Lexical patterns in the reading comprehension section of the TOEFL®Test : an investigation of the role of lexical cohesion in fixed-response EFL reading comprehension questions

• Autor(a) principal: Batista, Fabiana Mesquita
• Data de Publicação: 2006
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da Universidade Federal Fluminense (RIUFF)
• Texto Completo: https://app.uff.br/riuff/handle/1/21040
• topic: Língua inglesa; Leitura e interpretação; Testes; Coesão (lingüística); Lexical cohesion; Reading; Testing; CNPQ::LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LETRAS

This thesis argues that lexical patterns may be observed connecting question stems and/or correct options to relevant portions of the related passages in fixed-response reading comprehension test items on the TOEFL® test. Results stemming from the lexical cohesive analysis of a corpus of 608 TOEFL® practice reading comprehension test items suggest that these patterns are, more often than not, realized by specific categories of lexical repetition, or lexical links (Hoey, 1991) according to question type. Equivalent results found for TOEFL ® PBT, CBT, and iBT items appear to indicate that the patterns are in evidence across different versions of the test, even though these editions may, in certain instances, test the same reading skills by means of different question types. Finally, based on the results of an additional analysis of the level of difficulty of the same test items, it is claimed that the lexical patterns associated with the different question types in the corpus have a bearing on the general range of difficulty of the latter in terms of the type of match variable (Jamieson, 2000)