A Study Of Paragraph-completion Task In EFL Reading Assessment

Reading assessment has long been the interest of language researchers. It has been found out that examinees' reading performance is affected by a variety of factors, among which one is the characteristics of the method used to elicit reading performance. In recent years, with the development of assessment theory, different kinds of reading assessment techniques have been put into practice. These techniques include true-false questions, multiple-choice questions, short-answer questions, sentence-completion tasks, cloze, summary tasks, and so on. The type of task this thesis attempts to examine is paragraph-completion task. It aims to measure test takers' ability to understand the main idea of a text, to organize a coherent text, and to understand its overall structure and relations among sentences through lexical devices, grammatical cohesive devices and various types of connectives. Based on a critical review of the studies on reading assessment in the past several decades by scholars from home and abroad, a study was done to investigate the usefulness of paragraph-completion task. The test was conducted in a key high school in Hangzhou. After finishing the test, all the test takers were asked to complete a questionnaire, and seven of them were also interviewed. The analysis of the test results shows that paragraph-completion task has acceptable reliability, validity, and power of discrimination, and it can be used as a supplement to the presently popular methods for reading assessment. The feedbacks from the questionnaires and interviews also indicate that it assesses students' understanding of the main idea of the text and their sense of coherence. Their most frequently used strategy is using contextual clues.