A Comparative Study of Two Parallel Reading Comprehension Tests

DOI

10.2991/icsshe-18.2018.66How to use a DOI?

Keywords

reading comprehension, multiple-choice question, testing method

Abstract

Multiple-choice question is widely used in reading comprehension tests even though its disadvantages are well recognized. However, there is little literature available about the optimal alternatives to MCQ. Heaton criticizes that MCQ has no communicative feature and maintains that text itself should determine the types of questions. This paper adopts two texts from TEM4 reading comprehension subtest as prototype. Alternative items are written with an aim to make exploration of the effectiveness of multiple types of RC tests from the perspective of communicative testing approach. By comparing the score means of such types as MCQ, SAQ, matching, and listing used for the two texts respectively, the study shows that the matching type and the listing type stand out owning to the high correlation between the result scores and the whole comprehension amount. The research comes to the conclusion that MCQ should not the unique method to test RC ability, and those factors as topic; genre and readability should be taken into consideration at the stage of elicitation method design.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Huijie Li
PY  - 2018/09
DA  - 2018/09
TI  - A Comparative Study of Two Parallel Reading Comprehension Tests
BT  - Proceedings of the 2018 4th International Conference on Social Science and Higher Education (ICSSHE 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 269
EP  - 273
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icsshe-18.2018.66
DO  - 10.2991/icsshe-18.2018.66
ID  - Li2018/09
ER  -