International Journal of Bilingual
Education and Bilingualism
Editor: Colin Baker, University of Wales, Bangor
Review Editor: Aneta Pavlenko, Temple University, Philadelpia
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Volume: 4 Number: 2 Page: 77–96
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Testing of Inferencing Behaviour in a Second Language
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Jane A. Kembo
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The term 'inferencing' has been used in many texts and teaching books to mean a process or a discrete skill in reading and implies the process of gap-filling. Other texts call this 'pragmatic inferencing',
meaning the incorporation of world knowledge into the meanings reconstructed during the processing of a text. This paper utilises the term after Winne et al. (1993) to mean everything a reader does
in the process of reconstructing the meaning of a text. Our definition is synonymous with reading. Inferencing is a complex process and testing its products may never be accurate or even simple. The problems
of testing SL inferencing may result from assumptions made by testers on the nature of reading, or test types to the presumptions and problems that readers bring into the testing situation. The study used
300 final year secondary school students who are SL speakers of English and administered two reading tests, one culturally familiar and the other culturally unfamiliar, based on three narrative texts per
test. Four categories of inferences were tested in four different sections 'A' to 'D'. The results showed that certain inference types were more difficult to make. Even Short-Answer Questions presented
peculiar problems. Readers did significantly better on culturally familiar texts than culturally unfamiliar texts. The ability to identify the locus of an answer was not an adequate requisite for arriving
at an acceptable answer.
© Multilingual Matters 2001
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