This document discusses strategies for assessing reading and different types of reading tasks. It describes bottom-up processing, which involves decoding skills, and top-down processing, which uses background knowledge. Four types of reading tasks are outlined: perceptive, selective, interactive, and extensive. Examples of assessment techniques are also provided, including summary, dictocomp, and strip story activities.

1. Assessing Reading

2. Contents
 Reading strategies
 Types of reading tasks
Perceptive
Selective
Interactive
Extensive
 Summary
 Dictocomp
 Strip story

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

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. 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. 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. 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.