A. ASSESSING READING
Reading, the most essential skill for success in all eduacational context, remains a skill of paramount importance as we create assessment of general language ability.
Two primary hurdles must be cleared in order to become efficient readers:
a. Be able to master fundamental bottom up strategies for processing separate letters, words and phrases, as well as top-down, conceptually driven strategies for comprehension.
b. As part of the top-down a approach, second language readers must develop appropriate content amd format schemata¬- background information and cultural experience- to carry out those interpretations effectively.
The assessment of reading ability does not end with the measurement of comprehension. Strategic pathways to full understanding are often important factors to include in assessing learners, especially in the case of most classroom assessment that are formative in nature.
All assessment of reading must be carried out by inference.
GENRES OF READING
1. Academic Reading
• General interest articles (in magazines, newspaper)
• Technical reports (e.g., lab raports), professional jurnal articles
• Reference material (dictionaries)
• Textbooks, theses
• Essays, papers
• Test directions
• Editorials and opinion writing
2. Job-related Reading
• Messages (e.g., phone messages)
• Letters / emails
• Memos (e.g., interoffice)
• Reports (e.g., job evaluations, project reports)
• Schedules, labels, signs, announcements
• Forms, applications, quetionnairs
• Financial documents (bills, invoices)
• Directories (telephone, office)
• Manuals, directions
3. Personal Reading
• Newspaper and magazine
• Letters, emails, greetings cards, invitations
• Messages, notes, lists
• Schedules (train, bus, plane)
• Recipes, menus, maps, calenders
• Advertisements, (commercials, want ads)
• Novels, short stories, jokes, drama, poetry
• Financial documents (e.g., checks, tax forms, loan applications)
• Forms, quetionnaries, medical reports, immigration documents
• Comic strips, cartoons
Importance of Genres of Reading
• It enables the readers to apply certain schemata that will assist them in extracting appropriate meaning
• Efficient readers have to know what their purpose is in reading a text, the strategies for accomplishing that purpose and how to retain the information.
Microskills for Reading
1. Discriminate among the distrinctive graphemes and orthographic patterns of English.
2. Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short term memory.
3. Process writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose.
4. Recognize a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance.
5. Recegnize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs), systems (tense, agreement, and pluralization), patterns, rules and elliptical forms.
6. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammar forms.
7. Recognize cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signalling the relationship between and among clauses.
Macroskills for Reading
1. Recognized the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance for interpretation.
2. Recognize the communicative functions written texts, according to form and purpose.
3. Infer context that is not explicit by using background knowledge.
4. From described events, ideas, etc., infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization and exemplification.
5. Distinguish between literal and implied meaning.
6. Detect culturally specific references and interpret them in a context of the appropriate cultural schemata.
7. Develop and use a battery of reading strategies such as scanning and skimming, detecting discourse markers.
Some Principles Strategies for Reading Comprehension
1. Identify your purpose in reading a text.
2. Apply spelling rules and conventions for bottom-up decoding.
3. Use lexical analysis (prefixes, roots, suffixes, etc.) to determine meaning.
4. Guess at meaning (of words, idioms, etc.) when you aren’t certain.
5. Skim the text for the gist and for main ideas.
6. Scan the text for specific information (names, dates, key words).
7. Use silent reading techniques for rapid processing.
8. Use marginal notes, outlines, charts, or semantic maps for understanding and retaining information.
9. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.
10. Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationship.
TYPES OF READING
• Perceptive
- Involve attending to the components of larger stretches discourse: letters, words, punctuation and other graphemic symbols.
- Bottom-up processing is implied.
• Selective
- This is largerly an artefact of assessment formats.
- Cerain typical tasks are used such as picture-cued tasks, matching, true /false, multiple choice.
- Stimuli include sentences, brief paragraphs and simple charts and graphs.
- Brief responses are intended and a combination of bottom-up and top-down processing may be used.
• Interactive
- Include stretches of language of several paragraph to one page or more which the reader must interact with the text.
- Genres: anecdotes, short narratives and descriptions, excerpts from longer texts, questionarries, memos, announcements, directions, recipes and the like.
- Focus: to identify relevant features (lexical, symbolic, grammatical and discourse) within texts of moderately short length with the objective of retaining the information that is processed.
• Extensive
- It applies to texts of more than page, up to and including professional articles, essays, technical reports, short stories and books.
- Purpose: to tap into a learner’s global understanding of a text, as opposed to asking test-takers to “zoom in” on small details.
- Top-down processing is assumed for most extensive tasks.
Designing Assessment Tasks: Perceptive Reading
At the beginning level of reading a second language lies a set of tasks that are fundamental and basic: recognition of alphabeticsymbols, capitalized and lowercase letters, punctuation, words and grapheme-phoneme correspondences.
LITERACY tasks: implying that learner is in the early stages of becoming “literate”
READING ALOUD
• The test takers sees separate letters, words and/or short sentences and reads them aloud, one by one, in the presence of an administrator.
• Any recognizable oral approximation of the target response is considered correct.
WRITTEN RESPONSE
• The same stimuli is presented, and the test taker’s task is to reproduce the probe in writing.
• Evaluation of the test taker’s response must be carefully treated.
MULTIPLE CHOICE
1. Grapheme recognition task.
2. Minimal pair distinction
PICTURE-CUED ITEMS
Test-takers are shown a picture along with a written text and are given possible tasks to perfom.
1. Picture-cued matching word identification
Designing Assessment Tasks:Selective Reading
Selective Reading
• Focus on formal aspect of language (lexical,grammatical and a few discourse features)
• It includes what many incorrectly think of as testing “vocabulary and grammar “
MULTIPLE CHOICE
1. Multiple-choice vocabulary /grammar tasks
2. Contextualized multiple-choise vocabulary/grammar tasks
3. Multiple-choise vocabulary /grammar tasks
MATCHING TASKS
1. Vocabulary matching task
2. Selected response fill-in vocabulary task
3. Matching task
ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES
• It offers an alternative to traditional multiple-choice or fill in the blank formats and are easier to construct than multiple choice item. • It become more of a puzzle-solving process than a genuine test of comprehension as test-taker strungle with the search for a match.
EDITING TASKS
• Editing for grammatical or rhetorical errors is a widely used test method for assessing linguistic competence in reading.
• It does not only focus on grammar but also introduces a stimulation of the authentic task of editing or discerning errors in written passages.
PICTURE-CUED TASKS
• Diagram-labeling task
GAP-FILLING TASKS
• The response is to write a word or phrase.
• To create sentence complement items where test-takers read part of a sentence and then complete it by writing a phrase.
- Sentence Completion Task
Gap Filling Task
DISADVANTAGES
It has a question assessment of reading ability. The task requires both reading and writing performance, thus, rendering it of low validity in isolating reading as the sole criterian.
Scoring the variety of creative responses that are likely to appear is another drawback. A number of judgment is needed on what comprises a correct response.
Designing Assessment Tasks:
Interactive Reading
Tasks at this level have a combination of form-focused and meaning-focused objectives but with more emphasis on meaning.
It implies a little more focus on top-down processing than on bottom-up.
Texts are a little longer from a paragraph to as much as a page or so in the case of ordinary prose. Charts, graps and other graphics are somewhat complex in their format.
- CLOZE TASKS
• The ability to filling gaps in an incomplete image (visual, auditory or cognitive) and supply (from background schemata) omitted details.
• Cloze tests are usually a minimum of two paragraph in length in order to account for discourse expectancies.
• Typically, ever seventh word (plus or minus two) is deleted (known as fixed-ratio deletion) but many cloze test designers instead use a rotation deletion procedure of choosing deletions according to the grammatical or discourse function of the words.
Two approaches to the scoring of cloze test
• Exact word method-gives credit to test-takers only if they insert the exact word that was originally deleted.
• Appropriate word method- gives credit to the test-takers for supplying any word that is grammatically correct and that makes good sense in the context.
1. Cloze procedure, fixed ratio deletion (every seventh word)
2. Cloze procedure, rational deletion (prepositions and conjunctions)
Variations on Standard Cloze Testing
• C-test- the second half (according to the number of letters) of every other word is obliterated and the test-taker must restore each word.
• Cloze-elide procedure¬- it insert words into a text that do not belong. The test-taker’s task is to detect and cross out the “intrusive” words.
Cloze-elide procedure is actually a test of reading speed and not of proofreading skill.
DISADVANTAGES
• Neither the words to insert nor the frequency of insertion appears to have any rationale.
• Fast and efficient readers are not adept at detecting the instrusive words. Good readers naturally weed our such potential interruptions.
- IMPROMPTU READING PLUS COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS
The traditional “Read a passage and answer same questions” technique which is the oldest and the most common. Ex: Reading comprehension passage (Phillips, 2001, pp. 421-422) and Computer-based TOEFL* reading comprehension item.
- SHORT-ANSWER TASKS
A reading passage is presented and the test taker reads questions that must be answered in sentence or two.
1. Open-ended reading comprehension questions
- EDITING (LONGER TEXTS)
ADVANTAGES
• Authenticity is increased.
• The task simulates proofreading one’s own essay, where it is imperative to find and correct errors.
• If the test is connected to a specific curriculum, the test designer can draw up specifications for a number of grammatical and rhetorical categories that match the content of the courses.
SCANNING
• It is a strategy used by all readers to find relevant information in a test.
• Test-takers are presented with a text (prose or something in a chart or graph format) and requiring rapid identification of relevant bits of information.
- Possible stimuli include:
- A one to two page news article
- An essay
- A chapter in a textbook
- A technical report
- A table or chart depicting some research findings
- An application form
Test-taker must locate
- A date, name or place in an article;
- The setting for a narrative story;
- The principal divisions of a chapter;
- The principal research finding in a technical report;
- A result reported in a specified in a table;
- The cost of an item on a menu; and
- Specified data needed to fill out an application.
ORDERING TASKS
- Sometimes called “strip story ” technique.
- Variations on this can serve as an assessment of overall global understanding of a story and of the cohesive devices that signal the order of events or ideas.
Sentence-ordering
INFORMATION TRANSFER: READING CHARTS, MAPS, GRAPHS, DIAGRAMS
- It requires not only an understanding of the graphic and verbal conventions of the medium but also a linguistic ability to interpret the information to someone else.
- It is often accompanied by oral or written discourse in order to convey, clarify, question, argue and debate, among other linguistic functions.
INFORMATION TRANSFER: READING CHARTS, MAPS, GRAPHS, DIAGRAMS
- To comprehend information in this medium, learners must be able to:
• comprehend specific conventions of the various types of graphics;
• comprehend labels, headings, numbers and symbols;
• comprehend the possible relationship among elements of the graphic; and
• make inferences that are not presented overtly.
The act of comprehending graphics includes the linguistic performance of oral or written interpretattions, comments, questions, etc. this implies a process of information transfer from one skill to another, in this case, from reading verbal/nonverbal information to speaking /writing.
Designing Assessment Tasks:
Extensive Reading
- It involves somewhat longer texts. Journal articles, technical reports, longer essays, short stories and books fall into this category.
- Reading of this type of discourse almost always involves a focus on meaning using mostly top-down processing, with only occasional use of targeted bottom-up strategy.
Tasks that can be applied in extensive reading:
- Impromptu reading plus comprehension questions
- Short answer tasks
- Editing
- Scanning
- Ordering
- Information transfer and
- Interpretation (discussed under graphics)
SKIMMING TASKS
It is the process of rapid coverage of reading matter to determine its gist or main idea.
It is a prediction strategy used to give a reader a sense of topic and purpose of text, the organization of the text, the perspective or point of view of the writer , its case or difficulty and its usefulness to the reader.
SUMMARIZING AND RESPONDING
SUMMARIZING
It requires a synopsis or overview of the text.
RESPONDING
It asks the reader to provide his/her own opinion on the text as a whole or on some statement or issue within it.
Scoring is also difficult in responding because of the subjectivity
Holistic Scoring scale for summarizing and responding
3 Demonstrate clear, unambiguous comprehension of the main and supporting ideas.
2 Demonstrates comprehension of the main idea but lacks comprehension of some supporting ideas
1 Demonstrates only a partial comprehension of the main and supporting ideas.
0 Demonstrates no comprehension of the main and supporting ideas.
NOTE-TAKING and OUTLINING
- They fall on the category of informal assessment
- Their utility is in the strategic training that learning gain in retaining information through marginal notes that highlight key information or organizational outlines that put supporting ideas into a visually manageable framework.
B. ASSESSING WRITING
Genres of Writing
- 1. Academic writing
- Papers and general reports/ essays, compositions /academically /focused journals /theses /dissertations
- 2. Job-related writing
- Message /letters, email /memos /reports /labels /signs / advertisements /announcements.
- 3. Personal writing
- Greeting cards /invitations /notes /tax /forms /diaries /fiction /personal journal
Types of Writing Performance
- 1. Imitative. It is a level at which learners are trying to master the mechanics of writing. Form (letters, words, punctuation, and brief sentences) is the primary while context and meaning are of secondary concern.
- 2. Intensive. It includes skills in producing appropriate vocabulary, collocations, idioms, and correct grammatical features. Most assessment tasks are concerned with a focus on form.
- 3. Responsive. At this level, form-focused attention is mostly at the discourse level, with a strong emphasis on context and meaning. Assessment tasks require leraners to connect sequence of two or three paragraphs.
- 4. Extensive. Extensive writing using all the processes and strategies of writing to write an essay, a term paper, a project report, or even a thesis.
Imitative Writing
- 1. Copying. There is nothing innovative or modern about directing a test-taker to copy letters or words.
- Ex: (Copy the words)
- Bit bet but gin din pin
- ____ ___ ____ ___ ____ ____
- Listening cloze selection tasks Test takers listen a passage and then write the missing words (p. 222)
- 3. Picture-cued tasks. Familiar pictures are displayed, and test-takers are told to write the word that the picture presents.
- 4. Form completion tasks. The use of a simple form (registration, application, etc.) that asks for name, addres, phone number, and other data.
- 5. Converting numbers and abbreviations to words.
- 9:00 ______ 5:45______
- Tues.______ 5/3 ______
- 726 S. Main St. _________
Spelling Tasks and Detecting Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences
- Spelling tests
- Picture-cued tasks
- Multiple-choice techniques
- Example:
- He washed his hands with _____
- A. soap B. sope C. sop D. soup
- Matching phonetic symbols
- d/e/ ______ I /ai/ /k/ _____
Intensive Writing
- The same as controlled writing or guided writing. At this level, students produce language to display their competence in grammar, vocabulary or sentence formation, and not necessarily to convey meaning for an authentic purpose.
- Dictation and Dicto-Comp
- Dictation is the rendition in writing of what one hears aurally.
- Dicto-Comp: A paragraph is read at normal speed, usually two or three times; then the teacher asks student to rewrite the paragraph from the best of their recollection.
- Variation: The teacher, after reading the passage , distributes a handout with key words from the paragraph as cues forstudents.
Grammatical Transformation Tasks
- The tasks are:
- Change the tenses in a paragraph.
- Change full forms of verbs to reduced forms.
- Change statements to yes/no or WH-questions.
- Change questions into statements.
- Combine two sentences into one using a relative pronoun.
- Change from active to passive voice.
Picture-Cued Tasks
- Short sentences. A drawing of some simple action is shown; the test-takers writers a brief sentence. (p. 227)
- Picture description. Using the prepositions: on, over, under, next to, around to describe as in a picture on p. 192.
- Picture sequence description. A sequence of three to six pictures depicting a story line can provide a suitable stimulus for written task. (p. 228)
- Vocabulary Assessment Tasks
- The major techniques used to assess vocabulary are (a) defining and (b) using a word in a sentence.
- Ordering tasks
- Recording words in a sentence
- 1. Cold /winter /is /weather /the /in /the
- 2. Studying /what /you /are
- 3. Next /clock /the /is /picture /to
Short-Answer and Sentence Completion Tasks
- Ex:
- 1. A: Who’s that? B: ______Gina.
- A: Where’s she from? B: _______Italy.
- 2. Write three sentences describing your preferences: #6a: a big, expensive car or a small, cheap car; #6b: a house in the country or an apartment in the city; #6c: money or good health.
- 6a._______ 6b._______ 6c. ______
Issues in Assessment responsive and Extensive Writing
- The genres of text here are:
- Short reports/responses to the reading of an article or story/summarize of articles or stories/brief narratives or descriptions/interpretations of graphs, tables, and charts.
- Writers become involved in composing, real writing, as opposed to display writing.
- 1. Authenticity. Assessment is typically formative, not summative, and positive washback is more important than practicality and reliability.
- 2. Scoring. Not only the form but also the function of the text are important in evaluation.
- 3. Time. Responsive writing, along with extensive writing, relies on the essential drafting process for its ultimate success.
Designing: Response and Extensive Writing
- Paraphrasing. It is to say something in one’s own words. It can avoid plagiarizing and offer some variety in expression. Scoring is judged by how the test-taker conveys the same of similar message, with discourse, grammar, and vocabulary as secondary evaluations.
- Guided Question and Answer
- The test administrator poses a series of questions which serve as an outline of the emergent written text.
Guided Written Stimuli
- 1. Where did this story take place? (setting)
- 2. Who were the people in the story?
- 3. What happened first? And then? And then?
- 4. Why did ________do________(reason)?
- 5. What did _____think about_____? (opinion)
- 6. What happened at the end? (climax)
- 7. What is the moral of the story? (evaluation)
Paragraph Conruction tasks
- Assessment of paragraph development takes on the following forms.
- 1. Topic sentence writing. The writing of a topic sentence (its preference/absence, its effectiveness in starting the topic).
- 2. Topic development within a paragraph . four criteria to assess the quality:
- The clarity of expression of ideas /the logic of the sequence and connections /the cohesiveness or unity /the overall effectiveness or impact.
- 3. Development of main and supporting ideas across paragraph. The elements in evaluating a multi-paragraph essay:
- Addressing the topic, main idea, or principal purpose.
- Organizing and developing supporting ideas.
- Using appropriate details to undergrid supporting ideas.
- Showing facility and fluency in the use of language.
- Demonstrating syntactic variety.
Strategic Opinion
- 1. Attending to task. A set of directives is stated or implied by the teacher or the conventions of the genre. Four types: compare/contrast, problem/solution, pros/cons, and cause/effect.
- 2. Attending to genre. Reports, Summaries of reading/lectures/videos, Responses to reading/lectures/videos, Narration, description, persuasion/argument, and exposition, Interpreting statistical, graphic data, Library research paper.
Test os Written English (TWE)
- TWE is a standardized test of writing ability and gained a reputation as well- respected measure of written English.
- The TWE is a timed impromptu test in which test-takers are under a 30-minute time limit and are not able to prepare ahead of time.
Sample TWE Topic
- Some people say that the best preparation for life is learning to work with others and be cooperative. Others take the opposite view and say that learning to be competitive is the best preparation. Discuss these positions, using concrete examples of both. Tell which one you agree with explain why.
Six Steps to Maximize success on the TWE
- 1. Carefully identify the topic.
- 2. Plan your supporting ideas.
- 3. In the introductory paragraph, restate the topic and state the organizational plan.
- 4. Write effective supporting paragraphs.
- 5. Restate your position and summarize in the concluding paragraph.
- 6. Edit sentence structur & rhetorical expression. (Scoring Guide p. 239)
Scoring Methods for Responsive and Extensive Writing
- There major approaches to scoring writing performance : holistic, primary trait, and analytical.
- Holistic : A single score is assigned to an essay.
- Primary trait : The achievement of the primary purpose, or trait, of and essay is the only factor rated.
- Analytical : The written teks is broken down into a number of subcategories (organization, grammar) and each subcategori gets a separate rating
Holistic Scoring
- Advatages :
- Fast evaluation /high inter - rater reability/
- easily interpreted by lay persons / empahasize the writer’s sterngths / applicability to writing across many different discipilines
- Disadvantages :
- No diagnostic information/ not aqually well apply to all genres / training in raters / one score only
Primary Trait Scoring
- If the purpose or function of an essay is to persuade the reader to do something, the score for the writing would rise or fall on the accomplishment of that function.
- Organization, supporting details, fluency, syantactic variety, and other features will also be evaluated.
- Advantage : focus on function.
Analytic Scoring
- Classroom evaluation of learning is best through analytic scoring.
- Brown and Bailey (1984) designed an analytic scoring scale that specified five major categories and five different levels in each category, ranging from “unacceptable” to “excellent”.
- Five categories: organization, logical development of ideas, grammar, punctuation /spelling/ mechanics, and quality of expression. (pp.244-245)
Continue
- Content 30
- Organization 20
- Vocabulary 20
- Syntax 25
- Mechanics 5
- Total 100
- Analytic scoring offers more washback and helps to call the writer’s attention to problem areas, but it requires more time for teachers to attend to details within each of the categories
REFERENCE:
Brown. H.D. 2004. LANGAUGE ASSESSMENT: Principle and Classroom Practices: Pearson.
- Assessing Reading (Chapter 8, p. 185-217)
- Assessing Writing (Chapter 9, p. 218-250)
https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/venj88/assessing-reading-hd-brown-handout. Accessed on 8 May 2020
http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/kheangsokheng52/chapter-9-assessing-writing. Accessed on 10 May 2020
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