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Investigating the reading problems of ESL students: an alternative
This article reports on a study involving three high/intermediate ESL students. It is argued that since reading comprehension depends on both reader variables and text variables, it is too complicated a phenomenon to be investigated or measured by means only of psychometric measures such as multiple-choice questions, cloze procedure, or fill-in-the-blank tasks, and that we need to add an interactional element to the procedure. In the first section a rationale is proposed for a more student-oriented way of examining the reader's comprehension level and probing into his or her strategies for doing the reading tasks or solving rhetorical problems. Then the readers' ‘retellings’ and their responses to probes based on an expository multiple-choice fill-in-the-blank passage are examined and some instructional alternatives are suggested in each case. Extracts from observer-student interviews are given.