Investigating A Self-assessment Checklist On Errors In High School English Reading Comprehension Test

The present study probes into effective reading self-assessment under the National Matriculation English Test(NMET)context.Its main purposes are to construct a new self-assessment checklist on errors in English reading comprehension task and to examine its effectiveness on high school students.Both cognitive processes of answering reading comprehension questions and common types of errors committed by students were explored so as to construct a new checklist.Based on a mixed-method design,the study was carried out in two phases.In the first phase,the phase of checklist-construction,the researcher adopted a combined approach of expert intuition and empirical study.First of all,in order to investigate the experts’ expected cognitive processes of answering reading comprehension questions,a NMET constructor was invited for interview.Then,retrospective interviews were conducted with ten Senior Two high school students,with an attempt to collect information about students’ cognitive processes during reading comprehension tasks.The qualitative data from these retrospective interviews were used to verify the results extracted from the interview with the test constructor by using deductive qualitative content analysis.Meanwhile,they were also used to abstract the common types of errors in reading comprehension by using inductive qualitative content analysis.Based on these analyses,a new self-assessment checklist on errors in reading comprehension was developed accordingly.In the second phase,this newly developed assessment instrument was put into use on an online self-learning platform.Fifty-six Senior Two high school students were invited to complete a reading comprehension test on the platform and then self-assessed on each error they made by using the new checklist.In addition,students were asked to complete questionnaires both before and after theexperiment.The result of the interviews revealed that there were three major components in the cognitive processes of answering reading comprehension questions,including information from the original text,correct information processing and answer-verifying.The location of information can be divided into 5 levels while the language knowledge and cognitive strategies applied in information processing include 14 categories.Seven common types of errors were identified.Reasons for errors included carelessness,unfamiliar words,complex sentence structure,wrong information location,application of incorrect knowledge,incorrect processing of information and decision on answers by purely guessing or intuition.In addition,the results of the self-assessment experiment showed that most of the students held positive attitude towards reading self-assessment by using the new checklist.More than 60% of the students reported that reading self-assessment can not only involve them to self-reflect their cognitive processes and thus identify their own weaknesses,but also arise their awareness of cognitive processes of answering reading comprehension questions.The new checklist developed in the present study provided a useful instrument for supporting self-assessment in high school English reading classroom.Meanwhile,the result of the research also provided some pedagogical implications for reading instruction.