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Hitting the Mark

How Can Text Organisation and Response Format Affect Reading Test Performance?

by Myoko Kobayashi (Author)
©2009 Monographs 322 Pages

Summary

Test results are often used to make major decisions, whether for educational or research purposes. But what intervening factors affect the reliability and validity of the tests? And how can we design better tests?
This book draws on a theoretical framework from research in reading and language testing, and investigates the results of a set of reading comprehension tests that were delivered to 750 Japanese university students. Its objective is to improve the quality of language tests by addressing the following questions:
• How do different kinds of text organisation affect students’ performance?
• What are the effects of different response formats such as summary writing and open-ended questions?
• What can examiners do to ensure that test results provide a more accurate measure of learners’ language abilities?
This book aims to make the full set of the author’s research findings available for the first time.

Details

Pages
322
Publication Year
2009
ISBN (Softcover)
9783039110834
Language
English
Keywords
reading comprehension rhetorical organization language proficiency language testing
Published
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2009. 322 pp., num. tables and graphs
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Myoko Kobayashi (Author)

The Author: Miyoko Kobayashi has taught at the University of Warwick (UK) and Kanda University of International Studies (Japan), and is now a Professor at the Graduate School of Social and Cultural Sciences at Kumamoto University (Japan). She started her career as a secondary school teacher in Tokyo, and has carried out British Council consultancy assignments on language test development in Poland, Bangladesh, and Northern Cyprus as well as in the UK. She was awarded the 2004 International Language Testing Association (ILTA) Best Paper Award for research findings included in this book.

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Title: Hitting the Mark