Testing of Inferencing Behaviour in a Second Language  

Oleh:

Kembo, Jane A.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Full Text) vol. 4 no. 2 (2001), page 77 — 96.
Fulltext: Vol. 4, No. 2,77 — 96.pdf (238.46KB)

Isi artikel

The term ‘inferencing’ has been used in many texts and teaching books to mean a process or a discrete skill in reading and implies the process of gap-filling. Other texts call this ‘pragmatic inferencing’, meaning the incorporation of world knowledge into the meanings reconstructedduring the processing of a text. This paper utilises the term afterWinne et al. (1993) to mean everything a reader does in the process of reconstructing themeaning of a text. Our definition is synonymous with reading. Inferencing is a complex process and testing its products may never be accurate or even simple. The problems of testingSL inferencingmay result fromassumptionsmade by testerson the nature of reading, or test types to the presumptions and problems that readers bring into the testingsituation. The study used 300 final year secondary school students who are SL speakers of English and administered two reading tests, one culturally familiar and the other culturally unfamiliar,based on three narrative texts per test. Four categories of inferenceswere tested in four different sections ‘A’ to ‘D’. The results showed that certaininferencetypes weremore difficult tomake. Even Short-Answer Questions presented peculiar problems. Readers did significantly better on culturally familiar texts than culturally unfamiliar texts. The ability to identify the locus of an answerwas not an adequate requisite for arriving at an acceptable answer.

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