Interactive Task-based Assessments Of Reading Comprehension For Academic Purposes

Assessment of reading in academic setting is attracting more and more research attention with the realization of the importance of reading for academic purposes. In spite of so many researches carried out in the field of language testing, less attention has been given to task-based assessment of this kind of reading. With different theories proposed, few researches have been carried out to verify them. The present study is an attempt to gain a better understanding of the interactive task-based assessment of reading comprehension in academic setting. On the basis of the theoretical proposals on the task-based assessment of reading comprehension in academic settings, the present study tries to investigate, on the one hand, the effects of different locations of testing tasks on the performance of the subjects; on the other hand the interaction among the various aspects involved in the test including subjects, reading material, reading tasks and so on. A pre-test is carried out for the design of the reading test. ANOVA design is carried out with one between-subject factor (Group) and one within-subject factor (Location of tasks). Tests with the same tasks located at different places have been given to three groups of subjects. And their results are compared. Questionnaires and interviews have also been carried out to learn more about subjects' affective responses to different tasks. Through the analysis, it is found out that subjects perform differently on the same tasks located at different places of the test. The result of the study indicates that different locations of testing tasks do have effects on the performance of the subjects' performance on tasks. The subjects' affective responses to different testing tasks are also different and the affective responses affect their performance on those tasks. Generally, they prefer those so-called subjective items which call for creative thinking and construction by themselves. And therefore, the traditional way of asking multiple-choice questions after the whole text may not be the most effective way of assessing reading.