Students’ Making Test-Format Questions in English for Specific Purposes Course as Means of Improving Reading Skills

Abstract

AbstractDevelopment of reading skills in the English for specific purposes course is an important problem, which is often underestimated. To comprehend specialist texts in a foreign language students have to use different cognitive practices and have solid background and linguistic and vocabulary knowledge. The paper describes the results of the 10-week experiment on involvement of second year IT students in making test-format questions as a part of their home assignment. At the beginning of the term, the academic group with a lower average placement test score (though statistically insignificant) was selected as the experimental one for the pedagogical experiment, with the second group becoming the control one. Both groups received instruction based on the same teaching materials for the following 10 weeks. The only difference was that students in the experimental group prepared test-format questions as a part of their home assignment and worked in small teams testing each other at the end of each class. These activities resulted in improving students’ reading skills and better memorization of target vocabulary items during the experiment. The final test revealed statistically significant difference in the knowledge of vocabulary and grammar structures between the experimental and control groups. The students’ reaction to making test-format questions was overwhelmingly positive. The paper discusses the findings and outlines further research. The proposed technology of improving reading comprehension skills in English may be extrapolated on teaching other foreign languages in our multilingual world.KeywordsEnglish for specific purposesESPTeaching foreign language readingTarget vocabulary itemsReading comprehension assessmentStudents’ making test-format questions