253 / 2018-04-15 21:49:47

Reading ability and text complexity: do English-medium schools prepare students for international texts and exams?

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An increasing number of schools in Asia use English as the medium of instruction. These range from full immersion programs such as international schools, to partial offering of some subjects in the curriculum. Within these English-medium programs, reading ability is a key component for success as it underpins all subjects across the curriculum. It is therefore invaluable for schools, teachers and learners to understand the reading standards among different subjects and school years, along with an estimate of students’ ability to cope with reading material.

The Lexile Framework for Reading, developed to match readers with texts at a level that is challenging but not frustrating, was used to investigate the reading demands in an international school in China. The Lexile Framework incorporates software to analyze a text and derive an empirical measure of complexity, and also evaluate students’ reading proficiency in any test that is linked to the Framework -- in this case, the test used is Aptis for Teens. This approach allows both text and student to be placed on the same equal-interval scale to find out whether they are well matched.

The study involved 317 students aged 15/16 years old who would be preparing for International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) exams. Students took Aptis for Teens; preliminary results suggest average reading ability of approximately 960L on the Lexile scale, equivalent to B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). Ten textbooks used at the school, in biology, chemistry, mechanics, maths, history and English language, and 18 IGSCE exam papers taken at the school, were analyzed for text complexity. Patterns that emerge between subjects, textbooks and exams are discussed. The text complexity of all material falls between 780L and 1180L. Based on the Lexile Framework, a typical student engaging with a typical text would understand about 75% of what they read (i.e. they would answer 3 out of 4 reading comprehension questions correctly). This implies that weaker students below B2 will be disadvantaged in exams due to reading proficiency rather than content knowledge, and also that they may struggle to learn content from school textbooks where the language is too complex for them.

In addition to triangulating Aptis for teens, English-medium textbooks, and IGSCE exams, Lexile measures directly compare these findings to reading standards in: Japan’s Eiken test; S Korean school textbooks; school and university texts in the UK and USA; and global English language newspapers.