Research on Micro— and Macroskills for Reading Tested in College Entrance Examination of Tianjin

張慧玲

【Abstract】Through doing a systematic contrastive research on the part of reading comprehension of the recent five years English papers of College Entrance examination， the author attempted to find some teaching and learning guidance on the usage of micro- and macroskills for reading assessment.

【Key words】 Microskills； Macroskills； Curriculum； English papers； Reading

1. What are micro- and macroskills for reading in details？

Micro-and macroskills represent the spectrum of possibilities for objectives in the assessment of reading comprehension.

1.1 Microskills

1）Recognize a core of words and interpret word patterns and their significance

2）Recognize grammatical word classes， patterns， rules， and elliptical forms

3）Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms

4）Recognize cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signaling the relationship between and among clauses

1.2 Macroskills

1）Infer context that is not explicit by activating schemata（using background knowledge）

2）Infer links and connections between events， deduce causes and effects， and detect such relations

3）Distinguish between literal and implied meanings

4）Develop and use a battery of reading strategies

2. What are the requirements for high-school graduates reading abilities according to the Curriculum？

1）Understand the different opinions and ideas of the reading materials

2）Understand long or short sentences by analyzing the sentence structures

3）Appreciate plain literature works with the help of teachers

4）Explore and process information from electronic reading materials or the internet according to requirements of different learning tasks

3. An analysis of the recent five years English papers for College Entrance Examination on the part of reading comprehension

details Guessing words inference Main idea/opinion

2010 11 2 6 1

2011 12 1 6 1

2012 9 2 6 3

2013 12 0 5 3

2014 11 1 6 2

In this part， students are required to read a passage and answer five relevant questions. As we can see from the chart， firstly， detail-questions cover an overwhelming percentage in the whole part of reading comprehension， followed by the inferring questions； secondly， the percentage that main-idea questions cover is increasing year by year； thirdly， the number of guessing-word questions almost stays static in the last five years. Meanwhile， we can see the requirements for the high-school graduates reading abilities changing trend.

Lets take inferring questions for example. Students should prepare themselves with the ability of inferring context that is not explicit by activating the background information or from the described events， ideas， etc.. This kind of ability belongs to macroskills. Compared with inferring questions， guessing-word questions lay more stress on the meaning of a certain word or chunks of words. If test- participators are asked to guess the meaning of the words from the context， this is what microskills requires us to do； if we can recognize a particular meaning of the given word by different grammatical forms， it means we are using microskills to accomplish a certain task. It is obvious that main-idea questions belong to the range of macroskills as it requires you should be able to get an overview or synopsis of the whole passage.

Conclusion： All in all， microskills are mostly used in multiple-choice questions while macroskills are common in the part of reading comprehension. All these abilities are definitely listed in the Curriculum. What we cultivate our students in our daily teaching should be based on what we are required and what are the students needs. Students should use both bottom-up and top-down processing models when they are doing reading comprehensive questions. But as a teacher， what we should teach our students is when and how to focus more on each kind of processing model and accomplish their tasks in a shorter time with a higher efficiency. For students further study， we should also focus on developing students other concrete reading abilities， or even integrated skills.

References：

[1]Peter Afflerbach，P.David Pearson，Scott G.Paris，Clarifying， Differences Between Reading Skills and Reading Strategies[J].The Reading Teacher，61（5），pp.364-373.

[2]Simon A.Lei，Patricia J.Rinehart，Holly A.Howard，Jonathan K.Cho，Strategies for Improving Reading Comprehension Among College Students[J].Department of Educational Psychology University of Nevada，Las Vegas.