Page 203 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Assessing Reading

Read the description of Sam’s family and complete Sam’s family tree below.
Hi, I’m Sam and this is my family. My parents, Mark and Lisa, have three children, my sister Emily, my
brother Jake, and me. We live in the same street as my mum’s parents, Grandma Mary and Grandpa
Robert who are always around when we need help. My aunt Sarah, who is my dad’s sister, also lives
close by with her family. Her husband is a doctor and we always call him when we get sick. They
have two daughters, Mia and Jenny who always play with us.

Sam

Figure 13.9 Information Transfer Assessment Task

show, read and reply in short answers, read and match, read and write, read
and retell, read and act out, etc.

Information Transfer Task
Information transfer tasks encourage deep processing of information which
is very useful both in academic and everyday life. Tasks involve getting learn-
ers to put texts into another form, such as a chart or table. In the task in Figure
13.9, learners are required to read the description of a family and transfer the
information into a family tree.

Gapped Test Task
When YLs are able to read shorter texts, we may use more complex assess-
ment tasks,such asreadingwith short answerquestions,multiplechoice(see
listeningassessmenttasks),orgappedtesttasks.Thelatterrequiresthelearn-
ers to read a text from which sentences have been removed. The missing sen-
tences are arranged in jumbled order after the text, and the learner’s task is
to reconstruct the text by selecting the correct sentence from a list of several
options to fill each gap in the text. The gapped test task, which can be made
more difficult by including an extra sentence which does not fit in any of the

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