TECHNIQUES IN CONDUCTING ENGLISH READING SKILLS TEST PERFORMED BY INDONESIAN TEACHERS ON ASSESSMENT OF LOCAL EDUCATION STANDARD 2021

One of the ways to measure the students' English reading comprehension skills is through testing. Despite its significant value, students frequently construct bad tests without considering the main rules in doing English reading comprehension tests. This research concerns to study of techniques in testing English comprehension reading skills performed by teachers in Indonesia on Assessment of Local Education Standard in the year 2021. Assessment of Local Education Standard abbreviated as ASPD in a provincial- standardized test to maintain the quality of learning. Four EFL teachers in Indonesia were chosen based on their teaching experience in high schools. The researcher used document observation and in depth- interview techniques to collect data which were transformed into observation notes and interview transcription. The data were then analyzed qualitatively. Findings from this study shown that there are three main themes regarding the most used techniques performed by the teachers, first, students must be able to analyze the bloom taxonomy theory, second, students must be able to identify the scope of material, and third determining the keywords of the question. From understanding and doing those three themes, teachers believe that these techniques could help and improve student's ability in facing English reading comprehension tests.

Using Eye-Tracking Measures to Predict Reading Comprehension

Research on reading comprehension assessments suggests that they measure overlapping but not identical cognitive skills. In this paper, we examined the potential of eye-tracking as a tool for assessing reading comprehension. We administered three widely-used reading comprehension tests with varying task demands to 79 typical adult readers while monitoring their eye movements. In the York Assessment for Reading Comprehension (YARC), participants were given passages of text to read silently, followed by comprehension questions. In the Gray Oral Reading Test (GORT-5), participants were given passages of text to read aloud, followed by comprehension questions. In the sentence comprehension subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT-4), participants were given sentences with a missing word to read silently, and had to provide the missing word (i.e., a cloze task). Results from linear models predicting comprehension scores from eye-tracking measures yielded different patterns of results between the three tests. Models with eye-tracking measures always explained significantly more variance compared to baseline models with only reading speed, with R-squared 4 times higher for the YARC, 3 times for the GORT, and 1.3 times for the WRAT. Importantly, despite some similarities between the tests, no common good predictor of comprehension could be identified across the tests. Overall, the results suggest that reading comprehension tests do not measure the same cognitive skills to the same extent, and that participants adapted their reading strategies to the tests’ varying task demands. Finally, this study suggests that eye-tracking may provide a useful alternative for measuring reading comprehension.

Using Tasks as a Pre-reading Procedure to Enhance L2 Reading Comprehension of Narrative Texts

Based on the assumption that preparing the reader before reading can foster reading comprehension, this research presents an empirical study in which the effects of pre-reading tasks on reading comprehension of narrative texts in English as a second language2 (L2) were investigated. Nine participants from a public high school took part in this investigation and to collect data, two Reading Comprehension Tests were fulfilled by participants right after reading each text. As stimuli, two narrative texts were selected. In the treatment condition, participants were exposed to the pre-reading tasks proposed by Willis and Willis (2011), which were adapted to fit the context of this research, prior to reading one of the narrative texts. In the control condition, the second text received a glossary at the end of the passage. The results provided evidence that pre-reading tasks are able to foster the reading comprehension of narrative texts in L2, since participants’ performance was higher in the treatment condition, endorsing previous research on reading. Furthermore, the results also go in line with Willis and Willis’ claim that pre-reading tasks are beneficial for reading comprehension of narrative texts.

Exploring which test-taker characteristics predict young L2 learners’ performance on listening and reading comprehension tests

Test-taker characteristics (TTCs), or individual difference variables, are known to be a systematic source of variance in language test performance. Although previous research has documented the impact of a range of TTCs on second language (L2) learners’ test performance, few of these studies have involved young learners. Given that young L2 learners undergo rapid maturational changes in their cognitive abilities, are susceptible to affective factors in unique ways, and have little autonomy with respect to the context of L2 acquisition, the relationship between their personal attributes and their test performance merit separate research attention. To fill this gap, we investigated the extent to which sixth-grade, Korean-L1, EFL learners’ ( n = 107) TTCs predicted their performance on tests of L2 listening and reading comprehension. The TTCs under investigation included three cognitive characteristics (aptitude, phonological working memory, L1 competence), one affective factor (motivation), and two demographic variables (socioeconomic status and gender). Results showed that aptitude and phonological working memory significantly predicted participants’ performance on both L2 listening and reading comprehension tests, whereas motivation predicted performance on the L2 listening comprehension test only. These findings suggest that higher aptitude, phonological working memory, and motivation contribute positively to young learners’ L2 outcomes.

Rasch testlet model and bifactor analysis: how do they assess the dimensionality of large-scale Iranian EFL reading comprehension tests?

Rasch testlet and bifactor models are two measurement models that could deal with local item dependency (LID) in assessing the dimensionality of reading comprehension testlets. This study aimed to apply the measurement models to real item response data of the Iranian EFL reading comprehension tests and compare the validity of the bifactor models and corresponding item parameters with unidimensional and multidimensional Rasch models. The data collected from the EFL reading comprehension section of the Iranian national university entrance examinations from 2016 to 2018. Various advanced packages of the R system were employed to fit the Rasch unidimensional, multidimensional, and testlet models and the exploratory and confirmatory bifactor models. Then, item parameters estimated and testlet effects identified; moreover, goodness of fit indices and the item parameter correlations for the different models were calculated. Results showed that the testlet effects were all small but non-negligible for all of the EFL reading testlets. Moreover, bifactor models were superior in terms of goodness of fit, whereas exploratory bifactor model better explained the factor structure of the EFL reading comprehension tests. However, item difficulty parameters in the Rasch models were more consistent than the bifactor models. This study had substantial implications for methods of dealing with LID and dimensionality in assessing reading comprehension with reference to the EFL testing.