READING

Reading is a very important skill that we use in many parts of our lives, including school,
work, and even fun activities, nevertheless, it is a skill that is taken for granted.. There
are different ways to read, like sounding out words (bottom-up) or using what you
already know to understand something new (top-down). Being a good reader also
means understanding the kind of text you're reading. The better you understand the
type of text, the easier it is to get the information you need. Second language readers
must develop appropriate content and formal schemata-background information and
cultural experience to carry out those interpretations effectively.

Schemata (plural of schema) refers to shortcuts your brain uses to process information
faster and more effectively.

TYPES (GENRES) OF READING

Each type of reading follows a certain format and conventions. A reader must be able to
anticipate those conventions in order to process meaning efficiently as when you know
the format, you can find the information you need easier. Knowing why you're reading
(your purpose) also helps you understand the text better, the strategies for
accomplishing that purpose, and how to retain the information.
There are three main types of reading: academic reading (school stuff like reports and
articles), job-related reading (work stuff like schedules and forms), and personal
reading (things you read for fun like magazines and emails).
The genre of a text enables readers to apply certain schemata that will assist them in
extracting appropriate meaning, they will expect a certain arrangement of information
and will know to search for a sequential order of directions.
The content validity of an assessment procedure is largely established through the
genre of a text.

MICROSKILLS, MACROSKILLS, AND STRATEGIES FOR READING

The skills and strategies for accomplishing reading emerge as a crucial consideration in
the assessment of reading ability.
Microskills are the building blocks, some examples are:
Microskills
1. Discriminate among the distinctive 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.

Macroskills are the bigger picture, some examples are:

1. Recognize the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance for
interpretation.
2. Recognize the communicative functions of written texts, according to form and
purpose.
3. Infer context that is not explicit by using background knowledge.
4. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.

Some principal strategies for reading comprehension

1. Identify your purpose in reading a text
2. Apply spelling rules and conventions.
3. Use lexical analysis (prefixes, roots, suffixes, etc.) to determine meaning.
4. Guess the 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, etc)

In the case of reading, variety of performance is derived more from the multiplicity of
types of texts than from the variety of overt types of performance.
Testing reading goes beyond just understanding the text. There are different skills
involved in reading, and tests can check these skills instead of just if you get the main
idea.
Perceptive reading: checks your ability to focus on the building blocks of written
language, like letters, words, punctuation, etc. Tasks involve attending to the
components of larger stretches of discourse. Bottom-up processing is implied.
Selective reading: is more like a pop quiz where you answer questions based on short
bits of text. It might involve matching words or answering true/false. A combination of
bottom-up and top-down processing may be used.
Interactive reading: tests how well you understand the meaning of a text by looking at
clues within the text itself and what you already know. This is often used for things like
news articles, stories, or instructions. The focus of the task is to identify relevant
features with the objective of retaining the information that is processed. Top-down
processing is typical of such tasks.
Extensive reading: tests your ability to handle longer texts, therefore it applies to texts
of more than a page.

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS: PERCEPTIVE READING

Tasks of perception such as recognition of alphabetic symbols, capitalized and
lowercase letters, punctuation, words, and grapheme-phoneme correspondences are
often referred to as literacy tasks. We must take into account that some learners are
already literate in their own native language, but in other cases the second language
may be the first language that they have ever learned to read.
Reading aloud: since the assessment is of reading comprehension, any recognizable
oral approximation of the target response is considered correct.
Written response: the test-taker's task is to reproduce the probe in writing. If an error
occurs, it is fundamental to determine its source; what might be assumed to be a writing
error, for example, may actually be a reading error, and vice versa.
Multiple-choice: instead of writing or reading aloud, the learner chooses the answer
from a list of options. This can be done in various ways, like matching pictures to words,
circling the answer, or choosing "true" or "false".
Examples: Picture-cued items: test-takers are shown a picture, along with a written text
and are given one of a number of possible tasks to perform.

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS: SELECTIVE READING

Making tests that go beyond just recognizing letters and words.
Possible tasks to assess lexical and grammatical aspects of reading ability:
 ● Multiple choice (for form-focused criteria): understanding of the building blocks
of language, such as grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure.
● Matching tasks: matching items from two or more columns.
● Selected response fill-in vocabulary task: passage with blanks where specific
words are missing.
Matching tasks have the advantage of offering an alternative to traditional multiple
choice or fill-in-the-blank formats and are sometimes easier to construct but can
become more of a puzzle-solving process than a genuine test of comprehension as
test-takers struggle with the search for a match.

DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TASKS: INTERACTIVE READING

Tasks that focus on understanding the meaning of a text (interactive reading). Interactive tasks
may therefore imply 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.
Focus more on meaning than grammar: these tests aim to see if you can understand the ideas
in a text, rather than just the individual words or sentence structures.
Text length: The passages can be a paragraph up to a full page long. They might also include
charts and graphs.
Cloze tests: test format where words are removed from a passage. Students fill in the blanks
based on the surrounding text. In written language, a sentence with a word left out should have
enough context that a reader can close that gap with a calculated guess, using linguistic
expectancies (formal schemata), background experience (content schemata), and some
strategic competence.
How it works: The removed words are chosen carefully to test your understanding of the text's
meaning and your ability to predict what word makes sense.
Scoring: There are two ways to score cloze tests:
● Exact word: You only get credit if your answer matches the exact word that was
removed. (This is easier and faster to grade but might be a bit harsh)
● Appropriate word: You get credit for any word that makes grammatical sense and fits the
context of the passage. (This is fairer but takes longer to grade)
● Open Ended Comprehension Questions: questions where you have to write your own
answer to explain what you understood from the text.
Challenges: It can be hard to design these questions in a way that accurately tests what you
know and takes time to grade the answers.
Benefits: They allow you to show your understanding in your own words and can lead to
interesting discussions about the text.
Typically every seventh word (plus or minus two) is deleted (fixed-ratio deletion), but many
cloze test designers instead use a rational deletion procedure of choosing deletions according
to the grammatical or discourse functions of the words. Traditionally, cloze passages have
between 30 and 50 blanks to fill, but a passage with as few as half a dozen blanks can
legitimately be labelled a cloze test.

Scanning: searching a text for a specific answer. Tests that assess scanning give you a
passage and ask you to find a specific piece of information quickly. Scoring of such scanning
tasks is amenable to specificity if the initial directions are specific
Scoring is easy if the question is clear. Sometimes, answering fast is part of the score.
Skimming: previewing a text to get the main idea. Skimming helps you understand the topic,
purpose, difficulty, and usefulness of a text. Tests that assess skimming ask you questions
about the main idea, author's purpose, or type of writing after you skim a passage.
Answering skimming questions is usually straightforward (written or oral answers).
These tests are often informal and used to check your understanding before reading more
carefully or having a discussion.
Skimming tasks:
What is the main idea of this text?
What is the author's purpose in writing the text?
What kind of writing is this [newspaper article, manual, novel, etc.)?
What type of writing is this [expository, technical, narrative, etc.
Extensive Reading: reading longer texts to understand the overall meaning. Skimming and
scanning are helpful strategies for extensive reading because you can't understand every detail
in a long text. One of the most common means of assessing extensive reading is to ask the test
taker to write a summary of the text.

Note-Taking and Outlining

A reader's comprehension of extensive texts may be assessed through an evaluation of a
process of note-taking and/or outlining. Taking notes and making outlines helps you remember
the key points from long readings.
Write down the important parts of what you read.
By looking at your notes, a teacher can see if you understand the main ideas and important
details. The teacher can then give you tips on how to take better notes and outlines, which will
make you a stronger reader. Because of the difficulty of controlling the conditions and time
frame for both these techniques, they rest firmly in the category of informal assessment.
Informal assessment: it's not a graded test, but a way for a teacher to see how you're doing.