Why do we have to do Reading Comprehension?

The job to teach two secondary schools has put me back to exam and practice paper. I did few sets of Reading Comprehension paper. And I started to think, why do we have to do such thing?

One of the school I taught, people call it "Band 3". They were quiet at the beginning. But now they started to answer my questions. Because I told them to treat it as a game.



The game is this:

Give you a passage:
Holiday celebrations vary from culture to culture.
 People in Rome, Italy mark the New Year by
 throwing away items they no longer want.

Ask you to fill in the blank
People in different countries a.) c________ holidays in different ways.
In Europe, a custom of Rome to (b)m_________ the New Year
is throwing (c) u________ things away.


These exercises are typical. Soon after you read you should be able to answer a.) celebrate holidays b.) mark the new year. c.) unwanted things. But my students struggle on (b) and (c) . It should be easy if you lands on the word Rome and New Year. You should be able to a least make a guess "mark" But the problem that my students faced is that they are not sure what is the meaning of "mark". Here is where the game starts.

Even though you do not know the meaning of a word. Look at:

Passage: People in Rome, Italy mark the New Year by...
Question: In Europe, a custom of Rome to (b)m_________ the New Year 

If you see what comes before and after, you should get what I called "neighbors" pointing at the word "mark. This sounds easy to a lot but not to some. We are told that the English test is testing your language proficiency. But it is not! It tests your observation and judgment.

(c) is a more advanced question. It requires your ability to paraphrase.

Passage: Italy mark the New Year by throwing away items they no longer want.
Question: a custom of Rome to (b) mark the New Year is throwing (c) u________ things away.

OK now Italy is hidden into Rome. and items changed to things. Wait a moment. Why is the test designer being nasty and play tricks on us? I asked them. I answer of course. We want to test student's ability. But we do want all people to get the answer straight ahead. If it does, it tells nothing about the quality of the student. So we have questions that require more brainy works.

Back to the questions.  "items they no longer want " into "unwanted". OK. Now it tests your English ability. But just a bit. Don't tell me you don't know the word "unwanted". It requires you 1.) to add -ed to want, to make it an adjective 2.) to add to suffix un- to make it in negative meaning. Unwanted.

Perfect. We spent one lesson on this part. But I really want students who think they are not good at English to think again about these test. It is not a test of capability. It is a test of personality.