Reading Comprehension Testing in German

Abstract

Comprehensive testing is a challenge to all second-language educators. In layman's terms, teachers have the obligation to measure the students' understanding of the text. Since there is no consensus of opinion on what it means to understand a passage, the task is difficult indeed. The psycholinguistic models of Goodman and Smith describe the process whereby the reader interacts with the graphic input while attempting to reconstruct the message encoded by the writer.' In addition the more prior knowledge the reader possesses about the language and the world in general, the less visual input is required to comprehend the text. Their models are frequently labeled top-down because they give priority to the existing knowledge in the reader's head, not to the printed word. According to Goodman and Smith, success in comprehension depends on the extent to which the reader's reconstructed meaning agrees with the author's intended message. Goodman proposes a theory of psycholinguistic universals that is specifically second language oriented.2 He maintains that the strategies that readers use to comprehend a text are transferred from the first language setting to the second language setting. Therefore, a fluent reader uses the same basic strategies to process information and extract meaning from print in any language. Although not extensively investigated from the second language learning perspective, Goodman's model dominates the second language reading literature. Likewise, the evidence concerning the strategies used by beginning and intermediate second language readers is not impressive. Clarke posits that a short-circuit effect prevents the transfer of fluent reading skills from the first language to the second language.3 According to Clarke, the second language reader's lack of knowledge of the target language impedes the predictive hypothesis testing process that is the critical element of comprehension in Goodman's model. The lower level second language reader is not able to use the orthographic, syntactic, semantic, and discourse level cues that are available in the passage because of the basic lack of fluency in the target language. Although some resist the notion that the reading process should be segmented, Thorndike and Klausmeier contend that reading is thinking and that reading comprehension is based on many subskills.4 They maintain that efforts to increase comprehension should concentrate on developing analytic abilities. Among the multitude of subskills of comprehension that are mentioned in the literature, the following are frequently cited: establishing word meaning; identifying main ideas; identifying details; recognizing sequence; identifying cause-effect relation-