Assessing Academic Reading Ability

There has been an increased emphasis on skills integration in language teaching and assessment. This book reports the results of a unique, large-scale, longitudinal educational action research based on a separate sample pre-test and post-test design conducted to improve the effectiveness of the development of English majors' academic reading ability with a guided summary writing task. The completion of such an integrated task requires reading an input text and the extraction, summarisation, paraphrasing, and writing up of content specified in a guiding question. Questionnaire data subjected to exploratory factor analyses revealed the dimensionality of academic reading ability. Further analyses conducted with the scores awarded to the scripts enriched the findings with informative and practical insights into the reading processes and behaviours elicited with the reading-into-writing task. Given its pedagogical and assessment focus, the book is relevant for applied linguists, English for Academic Purposes materials designers and instructors, and language assessors-especially test developers.