Assesing reading:

In literate societies, most “normal” children learn to read by the age of five or six.

Reading is a skill that is taken for granted.(dar algo por hecho) Reading is the most essential skill for success in all educational context, is a skill

of paramount( primordial) importance as we create assessments of general language ability.

For learners of English is important to know the bottom-up strategy ( which means that is the strategy to process separate letters, words and phrases) and the top down strategy ( which means that second language readers must develop appropriate content and information to understand the interpretations effectively).

TYPES OF READING:Each type of reading has its own set of rules .A reader has to know that rules in order to understand better the idea and the purpose of the text and to process it efficiently.

Genres of reading:

1) Academic reading: - textbooks- essays- lab reports- Reference materials (dictionaries). etc

2) Job-realted reading: - Messages (phone messages)- Reports ( job evaluation, project reports)- Financial documents (bills)- Directories (telephone, office, etc).

3) Personal reading - newspaper and magazines - letters- emails- menus- novels- cartoons, etc

The genre of a text enables readers to apply certain outline that will assist them in extracting appropriate meaning.

MICROSKILLS, MACROSKILLS AND STRATEGIES FOR READING.

-The micro and macro skills represent the variety of possibilities for objectives in the assessment of reading comprehension.

Microskills: (some of them)

1) Discriminate among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic patterns of English.

2) Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.3) Process writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose.4) Recognize a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their

significance.5) Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different

grammatical forms.

Macroskills (some of them)

6) Recognize the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance for interpretation.

7) Distinguish between literal and implied meaning.8) Infer context that is not explicit by using background knowledge.

Some principal strategies for reading comprehension (some of them)

- Identify your purpose.- Use lexical analysis (prefixes, suffixes, etc) to determine meaning.- Guess at meaning (words) when you are not certain.- Skim the text to know the main idea(s).- Scan the text for specific information

Types of reading:

1) Perceptive: involve attending to the components of larger stretches of discourse: letters, words, punctuation and other symbols. Bottom-up processing is implied.

Example:- Reading aloud (separate words, letters or short sentence).- Written response ( the learner has to produce the reading comprehension by writing).- Multiple-choice (minimal pair distinction, grapheme recognition task (recognize for example which word is not related to the other ones)- Picture-cued items ( to recognize a word with an object for example in a picture)

- Picture true/false (indicate if the sentence is true or false according to the picture).

2) Selective: In order to ascertain one’s reading recognition of lexical, grammatical or discourse features of language within a very short stretch of language, certain typical tasks are used: matching, true or false, multiple choice, etc. brief response are intended as well. A combination of bottom-up and top-down processing may be used.

Example: - Multiple choice (to test a reading knowledge of vocabulary and

grammar) -Contextualized multiple-choice vocabulary ( to put a part of a dialogue

and then leave an empty space to complete and give to the learners different options to select the correct one).

- Matching tasks: is appropriate when you want to teach vocabulary. - Editing tasks: used for assessing linguistic competence. (Multiple

choice grammar editing task, for instance choose the letter of the underlined word that is not correct).

- picture-cued tasks: test taker read a sentence and choose one of four pictures that is being described. The sentence at this level is more complex.

- Gap-filling tasks: fill in the empty space.

3) Interactive: included among interactive reading types are stretches of language of several paragraphs to one page or more in which the reader must (in a psycholinguistic way) interact with the text. (Negotiating meaning, it could be an anecdote, short narrative story, memos, directions, recipes, etc. The focus of an interactive reading is to identify relevant features (characteristics) (lexical, symbolic, grammatical and discourse). Top-down processing is typical of such tasks, but sometimes bottom-up performance may be necessary.

Example:

- Cloze tasks - Reading comprehension passage: the learner has to read a text and then ask some questions of multiple choice.

- short answer tasks: the questions must be answered in a sentence or two.

- editing (longer test) -Scanning: to find relevant information in a text. - Ordering tasks: (put the following sentences in the correct order)

4) Extensive: appears in text of more than a page (essay, technical reports, or books, etc. the purpose of assessment is to introduce the learner into a “zoom in” on small details. Top-down strategy is assumed for most extensive tasks.

Example: - skimming tasks: it is the process of rapid coverage of reading matter to

determine the main idea.- Summarizing and responding: ( write a summary of the text)- Note taking and outline -