The reading comprehension portion of the test was designed to be a proficiency-based measure of students' understanding of facts and ideas in context. The reading passages consist of complete and meaningful texts drawn from authentic sources, including newspapers, magazines, advertisements, and short stories. Only minor editing has been done for length or to simplify particularly difficult vocabulary or structures. This portion of the test was designed to stress variety by including a sampling of different topics, functions, situations, styles, level of difficulty, lengths of passages, and types of questions. Questions were constructed to encourage thinking and intelligent guessing.
Some questions require students to understand factual information.
Other questions require students to go beyond simple decoding at the sentence level, to skim and scan for general ideas, understand logical development of ideas and sequential ordering of events, analyze and synthesize, make inferences and deductions, and also to interpret point of view and tone. In short, the reading module measures the understanding of written French and the reading skills needed to perform well in university courses. Because the scope of the reading test is so broad and the items so varied, it is difficult to select one model of a reading item to represent the entire test. The following sample items may be helpful to you in explaining the test to your students. Both examples are of average difficulty.