1. Assessing Reading

2. Yun-Pi Yuan 2 Contents  Reading strategies Reading strategies  Types of reading tasks Perceptive Selective Interactive Extensive  Summary Summary  Dictocomp  Strip story Strip story

3. Yun-Pi Yuan 3 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

4. Yun-Pi Yuan 4 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

5. Yun-Pi Yuan 5 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)

6. Yun-Pi Yuan 6 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

7. Yun-Pi Yuan 7 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)

8. Yun-Pi Yuan 8 Types of Reading Tasks (4)  Extensive: Top-down processing Global understanding of a text Skimming, summarizing and responding, note-taking and outlining

9. Yun-Pi Yuan 9 Summary  Types of reading by length (short, medium, long), focus (form and meaning), and process (bottom-up vs. top- down) (see Brown 190)

10. Yun-Pi Yuan 10 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

11. Yun-Pi Yuan 11 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

12. Yun-Pi Yuan 12 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.