Language Assessment - Assessing Reading Full Description with Picture and Chart (H. Douglas Brown)

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Assessing Reading

EFL Learners

DefinitionBeing able to reading is being able to

understand, use and reflect on written texts, in order to:

achieve…one’s goals,

to develop…one’s knowledge and potential

and to participatein society.

John H.A.L. de Jong

Texts we read, teach and test Fill in a chart.

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Retrieving information

Interpreting text

Reflection &

Evaluation

Why do we read Complete a chart.

Let’s look at ReadingThere are four main elements in the activity of reading:

Let’s look at ReadingThere are four main elements in the activity of reading:

1.there is a reader2.there is a text (author?)

(the author is part of the text, but not present in the activity)

3.the reader has a goal (who decides?)(a self-chosen reason for reading the text)

4.the reading activity will have a result (what?)(a change in the reader: more knowledge, satisfaction, etc )

Which elements are observable? Assessable?

These elements should be relevant to the intended traitThese elements should interfere the least possible

• refers to (part of) a text• sets task pertaining to the text,

requiring particular subskill(s)

• specifies format for overt response demonstrating application of subskill

• specifies rules for scoring response

A Reading item

• may require to link information from the text to prior knowledge and experience

Only then are score differences likely to reflect differences in true ability on the intended trait: i.e. reliable and valid

Skills used in reading. Microskills Macroskills

Reading Strategies (microskills) Bottom-up processing (decoding)

which employs micro-skills Discrimination of graphemes &

orthographic patterns Recognition & interpretation of words,

word classes, patterns, rules, etc. Cohesive devices Making use of formal schema to

decode the written text

Reading Strategies (macroskills) Top-down processing which

employs macro-skills Recognition of rhetorical forms and

communicative functions Using background knowledge to

make inferences Scanning and skimming, guessing

meaning of words from context, activating relevant schemata

Types of Reading Tasks (1) Perceptive:

Bottom-up processing Decoding…

letters, words, graphemic symbols, etc. Tasks…

Reading aloud, picture-cued word or sentence identification, etc. (Brown 190-93)

Picture-cued criteria

Picture-cued criteria

Types of Reading Tasks (2) Selective:

A combination of…bottom-up and top-down processing

Formal aspects of language..lexical and grammatical

Tasks including…multiple-choice, matching, gap-filling

Form-focused criteria

Form-focused criteria

Meaning-focused criteria

Meaning-focused criteria

Meaning-focused criteria

Types of Reading Tasks (3) Interactive:

Shift to processing that is mostly… Top-down (with some instances of bottom-up)

More lengthy reading means the reader… must interact with the textgoes through a process of negotiating meaning

Focus includes both form-focused and meaning-focused (but more

emphasis on meaning comprehension) Task types…

Cloze, comprehension Qs, editing, short answers, scanning, ordering, info. transfer (graphics interpretation)

Editing tasks – multiple choice

Contextualized editing tasks

Ordering tasks

Cloze Taylor, W.L. (1953). "Cloze procedure: A

new tool for measuring readability." Journalism Quarterly, 30, 415-433.

Based on gestalt theory:

What do you see?

What do you see?

What do you see?

How did you feel? A common human reaction:

a release of tension because it has been possible to assimilate a previously non-sensical image into a frame of reference.

Gestalt emphasises that the mind abhors non-sense. And a whole is different than the sum of its parts

Cloze – fixed ratio deletion

Cloze –rational deletion

Cloze – C-test Klein-Braily, C & Raatz, U. (1984). A

survey of research on the C-Test. In: Language Testing, Vol.1, (2), pp. 134-146.

Cloze – C-test

Cloze-elide test

Types of Reading Tasks (4) Extensive:

Processing is top-down

Requires an understanding of a text that isGlobal

Tasks…Skimming, summarizing and responding, note-taking and outlining

Skimming

Summarizing

Test design considerations Types of reading by Length

(short, medium, long), Focus

(form and meaning), and process

(bottom-up vs. top-down)

(Brown, 2003)

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