Between the Lines
What analysing reading tests tells us about how learners develop reading skills.
Any teacher will be aware that L2 learners start off with basic reading skills and they develop those skills along with their other competences. But, do we understand fully what learners can read at each level of the CEFR and how they progress in sophistication from one level to another?
Two recently published pieces of work have taken a closer look at reading and what they can teach us about the processes L2 readers use.
Cyril Weir and Hanan Khalifa’s Applying a Cognitive Processing Model to Main Suite Reading Papers looks at the different types of reading required of learners at different levels and the cognitive processes involved in them.
Types of reading tested within Cambridge ESOL General English examinations include:
Careful reading (local) – understanding propositional reading at clause and sentence level
Careful reading (global) – comprehending across sentences, across a whole text and across more than one text
Expeditious Reading (local) – scanning text
Expeditious Reading (global) – skimming text for gist or search reading.
Weir and Khalifa look at these reading skills through two exams adjacent to each other on the CEFR scale, PET and FCE (at B1 and B2 levels). In these two exams, the kinds of cognitive skills required include word recognition, lexical access, parsing, establishing propositional meaning, inferencing and building a mental model.
They conclude that Cambridge ESOL exams closely mirror real-life acquisition of reading skills, both in terms of the task demands at each level, and the kind of cognitive skills that can be expected at the different levels of proficiency.
Exploring Lexical Differences in General English Reading Papers, by Fiona Barker, looks at the entire Cambridge ESOL’s General English suite of Exams, using the lens of lexical analysis to make comparisons between different CEFR levels within the exams, and also the differences between L2 lexis and that of native speakers.
Lexical analysis shows some entirely expected differences between exams, such as an increase in the length of reading texts as the exams increase in proficiency, and also a broadening of vocabulary. However, comparisons with native speaker use show interesting patterns.
When material from general English reading papers is mapped against native speaker use of the first thousand words of English, it shows that L2 learners rely more heavily on those first thousand words than L1 speakers. While 70% of native speaker words come from the first 1,000 word list, at KET (A2) level, the rate is higher than 85%, and while the rate drops as proficiency increases, it only drops below 80% at the levels CAE and CPE (79% and 75%) respectively. Further evidence of the reliance on the first thousand words is shown in that across the whole General English suite, use of lexis from the second thousand words is significantly below that of native speakers. This importance of the first thousand words to L2 learners has obvious implications for teachers preparing students for any of the exams.
Fiona Barker’s paper also points to other findings in the areas of vocabulary range, overlap of vocabulary between levels and the effects of the decrease in general English vocabulary and the increase of other vocabularies (such as Academic), as proficiency increases.
The full texts of Applying a Cognitive Processing Model to Main Suite Reading Papers and also Exploring Lexical Differences in General English Reading Papers can both be found in Research Notes Issue 31, which can be downloaded free here www.cambridgeesol.org/rs_notes/rs_nts31.pdf
