The effect of adding supplementary writing to an extensive reading program.

2.4 Measures

The measures used were a 100-item cloze test (test-retest reliability = .87), the reading section of the TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) test (KR21 = .96), and the number of error free clauses made per 100 words in writing (inter-rater r = .90). The same measures were used at the beginning and end of the study; the cloze passage used was identical, but an alternate form of the TOEIC was used, and the prompt (story) for the pre and post writing samples differed.

To generate a writing sample for the error-free clause calculation, students were asked to read a short story, and write a summary in English. The pretest prompt was taken from a story at the 600-word level and the posttest prompt was from an un-graded text. The following is an excerpt from the un-graded text,

Poor little Lisa, how she cried! All she had left were the little red hood, and her pretty red shoes. She had given away all her other things. She had even lost her basket! She must have forgotten to pick it up when the bear frightened her. As the shadows grew darker and darker in the big black forest, she tried hard to be brave and to keep on walking. The stars twinkled brightly in the black sky while the Old Man in the Moon smiled kindly down on her. Tired out, she sat down on a big stone to rest.

("Little Lisa," Nerman, 1955)

Students were asked how much time it took them to read the prompt after the post-test; the average was about 30 minutes, and analysis of variance revealed no significant difference among the three groups. Students were also asked how many pages they had read at the end of each semester, and how much time they had spent reading and writing English summaries. At the end of the third semester, students were asked a) Do you think your writing ability improved? b) Did summary writing assignment hinder your reading? c) Did you sometimes copy from a book when you wrote a summary? d) How much did you copy (0%, 5%, 25%, 50% and 90%)? e) Should we continue writing summaries in English? f) Was writing summaries in English more tiring than reading?