CONSTRUCT AND CRITERION OF THE ENGLISH ORAL READING FLUENCY TEST FOR THAI UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

Abstract

The objectives of this study were to develop construct and criterion of the English Oral Reading Fluency test to investigate to what extent different oral reading fluency measures, rate, accuracy and prosody, contribute to comprehension, and to investigate students’ attitudes toward an oral reading fluency test. The subjects were 54 first year students from the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University who were selected by using the purposive sampling technique based on the Chulalongkorn University Test of English Proficiency (CU-TEP) scores. Three English Oral Reading Fluency (EORF) tests and three sets of comprehension questions were devised. Then, the scores of rate, accuracy and prosody were compared to investigate to what extent different oral reading fluency measures contributed to comprehension by using multiple regression analysis. Pearson product-moment coefficients were also used to analyze the correlations among the variables. To investigate the students’ attitudes toward the test, an attitude questionnaire was used. The attitudes questionnaire consisted of four parts including students’ attitudes toward learning English, EORF test anxiety, students’ attitudes toward the EORF Test and student opinion scale items. Then, descriptive statistics were used to analyze the students’ attitudes. The results revealed that in all the three tests, only accuracy made a statistically significant unique contribution to comprehension (Test II). In all the three tests, the correlations between accuracy and comprehension were very consistent as it had significant positive moderate relationships with comprehension. Thus, it can be concluded that accuracy is necessary for comprehension. Regarding rate, as it had no significant relationships with comprehension in test II and test III, it is possible that while the relationship between rate and comprehension is rather strong in L1 contexts, it is weak in EFL contexts. The last variable, prosody had significant positive moderate relationships with comprehension in all the three tests, which can be concluded that the connection between prosody and comprehension exists. Regarding students’ attitudes toward the test, the findings indicated that even though some students had exhibited certain signs of anxiety from taking the EORF test, those who experienced no anxiety outnumbered them, and the majority of the test takers had positive attitudes and opinions toward the EORF test.