Assessing Reading Contents Reading strategies Types of reading

Assessing Reading

Contents ¡ Reading strategies ¡ Types of reading tasks Perceptive l Selective l Interactive l Extensive l ¡ Summary ¡ Dictocomp ¡ Strip story

Reading Strategies (1) ¡ Bottom-up processing (decoding) which employs micro-skills Discrimination of graphemes & orthographic patterns l Recognition & interpretation of words, word classes, patterns, rules, etc. l Cohesive devices l Making use of formal schema to decode the written text l

Reading Strategies (1) ¡ Micro-skill processing (decoding) Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory. l Recognize a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance. l Recognize grammatical word classes l

Reading Strategies (2) ¡ Top-down processing which employs macro-skills l Recognition of rhetorical forms and communicative functions l Using background knowledge to make inferences l Scanning and skimming, guessing meaning of words from context, activating relevant schemata

Reading Strategies (2) ¡ Macro-skills processing Distinguish between literal and implied meanings. l Detect culturally specific references and interpret them in a context of the appropriate cultural schemata. l Develop the reading strategies – such as, scanning and skimming, guessing meaning of words from context, activating relevant schemata l

Reading Strategies ¡ The reading strategies: l Skim l Scan l Make an inference

Types genres of Reading Tasks ¡ Genres of reading Academic reading ¡ E. g. l Job-related reading ¡ E. g. l Personal reading ¡ E. g. textbooks, comic strips, test direction, letter/email, announcements, newspaper, l

Types genres of Reading Tasks ¡Efficient readers l Know the purpose in reading a text l The strategies to accomplish the purpose l How to retain the information ¡The content validity of an assessment procedure is established through the genre of a text

Types of Reading Tasks ¡ Perceptive ¡ Selective ¡ Interactive ¡ Extensive

Types of Reading Tasks (1) ¡ Perceptive: l Bottom-up processing l Decoding letters, words, graphemic symbols, etc. l Reading aloud, picture-cued word or sentence identification, etc. (Brown 190 -193)

Perceptive assessment tasks ¡ ¡ Reading aloud Multiple-choice – l l ¡ minimal pair distinction Grapheme recognition task Picture-cued items Picture-cued l picture-cued l Picture-cued (p. 192 -193) l word identification sentence identification true/false sentence identification matching word identification

Types of Reading Tasks (2) o Selective: l. A combo of bottom-up and topdown processing l Formal (lexical and grammatical) aspects of language l Formats including multiple-choice, matching, gap-filling

Selective Assessment Tasks o Multiple-choice form-focused criteria e. g. He’s not married. He’s_____ a. young b. single c. first d. a husband

Selective Assessment Tasks o Contextualized multiple-choice vocabulary / grammar tasks 1. Oscar: Do you like champagne? Lucy: No, I can’t _____it. a. stand b. prefer c. hate

Selective Reading Assessment Tasks o o Contextualized multiple-choice cloze vocabulary task (p. 196) Matching tasks o o o Editing tasks o o Vocabulary matching tasks Selected response fill-in vocabulary task E. g. paper-based toefl Picture-cued tasks (p. 199)

Types of Reading Tasks (3) ¡ Interactive: Top-down processing (with some instances of bottom-up) l More lengthy reading where the reader must interact with the text l A process of negotiating meaning l Both form-focused and meaning-focused (but more emphasis on meaning comprehension) l Cloze, comprehension Qs, editing, short answers, scanning, ordering, info. transfer (graphics interpretation) l

Interactive Reading Assessment Tasks ¡ Cloze procedure (p. 202) l l ¡ ¡ ¡ C-test Reading comprehension passage Short-answer tasks l ¡ ¡ Open-ended reading comprehension questions Editing (longer texts) l ¡ Fixed-ratio deletion Rational deletion Contextualized grammar editing tasks. Ordering tasks Information Transfer (p. 211)

Types of Reading Tasks (4) ¡ Extensive: l Top-down processing l Global understanding of a text l Skimming, summarizing and responding, note-taking and outlining

Summary ¡ Types of reading by length (short, medium, long), focus (form and meaning), and process (bottom-up vs. topdown) (see Brown 190)