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Reading skills in extended discourse in English as a foreign language
Author(s) -
Berkoff Nelson A.
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
journal of research in reading
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.077
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1467-9817
pISSN - 0141-0423
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9817.1979.tb00197.x
Subject(s) - psychology , reading comprehension , reading (process) , vocabulary , test (biology) , linguistics , foreign language , meaning (existential) , recall , cognitive psychology , mathematics education , paleontology , philosophy , psychotherapist , biology
Are there different reading skills (Davis, 1944; 1968; 1972) or is there just one‘basic’(Spearitt, 1972) or‘common’(Thorndike, 173) reading skill? Tests designed to measure some posited reading comprehension skills were given to advanced students of English as a Foreign Language. There were five tests: I) Vocabulary Recognition as measured by a multiple‐choice test, 2) Extraction of Meaning during reading as measured by open‐end questions, 3) Extraction of Meaning during and after reading as measured by a question‐cued recall test, 4) Fast and accurate reading as measured by a Word Intrusion Test, and 5)‘Overall reading proficiency’as measured by a modified cloze test. Results indicate the existence of two factors: Factor I which is connected with‘receptive’reading skills, and Factor 2 which is connected with‘productive’reading skills. It is suggested that reading comprehension tests of extended discourse in English as a Foreign Language which do not tap‘productive’reading skills, such as are required in recall (and in real life), are only partial tests of reading comprehension.