All images Mat Wright

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Diagnosing Reading
Problems in Arabic-
speaking Young
Learners
TESOL Arabia YL SIG - October 2014
Workshop Aims
By the end of this session...
1. ...you will have a greater awareness of the difficulties Arabic-
speaking 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 learners
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.


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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).
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Diagnosing learner difficulties with reading: the
problem
Input (a
written text,
an activity)
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Mental
processes
Wrong result
(wrong answer,
no answer,
wild guess)
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

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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 youd 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 well-
learned 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 centres placement testing system to provide more
and better feedback on a learners 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 arent 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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