文本长度对大学生英语阅读理解测试成绩的影响

The Influence of Text Length on English Reading Test Performance

为探究文本长度对英语阅读理解测试表现的影响,选取120名非英语专业大学生参加包括2篇短篇文本、1篇中篇文本和1篇长篇文本的英语阅读理解测试。结果显示:整体上,文本长度对英语阅读理解测试表现影响显著;被试在长篇文本上的得分显著低于中篇和短篇,但在中篇和短篇文本上的得分无显著差异;在各子技能得分率方面,文本长度的影响呈现非线性、多层次的特征。本研究提供2点启示:一是为确保阅读测试的效度,应尽量选用较长篇幅的阅读文本;二是应更加重视长篇文本的阅读教学。

Text length is one important feature that reading-test developers need to consider.Although its crucial role in reading tests has long been recognized,the related research is far from sufficient:researchers have different ideas about the choice of text length in reading tests,and empirical research has arrived at conflicting conclusions.In this context,this research aims to investigate the influence of text length on the test takers’English reading comprehension performance.In this research,as the independent variable,text length is operationalized as the number of words in one reading passage and is classified into three levels:short (about 350 words),medium(about 700 words),and long(about 1,000 words).120 Chinese non-English major college students attended an English reading comprehension test,which incorporated two short texts(356 and 383 words respectively),a medium-length tex(t 700 words)and a long tex(t 1,007 words).The four reading texts vary in length yet are similar in other text features such as genre and language difficulty.The test takers’performance was evaluated by the scores they got from each part,with a total full score of 10.After the reading test,nine test takers were invited to attend a semi-structural interview,which was conducted to explore how text length influences the reading process.One-way analysis of the variance of test takers’scores in three different length parts indicates that text length has a significant effect on test takers’overall reading comprehension.To be specific,the test takers’scores in the long text are significantly lower than that in the short and medium-length texts,though the scores in the medium-length text are insignificantly different from that in the short text part.The influence of text length is found to be non-linear and multi-layered,with a significant effect on the test takers’performance in four sub-skills,namely understanding the main idea of the paragraphs,understanding the explicitly expressed ideas,understanding the author’s attitude and argument,and understanding the relationship at the levels of sentences,paragraphs and the whole passage.Based on the results,a test text length threshold hypothesis has been proposed.If the text length is shorter than this threshold,length change would have little effect on the comprehension difficulty;if the text length surpasses the threshold,the critical reading abilities would be changed fundamentally,shifting from lexical and syntactic proposition understanding to the global discourse comprehension,and the reading difficulties would be upgraded accordingly.This text length threshold would be related to the reader’s reading proficiency and his/her working memory capacity.For adult EFL readers,the test text length threshold is speculated to be about 700~1,000 words in length.In the end,the implication has been discussed,including the necessity to include longer texts in reading comprehension tests,to consider text length to assess some particular sub-reading skills and to strengthen reading teaching based on longer texts.