Assessing Reading... For Real
I think we have all supposed students know how to read when they come into our classrooms, and why not? how difficult is it? if they read in Spanish, they sure know how to read in English, right? This skill feels so natural to us that we never stop to think about all the cognitive processes that co-exist behind it, and so we end up being so unfair to our students, sometimes they don't even know how to read in their native language!
W forget that reading implies not only putting letters and words together but the understanding of what is being read and the strategies used to reach such understanding; there is a set of micro and macroskills we use without even knowing we do.
At reading Brown's (2000) chapter on assessing reading, which is "the most essential skill for success on all educational contexts..." I have come to realize all the terrible job I have been doing at assessing my poor students who have encountered the least meaningful, unauthentic reading tasks. I had never stop to carefully think of the criterion and principles an assessment task should meet! Authenticity, reliability, validity and washback were not in the back of my mind at planning a task; practicality, however, was always one of the main concerns.
As fundamental as this skill is in the learning process, as difficult it is to assess since it has an "unobservable nature" (Brown, 2012); how do we know that a learner is "reading" ? how do we know, for sure, that they are comprehending what is in front of them? is it possible to know if, and when they are using top-down and bottom-up processing? and if they are, how do we realize if they are using them on the right moment, with the right type?
I am pretty sure that we can all spend a little longer of our time and come up with tasks that are meaningful for our students, that catch their attention, that emulate real life and awake their creativity, their critical thinking! Tasks that meet, at least, the principles of washback, validity, and authenticity, that are more within our hands than reliability sometimes is; I would even dare saying that it is worth to sacrifice some practicality, at least at early stages, to make sure our students are learning how to read, are comprehending, and acquiring the skills to reach full understanding.
I agree with you, I think after we read this chapter, we feel so bad for being so unfair with our students. The problem is that we are not good readers, we can not read beyond the words, even beyond the cover, for our culture reading is not a habit is more an obligation. As we said in class reading skills are often depending on the age of our students. It may be necessary to re-teach the student how to effectively use reading strategies rather than to teach the reading process as one would to a small child.
ReplyDelete* Previewing: teachers can discuss titles and section headings of the reading materials
* Predicting: Ss can predict the content and the vocabulary.
*Skimming and scanning: Ss can scan the text to guess the main idea of the text
*Guessing from the context: Ss can use previous knowledge of the subject as clues to the overall meaning of the text and specific vocabulary words *Paraphrasing: Ss can restate each section of the text after reading it to check comprehension
To conclude, I want to say that reading is part of the communicative competence and are all the skills necessary for students to reach their goals
An Yulian, since we are not good readers, since we don't like it, we can not pretend that our students do. As I commented to another classmate, it is not only about the apathy that students have towards the activity itself, it is also about the one teachers feel too, and not only teachers: lawyers, designers, everybody should worry about reading and understanding whatever they read, not only for academic purposes because we can find a huge number of possibilities to start building our reading habit and then we can build our writing and speaking habit too. As teachers, we have to motivate them to READ! we have to tell them that reading is not old-fashioned, that reading will open a lot of windows in our minds. Tell me who's the best lawyer? the best professional, the one who do read and do understand whatever case he/she face to... we already know how to read, but we simply choose not to do it...
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