Guidance on the principles of language accessibility in National Curriculum Assessments : research background

This review accompanies the document, which describes the principles which should guide the development of clear assessment questions. The purpose of the review is to present and discuss in detail the research underpinning these principles. It begins from the standpoint that National Curriculum assessments, indeed any assessments, should be: - appropriate to the age of the pupils - an effective measure of their abilities, skills and concept development - fair to all irrespective of gender, language, religion, ethnic or social origin or disability. (Ofqual, 2011) The Regulatory Framework for National Assessments: National Curriculum and Early Years Foundation Stage (Ofqual, 2011) sets out a number of common criteria which apply to all aspects of the development and implementation of National Assessments. One of these criteria refers to the need for assessment procedures to minimise bias: “The assessment should minimise bias, differentiating only on the basis of each learner’s ability to meet National Curriculum requirements” (Section 5.39, page 16). The Framework goes on to argue that: “Minimising bias is about ensuring that an assessment does not produce unreasonably adverse outcomes for particular groups of learners” (Annex 1, page 29). This criterion reinforces the guiding principle that any form of assessment should provide information about the knowledge and understanding of relevant content material. That is to say that the means through which this knowledge and understanding is examined, the design of the assessment and the language used should as far as possible be transparent, and should not influence adversely the performance of those being assessed. There is clearly a large number of ways in which any given assessment task can be presented and in which questions can be asked. Some of these ways will make the task more accessible – that is, easier to complete successfully – and some will get in the way of successful completion. Section 26 of the Fair Access by Design (Ofqual, 2010) document lists a number of guiding principles for improving the accessibility of assessment questions, although the research basis for these principles is not made completely clear in that document. The aim of the current review is to examine the research background more closely in order to provide a more substantial basis for a renewed set of principles to underpin the concept of language accessibility. In the review, each section will be prefaced by a statement of the principles outlined in Guidance on the Principles of Language Accessibility in National Curriculum Assessments and then the research evidence underpinning these principles will be reviewed

Easy-to-read Texts for Students with Intellectual Disability: Linguistic Factors Affecting Comprehension

Background: The use of ‘easy-to-read’ materials for people with intellectual disabilities has become very widespread but their effectiveness has scarcely been evaluated. In this study, the framework provided by Kintsch's Construction–Integration Model (1988) is used to examine (i) the reading comprehension levels of different passages of the Spanish text that have been designed following easy-to-read guidelines and (ii) the relationships between reading comprehension (literal and inferential) and various linguistic features of these texts. Method: Sixteen students with mild intellectual disability and low levels of reading skills were asked to read easy-to-read texts and then complete a reading comprehension test. The corpus of texts was composed of a set of forty-eight pieces of news selected from www.noticiasfacil.es, a Spanish digital newspaper that publishes daily journalistic texts following international guidelines for the design of easy-to-read documents (IFLA, Tronbacke B. (1997) Guidelines for Easy-to-read Materials. IFLA, The Hague). Results: Participants correctly answered 80% of the comprehension questions, showing significantly higher scores for literal questions than for inferential questions. The analyses of the texts' linguistic features revealed that the number of coreferences was the variable that best predicted literal comprehension, but contrary to what the previous literature seemed to indicate, the relationship between the two variables was inverse. In the case of inferential comprehension, the number of sentences was a significant negative predictor; that is, the higher the sentence density, the lower the ability of these students to find relationships between them. The effects of the rest of linguistic variables, such as word frequency and word length, on comprehension were null. Conclusions: These results provide preliminary empirical support for the use of easy-to-read texts but bring into question the validity of some popular design guidelines (e.g. augmenting word frequency) to optimally match texts and reading levels of students with intellectual disability. Two factors are suggested as contributing to the effect of sentence density on inferential comprehension: (i) long texts present higher conceptual density, so there are more ideas to store, retrieve and integrate, which increases the demand on inferential reasoning and (ii) long texts are perceived as difficult, which affects reading motivation and, consequently, induces passive reading strategies. The need for further research to elucidate the origin of our main findings with a larger and more heterogeneous sample of students with intellectual disability is highlighted.This research was funded by the AVANZA intellectual disability program (Project expedient: TSI-040200-2008-0063) of the Spanish Minister of Industry, Tourism and Trade and Technosite (ONCE Foundation Group)

The language of instruction: Compensating for challenge in lectures.

Recent studies have used Coh-Metrix, an automated text analyzer, to assess differences in language characteristics across different genres and academic disciplines (Graesser, McNamara, & Kulikowich, 2011; McNamara, Graesser, McCarthy, & Cai, 2014). Coh-Metrix analyzes text on many constructs at different levels, including Word Concreteness (vs. abstractness), Narrativity (vs. informational), Deep Cohesion, Referential Cohesion, and Syntactic Simplicity. In previous research, texts in the natural sciences had lower Narrativity and Word Concreteness than texts in the language arts, but were higher in Syntactic Simplicity and Referential Cohesion. This pattern suggests a form of compensation in which difficulty on one dimension (e.g., Word Concreteness) is compensated for by increasing text ease on another dimension (e.g., Syntactic Simplicity). In the present study, we provide a further test of this compensation idea by analyzing oral language use across humanities and natural science lectures. We demonstrate that decreases in Word Concreteness across lectures are associated with increases in Narrativity, Deep Cohesion, and Syntactic Simplicity. In addition, within lectures, decreases in Word Concreteness are associated with increases in Syntactic Simplicity. Compensatory mechanisms are discussed in this article at different levels of language and discourse

Generic and rhetorical structures of texts : two sides of the same coin?

Two major approaches to textual macro-structures have been developed during the last decades: Register & Genre Theory (R&GT) and Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Both stress that textual structures co-occur with contextual relations involving social action and subject matter, role structure and symbolic organization. The approaches, however, significantly differ in their conceptions of textual organization. Whereas R&GT conceives of texts as goal-oriented staged (i.e. linearly progressing, while still allowing for prosodic and recursive realizations of stages) interactions, RST conceptualises them as hierarchically structured entities in which certain elements are foregrounded (nuclei) and others are backgrounded (satellites); Based on empirical analyses of Viennese university students' essays, we will discuss in what ways generic and rhetorical organizations of texts relate to each other and what advances a combination of these two approaches may offer for text analysis and text linguistics. Through such a combinatory approach to analyzing texts, it becomes possible to identify systematic patterns of textual features in context (using R&GT) and culturally influenced, semantic coherence relations (using RST). Central to our discussion are issues involving the relation between hierarchical versus linear perspectives on text organization and the relation between cohesion and coherence

Narrative comprehension in Kindergarten: an analysis of talk about narratives by children differing in early literacy development

Literacy skills include expressive language, oral and written, and receptive language, comprehension. This study explores both aspects of language in six Kindergarten children differing in early literacy development-three judged by teacher assessment to be 'at risk', and three acquiring Kindergarten literacy skills as expected. Oral retellings of a familiar narrative and an unfamiliar story just heard, and a personal recount were taped and analysed using Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar. Comprehension responses to individually shared narratives were also collected and analysed. The children's use of language and comprehension responses varied significantly. Those 'at risk' were unable to retell narratives, needed high levels of support to comprehend texts and produced less cohesive personal recounts. The linguistic analysis revealed vocabulary and rhetorical organisation affected the reconstruction of oral narratives. These children also seemed to find comprehending difficult when questions or recall involved following reference, negotiating marked Theme or drawing inferences. The study was designed as a series of one to one literacy experiences. A listening comprehension test showed that all children except one benefitted from the experience. The findings underline the importance of oral language development and the value of interactive teaching experiences to the attainment of sophisticated literacy skills

The effects of individual differences and linguistic features on reading comprehension of health-related texts

Background. Relatively little attention has been focused on whether or how the effects of reader characteristics, or of the linguistic properties of a text, predict reading comprehension of health-related information. In addition, there is little evidence for the utility of any of the writing guidelines promulgated by the National Health Service (NHS) in order to improve the comprehension of health information. Nonetheless, some previous research suggests that health-related texts could be adapted for different groups of users to optimise understanding. Thus, existing knowledge presents important limitations, and raises concerns with potentially far-reaching practical implications. To address these concerns, I investigated how variation in individual differences and in text features predicts the comprehension of health-related texts, examining how the effects of textual features may differ for different kinds of readers. Method. The focus of this thesis is on Study 3, in which I investigated the predictors of tested comprehension, but I report preliminary studies where I examined the readability of a sample of health-related texts (Study 1), and the perceived comprehension of a sample of health-related texts (Study 2). In the primary study (Study 3), I used Bayesian mixed-effects models to analyse the influences that affect the accuracy of responses to questions probing the comprehension of a sample of health-related texts. I measured variation among 200 participants in their cognitive abilities, to capture the effects of individual differences, as well as variation in the linguistic features of texts, to capture the effects of text structure and content. Results. I found that tested comprehension was less likely to be accurate among older participants. However, comprehension accuracy was greater given higher levels of education, health literacy, and English language proficiency levels. In addition, self-rated evaluations of perceived comprehension predicted comprehension, but only in the absence of other individual-differences-related predictors. Variation in text features, including readability estimates, did not predict comprehension accuracy, and there was no evidence for the modulation of the effects of individual differences by text features. Discussion. Text features did not module the effects of individual differences to influence comprehension accuracy in any meaningful way. This suggests that adapting health-related texts to different groups of the population may be of limited practical value. Implications. Individual differences really matter to comprehension. Thus, optimally, understanding of health-related texts amongst the end-users should be tested, and interventions to aid readers, such as those with relatively low health literacy levels, could be used to improve comprehension of health-texts. In the absence of sensitive measures of reader characteristics, and when testing of understanding is not possible, the use of end-user evaluations of health-related texts may serve as a useful proxy of tested comprehension. However, looking for text effects, and guidance focusing on text effects, seems less useful given the reported evidence. Consequently, the effectiveness of designing health-related texts with the consideration of NHS’s text writing guidelines, is likely to be limited

THE IMPACT OF ELLIPSES ON READING COMPREHENSION

This study aimed to detect the extent to which comprehending elliptical structures predicted reading comprehension. The study utilized a correlational survey model, and participants involved a total of 173 middle school students. Data were collected through two different tools based on the same text in 2019. The ellipsis comprehension test consisted of 40 items that included various types of elliptical structures present in the text. These items were in the form of fill-in-the-blanks. The reading comprehension test that was developed based on the same text comprised 21 items in the form of multiple-choice items. The tests were administered to the participants every other day. During the data analysis, a simple linear regression analysis was performed to reveal the extent to which the ellipsis comprehension ability predicted reading comprehension, and a multiple linear regression analysis was employed to reveal the extent to which the sub-dimensions of ellipsis comprehension ability predicted reading comprehension. Enter method was used in the regression analysis. Findings showed that ellipsis comprehension was a significant predictor of reading comprehension. The elliptical sub-dimensions predicting reading comprehension the best appeared to be the ellipses in the form of verb, object and determinative units. However, it was also found that ellipses in the form of subject and indirect object did not significantly predict reading comprehension. Keywords: Ellipsis, reading, comprehension, cohesion, narrative

How to teach digital reading?

This paper offers a discussion of the knowledge, skills, and awareness involved in digital reading. Reading, in this paper, is used in the broader sense to include deriving meaning from media on a digital screen. This paper synthesises key ideas from existing studies and presents a taxonomy for the teaching of digital reading. The taxonomy includes the development of: 1) the knowledge of linear and deep reading strategies; 2) basic and critical information skills; and 3) a multimodal semiotic awareness. The goal of this paper is to unpack the specific knowledge and skills for digital reading which will support educators, including classroom teachers and librarians, on the aspects to pay attention to as students engage in digital reading. This paper argues that, in addition to equipping students with the knowledge of reading strategies and information skills, an awareness of how the various semiotic modes make meaning is fundamental to effective digital reading