Einsatz von geschlossenen Aufgaben beim prüfen des Leseverstehens im Fachsprachenunterricht an der Universität Vilnius

• Uždarojo tipo užduotys skaitymo gebėjimams patikrinti ir jų taikymas mokant dalykinės kalbos universitete
• Use of closed tasks for reading assessment in teaching foreign languages for specific purposes at university

ENThis paper presents an analysis of closed tasks used to check reading skills; it discusses the advantages and shortcomings related with choosing certain items. The didactics of foreign language teaching identifies the choice of the following items: multiple and binary choice, matching. In preparing this type of task, it is important to determine what kind of reading (overview, selective or reading in detail) will be checked. Multiple options tasks have the advantage that they can be checked quickly and objectively, their performance is not complicated. On the other hand, it is difficult to determine good points (distracters), their preparation takes a long time, and there is a strong possibility that the correct answer will be guessed. In order to minimize the possibility of prediction, the theory of the development of tests offers adding “not given in the text” as an alternative option to true/false statements and supplementing the matching task with one or more distracters. Based on the theoretical recommendation for the preparation of tests, the authors of the article worked out tasks designed to test reading comprehension in German for specific purposes at the Faculty of Medicine of Vilnius University. Important sentences were removed from a German text and arranged alphabetically in the list of options. To avoid a possibility of prediction, two distracters (from the total of 12 options) were created. The purpose of such exercise is to check how well students understand a text and its structure. On the other hand, it is also important to determine the German language level of students. It is required that though such distracters must be wrong, they are to seem convincing to individuals with weaker knowledge of the language; thus this criterion was also considered during the analysis of students’ answers.The analysis of the results of this task revealed that: 1. Students with good language level performed the task better than those with the lower level of knowledge; 2. Among students who made mistakes, distracters were chosen by 11.4% and 25.7% respectively; 3. Sentences were linked correctly by 19.5%, 29% made one mistake, 19.5% made two mistakes, and 32% of the students made three or more mistakes.