چكيده لاتين :
The purpose of the present study was to investigate how different
answers to open-ended reading comprehension items are scored by
Iranian high school teachers. Three reading comprehension tests were
chosen; each open-ended question was given four different types of
answers: type one was a יcompleteי and highly grammatical answer;
type two contained some ungrammaticality, type three, called the יcopypasteי answer, included the relevant copied answers from the text, and finally type four contained lexically short, semantically rich and
pragmatically functional responses. Sixty five high school teachers
scored each answer and explained briefly why they scored the way they
did. Data analyses revealed that there was a statistically significant
difference between teachersי scoring of the four answer types. Further
analysis of the data indicated that the mean differences between the
answer types were significant, except 3 with 4. The first answer type had the highest score mean, the second and the third categories were scored as the second and the third best response respectively, and the last type, i.e. pragmatically functional answers, received the lowest score mean. A יcommunicative scoring rubricי is advocated later in which meaning negotiation, pragmatic success, and communicative efficiency is considered as important as, or more important than, syntactic and
grammatical accuracy.
