Assessing Reading

Reading ability is very difficult to assess accurately. In the communicative competence model, a student's reading level is the level at which that student is able to use reading to accomplish communication goals. This means that assessment of reading ability needs to be correlated with purposes for reading.

Authentic Assessment

In order to provide authentic assessment of students' reading proficiency, a post-listening activity must reflect the real-life uses to which students might put information they have gained through reading.

• It must have a purpose other than assessment
• It must require students to demonstrate their level of reading comprehension by completing some task

To develop authentic assessment activities, consider the type of response that reading a particular selection would elicit in a non-classroom situation. For example, after reading a weather report, one might decide what to wear the next day; after reading a set of instructions, one might   repeat them to someone else; after reading a short story, one might discuss the story line with friends.
Use this response type as a base for selecting appropriate post-reading tasks. You can then develop a checklist or rubric that will allow you to evaluate each student's comprehension of specific parts of the text.

Approaches to Reading

Reading is an active skill which involves inferencing, guessing, predicting etc. It also has, more often than not, a communicative function. We rarely answer questions after reading a text except in a language class, but we do write answers to letters, follow directions, choose restaurants and holidays, solve problems and compare the information to our previous knowledge or the knowledge of others.WHAT SKILLS DO WE NEED TO READ SUCCESSFULLY?
Look at the following subskills, consider each at two different levels (e.g. advanced and beginners) and then number the ten most important skills for each level.
* Recognising the script of a language.
* Deducing the meaning of unfamiliar lexical items.
* Understanding explicitly stated information.
* Understanding conceptual meaning.
* Understanding the communicative values of sentences and utterances.
* Understanding relations within the sentence.
* Interpreting text by going outside it.
* Identifying main points in a discourse.
* Extracting salient points to summarise.
* Basic reference skills (contents, index, abbreviations, ordering).
* Skimming.
* Scanning.

Reading Assessment Techniques

Reading comprehension assessments are the most common type of published reading test that is available. The most common reading comprehension assessment involves asking a child to read a passage of text that is leveled appropriately for the child, and then asking some explicit, detailed questions about the content of the text (often these are called IRIs).

Because comprehension is what is being measured, language comprehension can be assessed in basically the same way reading comprehension is assessed. With language comprehension assessment, however, the child should not be expected to read any text. Everything from the instructions to the comprehension questions should be presented verbally to the child.

As mentioned earlier, oral reading accuracy is one form of decoding assessment, but it is not a very "clean" assessment. Teachers need to be aware that, in their early attempts to acquire reading skills, children apply many different strategies, some of which are hard to detect. Children often attempt to guess words based on the context or on clues provided by pictures — most of the time, a child’s guesses are inaccurate, and their difficulties with decoding are revealed, but sometimes the child guesses correctly, making the teacher believe that the child accurately decoded the word.


Linguistic Knowledge is the synthesis of three more basic cognitive elements -- phonology, semantics, and syntax. Linguistic knowledge is more than the sum of it's parts, but it does not lend itself to explicit assessment. A child may have a grasp on the more basic cognitive elements, but still have trouble blending these elements together into a stable linguistic structure.

The Importance of Reading is difficult to express in words but can experienced by people from all walks of life. Reading has a host of benefits - tangible and intangible and should infact become a habit as common as bathing or eating.