257 / 2018-04-15 23:11:05

A Low Proficiency Test of Expeditious Reading

reading assessment,expeditious reading,low proficiency

全体主题 > Standards in developing language assessments

In recent years, development of L2 reading test has placed greater attention to expeditious reading, which has been neglected in traditional L2 teaching and testing (Weir et al., 2013). This shift in attention was in part motivated by the wide recognition of Khalifa and Weir's reading model (2009), which not only features a taxonomic framework of reading types but also links those types to the underlying mental processes. Equipped with this model of reading, several validation practices have been conducted to investigate how well expeditious reading is addressed in English language tests (e.g., Khalifa & Weir, 2009; Weir, Hawkey, Green & Devi, 2009a; Weir, Hawkey, Green, Unaldi & Devi, 2009b; Weir, Yang & Jin, 2000). These studies show that expeditious reading is not tested independently or addressed fully in some academic English tests due to practical issues in test development (Weir et al., 2009a). General English tests, however, tends to place even less emphasis on expeditious reading skills probably due to absence of such skills in CEFR descriptors at lower proficiency level. This absence has raised our concern, as in theory expeditious reading is not cognitively more demanding than other types of reading (Weir & Khalifa, 2008) and thus could be attempted by lower-level learners. With an attempt to address the issue raised above, the present study developed a test to measure expeditious reading skills of lower-level English learners, 84 middle school students with Spanish as their L1. According to the preliminary results, it seems clear that the set of reading skills, restricted for our purposes to scanning and skimming, is within the ability of lower level learners. This shows support for the order of difficulty proposed by Khalifa and Weir (2008) and discussed in the literature review, in which scanning for information and skimming for gist are designated as cognitively less demanding than most types of careful reading, and indicates a possible under-representation of this skill in the CEFR A2 descriptors.