Online reading skills as an object of testing in international english exams (ielts, toefl, cae)

Abstract

The present article addressed the issue of university teachers' working experience in the field of class-oriented online teaching English in higher educational institutions. The central aim of this study was a detailed description of the system for assessing reading skills utilized in English proficiency tests (CAE (C1), TOEFL, IELTS), as well as a comprehensive analysis of testing results. As a part of a thorough investigation, the article detailed three major reading modes and tasks most commonly used in such tests (scan-reading, skim-reading, and in-depth reading). Besides, in order to obtain reliable conclusions about the reasonability of the test tasks, the study took into account the tests' duration, the number and types of tasks, as well as the length of reading passages proposed. The research population comprised 622 second-year students from all faculties of the National Research University "Higher School of Economics" (Nizhny Novgorod Campus, Russia) with English proficiency levels from B1 to C1+. All data required for the study were collected from the outcomes of international English exams (CAE (C1), TOEFL, IELTS), conducted in the form of testing in 2013, 2014, and 2015. The results of this examination showed that 97% of students involved successfully solved multiple choice tasks, 96% demonstrated an understanding of the dependence between headings and text fragments, and 95% succeeded in gap-filling tasks. Provided that research participants were engaged in active work on English reading comprehension improvement throughout the examination period, 95% of students have mastered their reading skills.