It’s long time since the last post talking about reading, for reading theme, I’ve written you the cognitive factor of reading, example of reading strategy, and purpose of reading. To make it clear of what i would say, listen carefully what i wrote as follow:
Learning reading is not a difficult thing if you would study it hardly. When you are teaching reading, what question you used to test your student?, there are so many types of question on reading. According to Djiwandono (2002:97), the questions in reading comprehension tests are about:
a. Tone & Style
Tone questions ask you to identify the attitude or mood of a specific part of the passage or of the entire passage. A common characteristic of this question type is answer choices that are marked by one to three word phrases containing adjectives. Tone questions test your ability to recognize an attitude or disposition of the author, which is signaled by the use of a handful of trigger words. Never base your guess about the author's tone on a single word--this is not enough to define the tone of the entire passage. Tone questions tend to be among the more infrequent question types.
b. Passage Structure
Passage structure questions ask you to determine the relationship between different parts of a passage. The key to this question type understands the relationship between each idea and paragraph. You must be able to separate ideas that support a thesis from the thesis idea itself. These questions are referred to by some as logical structure questions.
c. Logical Reasoning
Logical reasoning questions ask the students to take information outside the passage and reason about how it will influence a point or sentence in the passage. The most common questions in this genre are those that ask which pieces of information will strengthen or weaken a point in the passage.
In some ways, these questions are similar to application questions in that both require you to understand the thesis of the passage (if one exists) and the relationship between ideas in the passage. However, logical reasoning questions ask you to take outside information and apply it to the ideas in the passage (commonly to strengthen or weaken a point in the passage). However, application questions ask you to take the information in the passage and apply it to an argument or action outside the passage.
d. Application
Application questions ask the students to take information and conclusions in the passage and extrapolate them to similar situations or ideas. The key to this question type is the ability to identify the crux of an argument and see how it relates to a similar situation.
e. Main Idea
Main idea questions ask the students to identify the "primary purpose" or "main point" of the passage. In order to answer these questions correctly, the students must be able to identify the thesis of the passage and those ideas that support this thesis.
f. Supporting Idea
Supporting idea questions are often prefaced by "according to the passage" or "the passage states that". Most of the questions that fit into this category could be called "find the fact" as they rely on your ability to find a specific piece of information, often contained in two or three sentences.
These questions tend to be more difficult than main idea questions because they require a more detailed recollection of the test. If necessary, you can return to the text and quickly re-read a few sentences.
Unlike main idea questions which are more generic in their question stem, these questions tend to incorporate an idea specific to the passage in the question stem.
g. Inference
Inference questions are often prefaced by "the passage implies" or "the author implies", where "suggests" is sometimes substituted.
In some ways, inference and supporting idea questions are similar. They both require you to stick closely to the text and rely on specific facts. However, inference questions tend to go a tad further and ask you to make a very small logical conclusion that is strongly implied based upon information in the passage. Answer choices that require significant assumptions or inferences will never be correct. In inference questions, the answer lies directly in the text and requires a very small logical step (e.g., if the text says that "all the cups in the room are red", an inference would be that "there are no green cups in the room").
In other ways, inference and application questions are similar. They both require you to draw a conclusion, albeit a very small one, based upon what the passage states explicitly. However, the inference question type asks for an answer that is often a near paraphrase of a fact in the passage or a fact that the information in the passage rules out (e.g., if a species of an animal has existed for 1 million years, you can infer that the animal is not new to the earth). On the contrary, the application question type asks you to use the information in the passage as premises and draw a conclusion that is not directly addressed in the passage. In other words, the answer to inference questions is a conclusion made in the passage while the answer to application questions is a conclusion that is applied outside of the passage to an idea or action.