Teachers training students for gate-keeping examinations such as the UCLES ‘O’ Level English Paper 2 need to not only teach students specific reading skills but must also know how to diagnose the specific weaknesses in their students to ensure a good performance in the examination. Reading comprehension is a cognitive process that relies on specific question & text-processing skills designed to be tapped in a structured manner. Many students however tend to simply intuit or guess the answer. As a result, they have no awareness of what they are doing wrong in terms of technique or skill when they get the answer wrong. You cannot cure the ‘illness’ if you don’t know what the cause is. Teachers therefore need to be able to tell from the ‘product’ i.e. the answers given, to diagnose what has gone awry in the ‘process’ of arriving at the answer. This workshop will provide teachers with an extensively tested approach to identify possible areas of difficulties based on the answers produced by students. Instead of only assessing their performance, teachers should also analyse the rich data hidden in the answers given by their learners to identify areas of weakness and design their resources around these unique difficulties.

AIM:

To equip teachers with a diagnostic feedback system to evaluate flaws and weaknesses in students’ text and question processing technique and strategy. This system will allow teachers to provide very specific feedback to students who will not only become more aware of their text processing strategies but also allow them to systematically weed out unhelpful strategies and vet their text-processing procedures more systematically. The information gleaned from the diagnosis will also help  teachers identify specific areas of difficulties in the comprehension section of the EL Paper 2 and consequently design more effective remedial actions and resources.

 PROGRAMME OUTLINE:

 1.   Presentation of the two frameworks:

  A:   Question & Text Interpretation Skills.    B:   Feedback Meta-language system.

 2.   Participant’s practice application of            framework, presentation & discussion.

 3.   Concluding remarks on pedagogical               observations & implications of the                 diagnostic feedback system.