Diagnosing academic reading in EFL teacher education programmes in Chile : test construction and initial validation

Ramos Galvez, Camilo and Brunfaut, Tineke (2025) Diagnosing academic reading in EFL teacher education programmes in Chile : test construction and initial validation. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

While diagnostic language assessment (DLA) is an active area of research, there is still limited discussion about what diagnosis constitutes and entails (Huhta et al., 2024), particularly for various learner populations. In Chile, where university-level teacher education degrees must administer diagnostic assessments to their students (Law 20903, Mineduc, 2016), no studies have investigated how these are conducted in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher education programmes. Similarly, while academic reading is crucial for higher education learning, existing literature calls for assessments that more comprehensively and accurately reflect the reading demands in university settings (Weir et al., 2012). In response, a two-phase, mixed methods argument-based validation study was conducted to develop and validate aspects of a diagnostic test of academic reading for Chilean EFL teacher education programmes. Phase 1 investigated the diagnostic assessment practices and academic reading practices in English across five EFL teacher education programmes in Chile. Eight teacher educators and five directors of these programmes participated in semi-structured interviews, while 147 undergraduates completed a questionnaire regarding their academic reading practices. Findings from Phase 1 suggest that current diagnostic assessments are conditioned by institutional/national practices and practicality issues, while views about ideal diagnoses align well with existing principles of DLA. Meanwhile, undergraduates reported to read mostly webpages and academic books on digital devices and paper, and to complete assessments targeting a wide range of reading subskills such as comprehension of the gist, main ideas, and specific information in academic texts. Phase 2 investigated how higher-level academic reading (Khalifa & Weir, 2009) can be diagnosed, by designing, administering, and evaluating a diagnostic test of higher-level academic reading for EFL teacher education programmes in Chile. This phase used the combined results from 11 experts’ judgements, statistical analyses from 185 test-takers, and 14 think-aloud reports, to critically evaluate the proposed test’s design, content, and ability to elicit relevant higher-level reading processes. Findings from Phase 2 suggest that while the test elicited relevant higher-level cognitive processes, these were, at times, hard to separate sufficiently for fine-grained diagnosis. This thesis contributes to the ongoing discussion about what it means to diagnose and what a theory of diagnosis might entail. It also offers a practical framework for developing diagnostic assessments of academic reading that are theoretically grounded, empirically supported, and contextually relevant.