| Reading is such an essential part in one’s language learning.Meanwhile,it holds the highest percentage and accounts for the most scores in the NMET.NMET is an important test to detect the students’ English proficiency,which plays,to a certain degree,a profound guiding role in senior high schools’ English teaching.And,the brand new English Curriculum Standards of Senior High School issued in 2017 puts forward much more integrated requirements for the students’ reading comprehension ability.Guided by the RT,this study analyzes ten years’ reading comprehension tests of NMET from 2010-2019 and mainly discusses the following three research questions.(1)What are the distribution characteristics of the reading comprehension test questions?(2)How can the answers to the reading comprehension test questions be found in terms of RT?(3)What factors may influence the answer-seeking process from the perspective of RT?After a comprehensive analysis,both qualitative and quantitative,of 150 test questions from 40 passages of 10 years’ English test papers,the results are found as follows.(1)Among 150 reading questions,question types such as Understanding Details,Inferring,Making Title,Word Meaning and Main Idea questions are mainly involved.Understanding Details question is most widely distributed which accounts for 51.33%.Inferring questions take the second place with the proportion of 26.7%.These two types are involved in the reading comprehension test every year.The last three kinds are of small probability with the respective distribution of 5.33%,6.0%,and 4.67%.There is one Making Title question in the test papers from 2011 to 2018.Word Meaning question has been a part of the test paper since 2012.And Main Idea question occurs in the test papers of 2017,2018 and 2019.All the statistics indicate that the students’ detail understanding ability is the basic requirement for reading comprehension,while inferential ability is a much higher requirement.Besides,the students should as well be able to predict,guess and integrate the information derived from the passage due to the existence of the small probability questions in the NMET.(2)Answer-seeking process for the reading comprehension test question,in terms of RT,is a process to seek for the best contextual effect.According to the ways of answer-seeking,Understanding Details questions can be divided into two types,one is Factual question for which the answer can be found directly in the text,the other is Non-factual question.Answer-seeking for Non-factual question is much more complicated which requires that the students should not only be able to locate the sentences related to the test question but also enrich them for the full semantic meaning,construct and meanwhile enlarge and cognitive context during explicating.In most cases,the option that is strengthened by the cognitive context owns the best contextual effect and is exactly the most appropriate choice.Answering Inferring questions needs the recovery of full semantic meaning and the construction of cognitive context too,but the key to finding the answers to Inferring questions is to find out the contextual implication of the original text.It is a process of generating pragmatic meaning by inferring.Building a bridge between given and new information helps with Word Meaning questions,which can be seen as a kind of reference assignment.As for the question type of Making Title and Main Idea,the students need to integrate all the relevant information based on the text type knowledge of writing intention,writing style,and passage structure to generalize the answer with optimal relevance.(3)In the process of answer seeking,the recovery of full semantic meaning of the original text may be influenced by various cognitive contextual factors.Text type knowledge mainly exerts notable effect on the answer-seeking for Making Title and Main Idea questions.Besides,the students’ understanding of English grammatical rules,the storage of diverse encyclopedic knowledge,the depth of vocabulary knowledge will all affect the students’ processing effort and subsequently influence the choices. |
