diagnosing reading difficulties

8/10/2019 Diagnosing Reading Difficulties

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All images Mat Wright

www.britishcouncil.org 1

Diagnosing ReadingProblems in Arabic-speaking Young

LearnersTESOL Arabia YL SIG - October 2014


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Workshop Aims

By the end of this session...

1. ...you will have a greater awareness of the difficulties Arabic-

speaking young learners may have with reading.

2. ...be more aware of how to diagnose such difficulties.

3. ...be better able to create new or modify existing reading tests

so they provide a better diagnostic assessment of a learners

reading skills.



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Sources of reading difficulties

Reading in a foreign language in a classroom setting is achallenge for many Arabic speaking children across the Middle

East. Why might this be?

What barriers do you think exist to children becoming better

readers of English as a foreign language?



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Sources of reading difficulties

Some suggestions:

Linguistic convention differences such as reading right to left,differences in script, differences in syntax.

Learners may lack schematic knowledge about the topic.

Learners may struggle at the level of word recognition.

Learners may not have developed reading sub-skills in their ownlanguage (e.g. scanning, skimming, inference making, etc).

Learners might read so slowly that the relationships of meaning

within a sentence and between sentences may be lost.

Some jagged profile learners may have a large spoken

vocabulary, but an underdeveloped written one.

Learners may not like reading and could be reluctant to do it.

Some might struggle to focus on an individual task.

Some learners may have uncorrected eyesight problems.



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Diagnosing learner difficulties with reading: the

problem

When we first realized that understanding what we read was a

legitimate index of reading accomplishment, we started to

measure reading comprehension with indirect indices, such as

open-ended and multiple-choice questions. We settled on

indirect measures largely because we knew we could notobserve the real thing comprehension as it takes place

online during the process of reading. The history of reading

assessment has been a history of developing the best possible

artefacts or products from which to draw inferences about -

what must have been going on during the act of comprehension.

We never really see either the clicks or the clunks of

comprehension directly; we only infer them from distant indices

(Pearson, Destefano & Garcia, 2002: 23).



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Diagnosing learner difficulties with reading: the

problem

Input (a

written text,

an activity)


Mental

processesWrong result

(wrong answer,

no answer,

wild guess)


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Major components of reading comprehension

What could be going wrong? (Grabe 2009)

1. Fluency and reading speed

2. Automaticity and rapid word recognition

3. Search processes

4. Vocabulary knowledge

5. Morphological knowledge6. Syntactic knowledge

7. Text-structure awareness and discourse organization

8. Main-ideas comprehension

9. Recall of relevant details

10. Inferences about text information

11. Strategic-processing abilities

12. Summarization abilities

13. Synthesis skills

14. Evaluation and critical reading



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Major components of reading comprehension

The challenges for diagnostic reading assessment:

How can such an array of component abilities best be captured

within the operational constraints of a single test?

What component abilities (e.g., grammar) might best be assessedindirectly?

How can affective filters best be minimized?

How can task types best be matched to different proficiencylevels?



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Diagnosing problems with reading: using

diagnostic tests

Have a look at the different diagnostic reading tests I give you.

Read the instructions on the test and answer the questions

below:

1. What problem(s) with reading skills is the diagnostic test

designed to reveal? Does the test measure other language

skills/systems apart from reading?

2. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this kind of test?

3. How can you adapt the diagnostic tests to help reveal betterquality data?



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Diagnosing problems with reading: using

diagnostic tests

Look at my key. Is there anything you disagree with?

Is there anything youd like to add?



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Diagnosing reading assessment best practice

Diagnostic assessment should present a battery of skills

to students on a given ability level that may cause

difficulties or (alternatively) should already be well-

learned by students. Results should indicate the needfor specific teaching practices and possible tutorial work

that is designed specifically to address the weaknesses

of each student (Grabe 2009: 266).



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Diagnosing reading assessment best practice

Learn to identify and respond to the different student signals of

non-comprehension.

Create feedback mechanisms from students to teachers that

allow them to signal the difficulties they are encountering.

Encourage learners to think aloud, providing the teacher with a

window into his/her mental processes.



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Four principles for diagnosing difficulties with

reading (Nation, 2009: 79)

Diagnosing problems should be done on an individual basis.

Diagnosing problems should begin with the smallest units

involved and go step by step to the larger units.

As much as possible, learners should feel comfortable with and

relaxed during diagnostic testing.

Do not rely on only one test. Even where it seems obvious wherethe problem lies, use a different kind of test possibly at a different

level of unit size to double check.



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From diagnostic assessment to teaching

Once a problem has been identified, teachers should aim to dothe following:

1. Make a record of the problem, and if sufficiently serious,

inform the parents so they can provide out of class support.

Conveying that there is a problem directly to a learner may do

more harm than good.

2. Encourage greater student awareness of what successful

reading outcomes look like.

3. Provide opportunities for learners to become more successful.



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From theory to practice

The types of diagnostic tests in this workshop could be integrated

into a teaching centres placement testing system to provide more

and better feedback on a learners reading skills.

Think about creating a (series) of reading diagnostic tests for use

in your teaching centre. These could be used with strugglingstudents to provide parents with more information.

If diagnostic reading tests arent feasible in your context, when

designing performance reading assessments consider what kind ofinformation a question type or activity will reveal about a learner.



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References

Alderson, C. & Huhta, A. (2010) Can research into the diagnostictesting of reading in a second or foreign language contribute to

SLA research? University of Jyvaskyla.

Grabe, W. (2009) Reading in a Foreign Language: Moving from

Theory to Practice. Cambridge University Press.

Nation, I. S. P. (2009) Teaching Reading and Writing. Routledge.

Pearson, P. D., Destefano, L., & Garcia, G. E. (2002) Assessing

Reading: Theory and Practice. Routledge



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Thank you for attending today.

Do you have any questions orcomments?


diagnosing reading difficulties

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