Diagnosing Reading Difficulties

Diagnosing Reading Problems in Arabicspeaking Young Learners TESOL Arabia YL SIG - October 2014

All images © Mat Wright

www.britishcouncil.org

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Workshop Aims By the end of this session... 1. ...you will have a greater awareness of the difficulties Arabicspeaking 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 learner’s reading skills.


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Sources of reading difficulties Reading in a foreign language in a classroom setting is a challenge 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 own language (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. www.britishcouncil.org

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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 not observe ‘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). www.britishcouncil.org

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Diagnosing learner difficulties with reading: the problem

•Input (a written text, an activity)


•Mental •Wrong result processes (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 knowledge 6. 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 www.britishcouncil.org

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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 assessed indirectly? •How can affective filters best be minimized? •How can task types best be matched to different proficiency levels?


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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 better quality 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 you’d 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 welllearned by students. Results should indicate the need for 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 where the 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 do the 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 centre’s placement testing system to provide more and better feedback on a learner’s reading skills. Think about creating a (series) of reading diagnostic tests for use in your teaching centre. These could be used with struggling students to provide parents with more information. If diagnostic reading tests aren’t feasible in your context, when designing performance reading assessments consider what kind of information a question type or activity will reveal about a learner.


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References

•Alderson, C. & Huhta, A. (2010) Can research into the diagnostic testing 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 or comments?


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Diagnosing Reading Difficulties

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