Nine of eleven correct answers are the same word twice
Mei is ten. She reads aloud fluently and with expression, borrows two books a week from the class shelf, and can retell a whole story in her own words at home. On a mock reading paper she scored 14 out of 20. Item-level analysis shows that nine of her eleven correct answers came from items where the answer word appeared verbatim in the text - 'café' in the text, 'café' in the question. She got none of the six items that needed a paraphrase: 'not expensive' for 'cheap', 'gran' for 'grandmother', 'closed on Mondays' for 'open Tuesday to Sunday'. She also missed both items that required joining information from two sentences several lines apart. On true/false items she marks 'true' whenever she recognises any word from the statement somewhere in the text. Her vocabulary test scores are average for the class, and when asked orally she defines 'cheap' and 'grandmother' correctly and instantly.
1. Explain what this score profile shows and why it is not a vocabulary-size problem.
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The profile shows a matching strategy, not a meaning strategy. Nine of eleven correct answers sit on items that reward finding the same string twice; every item that required the reader to hold an idea and recognise it in different clothing failed.
It is not a vocabulary problem because the words are demonstrably there: she defines 'cheap' and 'grandmother' orally, and her vocabulary scores are average. The gap is between knowing a word and recognising it as a paraphrase of the question - a reading-behaviour gap.
The true/false behaviour confirms the diagnosis. 'Any recognised word means true' is a matching rule, not a comprehension rule; it is the same rule that produced the eleven right answers.
The two-sentence items fail for a related reason: she is reading sentence by sentence, hunting for a match, so she never holds the question open long enough to carry information across four lines.
2. Design a four-week routine - three activity types, how often, and how you will measure whether the strategy has actually changed.
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Week 1–4, three sessions of 15 minutes per week plus one 10-minute unseen check.
- Question-first reading, modelled aloud. She reads the question, says the key idea in her own words, then looks at the text. I think aloud for two texts first, deliberately failing on a verbatim match and correcting myself, so the wrong strategy is visible.
- Paraphrase pairs, then find them in text. Ten pairs per session drawn from paper topics (cheap / not expensive; gran / grandmother; closed Monday / open Tuesday–Sunday). Sort the pairs, then locate both halves in a short text and draw the link.
- Two-line joins. Short texts where the answer needs line 2 plus line 5; she draws a pencil line between them before writing anything.
Measure: a fresh unseen text each week, marked by item type. Target: 4 of 5 paraphrase items and 2 of 3 two-sentence items. Also check response time - if she gets faster while accuracy rises only on verbatim items, the old strategy is still running.
3. She also marks true/false by word-matching. What do you change in your teaching materials as well as in her technique?
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Technique first: teach that true/false is a judgement about the whole statement, and model a counter-example where every word appears but the statement is still false - text: 'The shop closes at six on weekdays'; statement: 'The shop closes at six at weekends.' She must point to the words that make it false.
Then the materials, because I have been feeding the habit. Any worksheet where the right answer is a copy of a phrase from the text teaches matching; I would rewrite those items so the answer requires one small transformation, and keep only a minority of verbatim items so that matching alone cannot reach a pass. If the class has been trained on copy-heavy worksheets, Mei's 14/20 may be an accurate measurement of what she was taught, not of what she can read.