Assessing%20Reading

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Assessing Reading
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Contents

• Reading strategies
• Types of reading tasks
• Perceptive
• Selective
• Interactive
• Extensive
• Summary
• Dictocomp
• Strip story

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Reading Strategies (1)

• 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

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Reading Strategies (2)

• 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

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Types of Reading Tasks (1)

• Perceptive
• Bottom-up processing
• Decoding letters, words, graphemic symbols, etc.
• Reading aloud, picture-cued word or sentence
  identification, etc. (Brown 190-93)

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Types of Reading Tasks (2)

• Selective
• A combo of bottom-up and top-down processing
• Formal (lexical and grammatical) aspects of
  language
• Formats including multiple-choice, matching,
  gap-filling

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Types of Reading Tasks (3)

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

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Types of Reading Tasks (4)

• Extensive
• Top-down processing
• Global understanding of a text
• Skimming, summarizing and responding, note-taking
  and outlining

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Summary

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

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Dictocomp

• A variation on the traditional dictation
  procedure
• T reads while Ss listen carefully
• Ss write a summary (not word for word as in
  dictation)
• Decide scoring criteria (Bailey 151)
• Rationale
• Meaning-oriented
• Conveying capturing meaning key component of
  communication

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Communicative Language Teaching

• Around 1980s
• 4 principles of communicative lang. test design
• Start from somewhere assessment should be based
  on sound theoretical principles
• Concentrate on content
• Appropriate topics and tasks in terms of the age,
  proficiency level, interests, and goals of the
  learners
• Bias for best to elicit best possible
  performance
• E.g., can use a dictionary when writing dictocomp
• Work for washback promote positive washback

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Strip Story

• A speaking/listening activity in which every
  student is given a strip of paper with one
  sentence (or portion of a sentence) from a story
  written on it.
• Procedure
• Every S memorizes his sentence.
• Each S says his sentence.
• Group sorts out the order.
• Ss negotiate the sentence order to reconstruct
  the story.