Test Items 36-50: Reading Comprehension

1. Test Items 36-50: Reading Comprehension

Among all parts in reading section, the last part is the one that really attempts to measure the students’ reading skills. Test items 36 to 50 are based on a selection of the reading materials that range from procedure, advertisements, news item, to application letters. In the order of the test item number, the first reading passage is an application letter. Another instance of application letter is at the end of the reading section. Similarly, question problems that follow those two letters are des igned to assess the students’ reading comprehension, through which they are expected to be able to find main idea of the passages. Besides, they are expected to locate some detailed information and guess the synonym, antonym, or derivation of particular word taken from the passages. The second reading passage is a news item that tells about the number of victims in 26 th December tsunami disaster. Using past tenses, the passage retells the readers about a revision that has been made in April 2005 upon the statistical number of the tsunami victims. This passage fulfills social function of news item, namely to inform the readers about particular events of the day which are considered newsworthy or important. The third reading passage is an advertisement of Conda car. Providing some descriptions on the primary features of Conda car, the passage genre is thus description. The features that are mentioned about Conda car is primarily the description about the car’s qualities and characteristics. The students’ reading comprehension is required as they are supposed to find main idea and explicit detailed information. Another reading passage is a procedure of printing a document. This short reading passage describes how the printing process is accomplished through a sequence of steps. Similar to those of the other passages, question problems related to this passage require the students’ reading comprehension. This part of reading section is divided into five groups of question problems, each of which is related to different reading passages as explained above. The questions of these test items vary from finding main idea and implicit or explicit detailed information to finding synonym or antonym of a word from the given reading passage. They are questions that commonly follow a reading passage in reading comprehension tests. These test items have thus been constructed based on the first topic of learning in the test specification. Two sub topics of the first topic of learning are, however, not represented in the reading section of the test, namely finding derivation and finding word meaning. The inclusion of the topics is summarized as follows. Table 4.2 Inclusion of Topics of Learning in Reading Comprehension T OPICS OF L EARNING R ELATED T EST I TEMS Finding from particular written texts: 1. main idea 2. implicit detailed information 3. explicit detailed information 4. derivation 5. synonym 6. antonym 7. word meaning 46 37, 42 and 44 36, 39, 40, 45, 48, and 49 - 43 and 50 38, 41, and 47 -

2. Test Items 26-35: Error Identification