Discrete Testing Of Reading Strategies And Its Application To Senior Middle School English Teaching

Reading is the most direct and effective way of acquiring knowledge. Reading research has always taken a prominent status in the interests of foreign language teachers. In the realm of testing of reading, however, there are still many unsolved problems. Traditional reading tests pay too much attention to careful reading; while expeditious reading strategies, such as skimming and scanning, are not given adequate consideration. This paper proposes a discrete reading test method, the essence of which is posing questions for expeditious reading before a text and then putting after it questions for careful reading. In order to prove my hypothesis that such a test is beneficial for learners acquiring fast reading skills, my research study is conducted at three senior middle schools in Changchun. The general idea of this paper is to emphasize the importance of testing skimming and scanning ability for senior middle school level learners.This paper consists of six parts:Part I introduces the importance of reading and briefly evaluates the weakness of traditional reading tests, and proposes the idea of a discrete reading test method.Part II is a comprehensive review of basic notions concerning reading. Reading is a cognitive activity, about which there have been various hypotheses concerning its nature and process, for instance, Cough's bottom-up model and Goodman's top-down model, and, as a seeming compromise of the two, interactive models, the last being favored by most reading researchers. As for the composition of reading ability, there are opposing views of divisibility and indivisibility.Part III evaluates weaknesses of traditional reading test design and strengths of discrete reading test design. The former is based onEducational Psychometric Model which is only interested in whether the candidates have acquired certain knowledge; the latter is based on Cognitive Information Processing Model which is more interested in how the acquired knowledge is organized in the brain and how it is retrieved.What this thesis advocates is a reading test embodying the assessment of skimming and scanning as reading strategies.Part IV presents research methodology and analyzes the data from test results, questionnaires and interviews conducted at the three middle schools together with their daily teaching activities.Part V points out pedagogical implications revealed through the research, that is, discrete reading tests can be favorable for senior middle school teaching. At least the following three aspects call for reconsideration: reading material selection, reading strategies teaching and grammar issues in reading class.Part VI concludes the whole paper by pointing out that discrete reading test is more valid in testing fast reading ability than traditional means. Besides, it is also an important way of developing higher rate of reading. Based on the observation and research, it is found that discrete testing method is feasible at senior middle school level.