Assessing Reading Proficiency
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.
Reading Aloud
A student's performance when reading aloud is not a
reliable indicator of that student's reading ability. A student who is
perfectly capable of understanding a given text when reading it silently may
stumble when asked to combine comprehension with word recognition and speaking
ability in the way that reading aloud requires.
In addition, reading aloud is a task that students
will rarely, if ever, need to do outside of the classroom. As a method of
assessment, therefore, it is not authentic: It does not test a student's
ability to use reading to accomplish a purpose or goal.
However, reading aloud can help a teacher assess
whether a student is "seeing" word endings and other grammatical
features when reading. To use reading aloud for this purpose, adopt the
"read and look up" approach: Ask the student to read a sentence
silently one or more times, until comfortable with the content, then look up
and tell you what it says. This procedure allows the student to process the text,
and lets you see the results of that processing and know what elements, if any,
the student is missing.
Comprehension
Questions
Instructors often use comprehension questions to test
whether students have understood what they have read. In order to test
comprehension appropriately, these questions need to be coordinated with the
purpose for reading. If the purpose is to find specific information,
comprehension questions should focus on that information. If the purpose is to
understand an opinion and the arguments that support it, comprehension
questions should ask about those points.
In everyday reading situations, readers have a purpose
for reading before they start. That is, they know what comprehension questions
they are going to need to answer before they begin reading. To make reading
assessment in the language classroom more like reading outside of the
classroom, therefore, allow students to review the comprehension questions
before they begin to read the test passage.
Finally, when the purpose for reading is enjoyment,
comprehension questions are beside the point. As a more authentic form of
assessment, have students talk or write about why they found the text enjoyable
and interesting (or not).
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. SeeAssessing Learning for more on checklists
and rubrics.