English Teaching

ELT365 · Day 169 — Multiple choice in reading tasks

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Idea — Good multiple-choice reading items test comprehension, not test-taking strategy. Distractors should be plausible but clearly wrong when the text is understood. Avoid ‘all of the above’ and trick answers.

Example — A strong distractor restates a detail from the text but misapplies it to the question — it sounds right but the text doesn’t support it.

Try — Take one multiple-choice question from a published coursebook. Analyse each distractor: why might a learner choose it? Is each one testing comprehension or just guesswork?


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