| Psycholinguistic Assessment of Reading Comprehension: Evidence of Inference Making |
| Paper ID : 1016-ICIL |
| Authors |
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Maryam Danaye Tous1, Sarana Ghavami Lahij *2 1Department of English Language and Literature, University of Guilan 2Guilan, Lahijan, 9th Sardar Jangal st., No 27 |
| Abstract |
| Reading comprehension is one of he most important skills in todays society. Its prerequisites involves a set of competences, including the capacity to decode words, syntactic and semantic analysis. However to attain the deeper levels of meaning, the role of prior knowledge and the ability to perform complex mental processes, such as inferences are essential. Inference making is the mental representation of the text based on the text information and prior knowledge. Inferemial processing is a linguistically and cognitively high demanding task, requires several resources including: linguistic and conceptual knowledge, integrity of attentional processing and memory, theory of mind, the executive functions and the ability to integrate these resources with prior knowledge. The present research pursues three goals: investigating methods for measuring inference making during reading comprehension, developing a test to measure Persian literate adults inference making ability and the study of the constructed test validity and reliability. It was a mixed methods study. The qualitative part included studying the methods for measuring inference making and studying the validity of the test; the quantitative part, included implementation of the designed test on 30 MA students of University of Guilan to determine its reliability. Acoordingly a test was designed based on Cain et al (2001), after confirming the content validity of the test by experts, to ensure the reliability, the test distributed on a sample of 30 MA students. Cronbach's alpha coefficient showed the reliability of the test 7.03, which is relatively appropriate. The consequences of the findings are discussed. |
| Keywords |
| reading comprehension- inference making- prior knowledge- memory- testing |
| Status: Accepted |