English proficiency reading skills at the age of 12 in Pavlodar region, Kazakhstan

Abstract

"The purpose of this paper is to explore the level of reading literacy of 12-year old students in Pavlodar because reading plays one of the important parts in the development of academic and intellectual processes of human beings. This work examined a pilot study of young language learners’ proficiency reading skills in English (L3 – compulsory foreign language) with a previous language background (L1 – Kazakh language is a mother tongue) and L2 (Russian language is a language of everyday communication) in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan. The quantitative methods was used in the secondary school No.22 of Pavlodar, the participants were 57 students of the 6th grade, the instruments were presented in the form of Reading test with 4 tasks and 24 items; the questions belonged to the information retrieval and inferring item types. After analyzing a short small-scale study of reading skills in English of 12-year old children showed significantly higher ability in retrieving information from texts than from graphs. However, the findings of Cronbach’s alpha was not high at the beginning but while analyzing data further we found out that in case of deleting some items the Cronbach’s alpha became higher. This implication would let us suppose to the idea that because of little time, distance in conducting paper-and-pencil test we were not familiar with the exact language level of the students while performing the test and if the teacher instructed the students well. Therefore, we assume that these factors affected on the reliability of the test. Hence, we consider that the test further should be corrected or changed into standardized test in L3 or translated into their mother tongue. "