READING ASSESSMENT

Skimming is when we go through a text quickly to understand what it is about and to see if we need to read it more carefully. We can also refer to this as ‘reading for gist’. 

Scanning is another form of quick reading, which we use when we want to look for something specific within a text. We can also refer to it as ‘reading for specific information’.

Intensive reading is a form of careful reading. When we need to pick up as many details as possible, usually in order to perform a task based on our reading, we read intensively.

Extensive reading is what we do when we are reading something for pleasure. 

As we’ve seen, the difference in purpose determines the way we read something. This happens because reading involves different skills.

One way to describe this is to differentiate between ‘higher’ and ‘lower-level’ reading processes.

Higher level processing is when we form an overall understanding of paragraphs or the whole text. We might make inferences to understand information which is not stated directly in the text. We will also use our knowledge and experience of the world to help our understanding.

For example, you read a news article about an event in another country. It is likely that you will integrate ideas from different parts of the text to understand what happened. You may also use everything you already know about that country to help you understand. Often we do this without realising it.

Lower level processing refers to recognising the basic units of the text such as letters, words, and building up meaning at sentence level.

For example, think about students whose own language does not use the Roman alphabet. They will need to recognise the letters of the Roman alphabet first and how they are grouped together to form words. Only once they have decoded the script will they be able to read a text in English.

To measure the difficulty of a text, there are a few tools we can use.

TEXT INSPECTOR: https://textinspector.com/

If you want to check the level of a specific word, you can use the English Vocabulary Profile tool from Cambridge University Press, which (at the time of writing) is free to subscribe to.

Similarly, you can also check the level of a grammatical structure using the English Grammar Profile.

For teachers writing academic reading tests, the Academic Word List from Victoria University, Wellington, NZ is also a useful resource. This resource provides useful lists of the most frequent words used in academic environments. There are 10 lists, ranging from most frequent words (list 1) to least frequent (list 10).

Task types for assessing reading

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When it comes to testing reading, we can use a lot of different tasks. All have their advantages and disadvantages.

Let’s have a look at them in more detail.

• Multiple choice questions normally consist of a short text (usually a sentence or part of a sentence), known as the ‘stem’, and a list of options or alternatives, which includes the correct answer or answers (the ‘key’) and a few incorrect ones, called ‘distractors’. One of the challenges of this task type is to come up with distractors that are credible enough, but not too challenging for our students.
• True/False questions are similar to multiple choice questions, but have only two options (generally True/False, Yes/No). This means that test takers have a 50% chance of getting them correct, regardless of their understanding. To limit the guessing, we might add a third option (e.g. Not mentioned), although sometimes it can be difficult for students to distinguish between ‘false’ and ‘not mentioned’, so it is important to train our students in this type of task if we want to use them in a test. Alternatively, we might ask them to locate the answer in the text (i.e. write the number of the paragraph where the answer is located), although this doesn’t work very well if we are testing global reading.
• Matching tasks are also often used to test reading skills. These tasks often take the form of matching texts with appropriate headings (or paragraphs within a text with appropriate subheadings) or matching the first part of a text with its second part. It is good practice to include a few extra distractors in the list of options (e.g. to have 7 subheadings and only 5 paragraphs), in order to limit guessing.
• Gap fill and cloze are tasks where a few words have been taken out and substituted with blanks. Test takers are expected to fill in the blanks with the missing word(s). This type of task requires not only reading skills, but also textual and language skills, as test takers are expected to fill in the blanks with a word that fits within the text and is grammatically correct. Common variants of this task include the ‘banked cloze’, where students have to choose the right answer from a list of options, and the ‘cloze elide’, where students have to put whole sentences back into a text.
• Short answer questions can be considered a variant of open questions where test takers are required to use a specific number of words. They usually pose less of a challenge when it comes to scoring because it is easier to predict the answers test takers will come up with, and decide in advance which are acceptable and which are not.
• Information transfer are tasks where candidates are expected to fill in charts, tables or diagrams based on the information they read in a text. This kind of task is often used in academically oriented language tests.
• Ordering tasks are tasks where candidates need to put sentences or paragraphs of a text in the right order. It is particularly important to pilot this type of task because they are apparently easy to build from authentic texts, but often students come up with different solutions we had not thought of (and which are also perfectly acceptable).
• Integrated tasks: These are tasks that require the use of a different skill (usually a productive one, like speaking and/or writing). Examples can be summary tasks, making notes from a text, paraphrasing, etc. They can be very challenging to score because it can be hard to build a scale of criteria that takes into account both reading and writing (or speaking) skills, and sometimes it’s not so straightforward to determine whether an error depends on poor reading or on the lack of productive ability. However, these tasks can be more authentic than non-integrated tasks.

Some of the task types will require the test takers to use only their reading skill: multiple choice questions in all their different forms, matching tasks, banked gap fill, and ordering tasks. Others will involve another skill, for example, writing. Sometimes, the amount of writing might be very small, such as short answers or gap fill and cloze tasks. In other tasks, candidates might be required to produce a certain amount of text, such as open questions, summaries, editing and paraphrasing tasks. In both cases, we’ll need to think about how this second skill might affect the students’ performances. There will be more on this when we discuss the scoring of reading tasks.

It’s important to keep in mind that each task type will have advantages and disadvantages, therefore, including a number of different task types is probably our safest approach.

Additional advice on developing reading tests

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To conclude this first part of the week about assessing reading, we have asked Professor Barry O’Sullivan OBE for some advice about assessing reading and developing tests for reading comprehension.

Here are some more tips on assessing reading.

• Decide which sub-skills you wish to test e.g. skimming, scanning, making inferences.
• Choose suitable reading texts and task types. Ideally your texts will be interesting and similar to the reading your students need to do in real life.
• Make sure you test a range of reading skills and include a variety of tasks.
• Give the test to someone else to try first. Did you expect the same answers? Can you improve the test?
• Make sure your questions do not test general knowledge. Ask someone to try your questions without giving them the text.
• Write tests in teams of people wherever possible. Two heads are better than one, as they say!

Remember - a reading test will only provide useful information about a test taker’s reading ability if we do three things: choose the right texts, select the most appropriate tasks, and score everything efficiently. All this takes time, effort, experience and, above all, a lot of common sense.

Source: British Council