Teacher Engagement With Technology-Enhanced Text Adaptation for Reading Assessment: A Case Study

Introduction

In preparing source materials for English as a foreign language (EFL) reading assessment, teachers need to take into consideration various factors to ensure that each text is suitable for testing purposes. Text complexity is one of such factors because of its profound influences on EFL students’ reading comprehension (Allington, McCuiston & Billen, 2015; Hiebert & Mesmer, 2013). Consequently, text adaptation has become an important task in teachers’ material preparation (Jin, Lu & Ni, 2020). In text adaptation, teachers evaluate the text complexity of a passage and make necessary linguistic modifications to match it with the target proficiency level and guarantee the test validity and reliability (Chen, 2018).

Following the development of corpus linguistics and information technology, a large number of complexity evaluation systems have been designed, which have great potential to scaffold teachers’ text adaptation. Nevertheless, most teachers still depend primarily on their subjective intuition and teaching experiences in adapting source texts, which often causes oversimplification, subjectivism, and arbitrariness (Green & Hawkey, 2012; Jin & Lu, 2018; Lupo et al., 2019). The bulk of research has mainly focused on the development and effectiveness of complexity evaluation systems, and little is known about how teachers engage with such technology in their text adaptation. To fill this gap, the current study aims to shed light on how EFL teachers engage with technology-enhanced text adaptation (TETA), and what factors may influence their engagement.