A Study of Students' Reading Performance in Two Test Formats of Summary Writing and Open-ended Questions

The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of two test formats summary writing and open-ended questions on students' reading performance and its relationship to students' English language proficiency. An expository passage was used for two test formats. In addition a reading component of TOEFL test was applied to investigate students' English language proficiency on 35 postgraduate students. Based on descriptive and inferential statistics, the findings were revealed that there was no significant difference of the test takers' reading performance on the two test methods of summary writing and open-ended questions. In addition, results of t-test for the two test methods was significant (p<.05). Consequently the test takers had a better performance in summary writing than open-ended questions. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Dr. Zafer Bekirogullari of Cognitive - Counselling, Research & Conference Services C-crcs.