taken from a story)A. it was called ‘The Last Waltz’B. The street
was in total darknessC. because it was one and he and Richard had learnt at schoolD. Peter
looked outside (FIRST)E. he recognized the tuneF. and it seemed desertedG. he thought he
heard something whistling
19. 19. Possible Answer (1)D-G-E-C-A-B-FPeter looked outside. He thought he heard something
whistling. He recognized the tune because it was one he and Richard had learnt at school. It
was called ‘The Last Waltz’. The street was in total darkness and it seemed deserted.
20. 20. Possible Answer (2)D-B-F-G-E-C-APeter looked outside. The street was in total
darkness and it seemed deserted. He thought he heard something whistling. He recognized
the tune because it was one he and Richard had learnt at school. It was called ‘The Last
Waltz’.
21. 21. Other Reading Tests• Editing Tests – Passages with errors and candidate has to identify
them• Short-Answer Tests – Bachman and Palmer (1996): Limited Production Response
Type – To be able to interpret students’ responses to see if they really understood in contrast
to MCQ where there is no justification. – Challenge is to remove ambiguities to the question.
Pre-testing with colleagues is necessary.
22. 22. Other Reading Tests• Free-Recall Tests – Students are asked to read a text, put it aside
and then write down everything they remember from the text. • Bachman and Palmer (1996):
Extended Production Response Type – Problem is that scoring templates for these are time
consuming. For example, It takes 25-50 hours to develop a scoring template for a 250-word
text
23. 23. Other Reading Tests• Summary Tests – Students read a text and are then required to
summarize the main ideas of the whole text or a part, or those ideas in the text that deal with
a given topic. • Scoring is problematic and can be subjective – Problems are reduced if the
summary can relate to a real-world task where clearly some textual information is more
important than other information.
24. 24. Other Reading Tests• Gapped Summary – Students read a text, and then read a
summary of the same text, from which key words have been removed. Task is to restore the
missing words.• Information Transfer Techniques – Task is to identify in the target text the
required information and then to transfer it to a table, map, etc.
25. 25. Real Life Test Tasks• Tests lack connection to real life texts• One strategy as a test
constructor is to get real-world examples of text as ask yourself: – What might a normal
reader do with a text like this? – What sort of self-generated questions might the reader try to
answer?