Psychometric validation of the Sentence Verification Technique to assess L2 reading comprehension ability

Abstract

English teachers use the Sentence Verification Technique (Royer et al., 1979) to determine the readability of written material for their classes. This process requires students to read short passages from a book, followed by isolated sentences. These sentences can be either identical or different from the original passages, in their meaning as well as in their form. For each sentence, students must indicate whether or not itscontent corresponds to that of the original passage. This paper reports on the design and assessment of an SVT test created for measuring reading comprehension ability, based on four English texts. The instrument was administered to 171 adult English learners, of various levels of English proficiency. The data were analysed using both traditional psychometric methods and the Raschmodel. Results indicate that the test shows high internal consistency, that it respects the basic assumptions behind the Rasch model, and that it is in the recommended range of difficulty for that technique.

Keywords

• Sentence Verification Technique
• Reading comprehension
• Reading test
• Readability
• Rasch model