Strategies for Assessing Reading

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

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

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 )

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

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)

Types of Reading Tasks (4)  Extensive: Top-down processing Global understanding of a text 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. top- down) (see Brown 190)

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

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

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.