Synopsis
By Licda. Guiselle Weelkly
Chapter 3
" Assessing Reading "
As a teacher you might be facing with the dilemma of testing students' abilities in reading and listening because we cannot realize what is going on in their minds when they are engage in both skills. During this synopsis you would find current ideas about reading and its subskills as well as strategies for optimal assessment. According to Folse (2007) the following are tips that an English Language teacher used with her pupils and have been proved to work effectible, take a look:
- She covers a range of reading skills from gist comprehension to scanning for details and inferencing for implied information.
- Shge chooses different text topics and types and uses several passages per test.
- She employs a range of different task types but ensures that students are familiar with them.
- She expects students to distinguish between main ideas and supporting details.
- She asks students to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words from context.
- She treats grammar as an important part of reading comprehension.
- She tests discourse-level aspects of texts, including text types and discourse markers.
- She asks students to recognize the purposes and audiences of texts.
- She encourages critical-thinking skills such as distinguishing fact from opinion.
During our lifetime we encounter lots of reading materials and tasks, yet it is difficult to define what we mean by reading. Many language teachers now a days agree that reading includes both bottom-pu-skills- recognizing and making sense of letters, words, and sentences- and top-down processing that deals with whole texts. Therefore, reading is regarded said Coombe(2007) as an interactive skill in which the background knowledge that the reader brings to the task is constantly interwoven with the new material.
Since it is not possible to observe reading behavior in a direct manner, the only thing you get is an idea of how students actually process texts through techniques such as think-aloud prottocols.
There are other important aspects to take into consideration while assessing reading, they are:
* Vocabulary and grammar
*Design taks appropiately according to students needs and level of domain.
*Specifications: which will take in account the content, conditions and the criteria.
*Texts
*Questions
*Formats including multiple choice, True/False, Short answer, sequencing tasks, combination tasks,
Give yourself a chance to identify the potential you have within you by trying this simple considerations.
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