Assessing of reading
Assessment of reading performance is carried out within skimming (reading for gist), scanning (reading for details), and extensive (reading for pleasure focuses on informational content). Reading presupposes forming receptive and comprehension skills.
At the beginning level of reading in English classrooms, the receptive tasks include: recognition of alphabetic symbols, capitalized and lowercase letters, punctuation, words, and grapheme-phoneme correspondences. They are referred to as «literacy» tasks, implying that the learner is in the early stages of becoming ‘literate’. The following tasks for testing are used: 1) reading aloud; 2) written response; 3) multiple-choice; 4) picturecued.
Scanning and skimming reading. A combination of bottom - up and top-down processing may be both used to assess lexical and grammatical aspects of reading ability. These types of reading involve the different testing tasks: 1) question-answer; 2) cloze tasks; 3) multiple-choice (form-focused and for reading comprehension); 4) true or false; 5) matching tasks; 6) editing tasks; 7) picture-cued tasks; 8) gap-filling tasks; 9) ordering tasks; 10) to get the main ideas or details/facts; 11) non-verbal tasks for information transfer such as charts, maps, graphs, and diagrams; 12) transformation; 13) extending or compression; 14) summarizing (a synopsis or overview of the text) and responding (personal opinion on the test as a whole); 15) note-taking and outlining.
Testing (exam) focuses on evaluation of reading comprehension, which can be involved in macro- and micro-skills.
Macro-skills for testing reading comprehension are: skimming to obtain the general idea (gist) of the text; scanning to locate specific information in the text; identifying the stages and arguments; identifying examples in support of the argument in topic sentence.
Micro-skills for testing can be: identifying referents of pronouns; infer the meaning of words using the text as a context; understanding the structure. Assessing of written work Writing involves content, organization, style, syntax, mechanics, grammar and spelling. It was pointed out that «If we limit our feedback to pointing out or correcting errors, our students will concentrate on producing error-free writing, neglecting the interest or even the meaning of the content. The equation teaching writing - error elimination is counterproductive». So it is necessary to conduct feedback in fair balance of content feedback and form feedback.
The experienced teachers consider that teachers should ignore the language mistakes that do not hinder learning, so teachers may correct only those mistakes which are very basic and those which affect meaning.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |