Techniques in Reading Assessment

1. Assessment of Reading
Argee Abadines

2. Outline
• Nature of Reading
– Tests have been created based on the beliefs of
researchers and practitioners regarding reading
• Strategies in Assessing Reading

3. Nature of Reading
• Reading Skills (Davis, 1968)- 8 skills
– Word Meanings
– Inferences
– Paraphrasing
– Recognizing Writer’s Purpose, attitude, tone and
mood
– Weaving Ideas together
– Following Structure of Passage
– Identify writer’s technique

4. Nature of Reading
• Munby (1978): Reading Microskills (19 skills)
– Deducing meaning and use of unfamiliar lexical
items
– Skimming
– Scanning
– Extracting relevant points from a text selectively
– Summarizing
– Main Idea and supporting details
– Conceptual Meaning

5. Other Views
• Lunzer et al (1979): No evidence that distinct
separate skills exist; Reading consists of one
single, global integrated aptitude.
• Alderson (1990): At least part of the reading
process probably involves the simultaneous
and variable use of different and overlapping
skills.

6. Other Views
• Matthews (1990): “Reading skills” are merely
aspects of knowledge.
– Speed and flexibility needs to be tapped in reading
tests.
• Reading has two components: decoding and
comprehension.
– Comprehension skills also lies in the field of
listening, not just reading. Thus, these are
linguistic skills, not reading skills.

7. Other Views
• Carver’s Simple View of reading
– Word recognition skills
– Reading rate or reading fluency
– Problem-solving comprehension skills
• Carver: Reading speeds increase with reading
development.

8. Other Views
• Grabe (1991): 6 components in the fluent
reading process
– Automatic recognition skills
– Vocabulary and structural knowledge
– Formal discourse structure knowledge
– Content/World background knowledge
– Synthesis and evaluation skills/strategies
– Metacognitive knowledge and skills monitoring

9. Other Views
• Abdullah (1994): Subskills in Critical Reading
– Evaluate deductive inferences
– Evaluate inductive inferences
– Evaluate soundness of generalization
– Recognize hidden assumptions
– Identify bias in statements
– Recognize author’s motives
– Evaluate strength of arguments

10. Assessment Techniques

11. Guidelines
• No best method for testing reading.
• No single test method can fulfill all the varied
purposes for which we might test.
• Objective methods can be supplemented by
subjective evaluations.

12. Assessment Techniques
• Multiple Choice (four-option)
– Most common technique in the 1960s
– Need to design excellent distractors in options
• 1970s: Cloze Tests
– Easy to prepare and score
– Validity is still being questioned

13. Current Trends
• Multiple Techniques (E.g. in IELTS) *Multiple
methods used for each passage, not just one
– Multiple choice
– Short-answer questions
– Sentence completion
– Notes/Summary/Diagram/Flow chart/Table
completion
– Matching lists/phrases
– Yes/No/Not given
– Classification

14. Cloze Test
• Deleting from selected texts every n-th word
(n being between 5 to 12) and asking the test
taker to restore deleted word.
• One or two sentences in the beginning and
end provide contextual support.
• *Gap Filling Tests: Words are removed on a
rational basis (e.g. removing content words:
test overall meaning of text; removing
function words: test grammatical sensitivity)

15. Multiple Choice Questions
• Students can be coached to become test wise
when it comes to MCQ.
• Constructing MCQs is a skilled and time
consuming activity.
• Tester does not know why the test taker
responded the way he or she did.
• Guessing

16. Cloze Test
• Research shows that varying the deletion
procedure creates various versions of a cloze
tests and thus produce different test results.

17. Other Objective Techniques
• Multiple Matching
• Ordering Tasks
– Difficult to construct satisfactorily
– Test Constructors are obliged to accept unexpected
orderings or to rewrite the text to make only order
possible.
• True/False
– Guessing problem
• 3 Category Option: E.g. Right/Wrong/Doesn’t Say

18. Ordering Task Example (taken from a
story)
A. it was called ‘The Last Waltz’
B. The street was in total darkness
C. because it was one and he and Richard had
learnt at school
D. Peter looked outside (FIRST)
E. he recognized the tune
F. and it seemed deserted
G. he thought he heard something whistling

19. Possible Answer (1)
D-G-E-C-A-B-F
Peter looked outside. He thought he heard
something whistling. He recognized the tune
because it was one he and Richard had learnt
at school. It was called ‘The Last Waltz’. The
street was in total darkness and it seemed
deserted.

20. Possible Answer (2)
D-B-F-G-E-C-A
Peter looked outside. The street was in total
darkness and it seemed deserted. He thought
he heard something whistling. He recognized
the tune because it was one he and Richard
had learnt at school. It was called ‘The Last
Waltz’.

21. Other Reading Tests
• Editing Tests
– Passages with errors and candidate has to identify
them
• Short-Answer Tests
– Bachman and Palmer (1996): Limited Production
Response Type
– To be able to interpret students’ responses to see if
they really understood in contrast to MCQ where
there is no justification.
– Challenge is to remove ambiguities to the question.
Pre-testing with colleagues is necessary.

22. Other Reading Tests
• Free-Recall Tests
– Students are asked to read a text, put it aside and
then write down everything they remember from
the text.
• Bachman and Palmer (1996): Extended Production
Response Type
– Problem is that scoring templates for these are
time consuming. For example, It takes 25-50 hours
to develop a scoring template for a 250-word text

23. Other Reading Tests
• Summary Tests
– Students read a text and are then required to
summarize the main ideas of the whole text or a
part, or those ideas in the text that deal with a
given topic.
• Scoring is problematic and can be subjective
– Problems are reduced if the summary can relate
to a real-world task where clearly some textual
information is more important than other
information.

24. Other Reading Tests
• Gapped Summary
– Students read a text, and then read a summary of
the same text, from which key words have been
removed. Task is to restore the missing words.
• Information Transfer Techniques
– Task is to identify in the target text the required
information and then to transfer it to a
table, map, etc.

25. Real Life Test Tasks
• Tests lack connection to real life texts
• One strategy as a test constructor is to get
real-world examples of text as ask yourself:
– What might a normal reader do with a text like
this?
– What sort of self-generated questions might the
reader try to answer?

26. Reference
• Anderson, J.C. (2000) Assessing
Reading, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

27. Thank You 
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