25 September 2026. 12:00 (Valeria). 13:00 (Nicolás). On-site and online session (Room M204). Language: Spanish (Valeria) and English (Nicolás)
Teaching approaches and practices for assessing reading comprehension
Valeria Arriaza
Catholic University of Maule
The presentation will report on two studies examining how language teachers in Chile assess text comprehension. The first examines their self-reported practices and conceptions, considering the frequency with which they use different activities and assessment instruments, the instructional validity they attribute to them, and their conceptions of comprehension assessment. This analysis makes it possible to explore the relationships between what teachers consider appropriate for assessment and the decisions they report making in the classroom. The second study analyzes a corpus of reading comprehension assessments used in school settings. Its purpose is to characterize the activities and assessment instruments used, the discourse genres included, the cognitive demands posed, and the type of evidence through which student comprehension is assessed. Together, the studies make it possible to contrast what teachers report about their practices with the characteristics of the assessments they design. Based on this relationship, the presentation discusses the possibilities and limitations of assessment tasks for obtaining evidence of comprehension, an unobservable process. It contributes to the discussion of how reading comprehension assessment is shaped in classrooms and the challenges this poses for assessment literacy and teacher education.
Bio
Valeria Arriaza Puebla holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso, and a degree in Spanish Language Teaching from the University of Playa Ancha. She is a faculty member in the Department of Spanish Language and Literature at the Catholic University of Maule, Chile. Her research focuses on text comprehension, reading comprehension assessment, and teacher education. She is currently the principal investigator of the Fondecyt Postdoctoral Project 3240666, which focuses on the relationships between in-service teachers’ reading profiles, their assessment practices, and their conceptions of the assessment of written-text comprehension.
From Discourse Reading to Conscious Access: Prediction and Integration in Autistic and Neurotypical Participants
Nicolás Acuña
Catholic University of Maule
This talk brings together two experiments examining how linguistic context influences language processing at different stages and in different populations. The first uses eye tracking during discourse reading to distinguish prediction from integration. It compares expected continuations with unexpected words that are either related or unrelated to the event described by the preceding discourse. Conducted with neurotypical university students, this design tests whether event knowledge facilitates the processing of unexpected input even when it conflicts with a strong local lexical expectation. The second experiment uses breaking continuous flash suppression (bCFS) to investigate whether sentence-level congruency facilitates conscious access to visually suppressed words and whether this effect differs between autistic and neurotypical participants. Together, the two studies address how contextual information shapes incremental discourse comprehension and access to word meaning, how the language system responds when its expectations are violated, and whether these processes vary across autistic and neurotypical individuals.
Bio
Nicolás Acuña Luongo is a professor of Spanish Language and Communication, holds a master’s degree in Cognitive Studies from the University of Chile, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso. He is currently a faculty member and director of the Spanish Language and Communication Education program at the Catholic University of Maule, Chile. He is the principal investigator of the FONDECYT Initiation Project 11241268, “Predictive Processing and Activation of World Knowledge During Language Comprehension in People with Autism.” His research focuses on predictive language processing, discourse comprehension, and differences in linguistic processing between people with autism and neurotypical individuals, using behavioral, eye-tracking, and electrophysiological methodologies.
