Reading Assessment

Reading Assessment.

As teachers, we all use a number of ways, conscious and unconscious, to assess our students and that applies to all four skills, including reading.

In this presentation, I will first focus on the various ways we assess our students, then I will look at what we understand by the activity of reading within an ESL classroom and finally I will explain a specific method that can be used to assess Extended Reading.

1. General comments on assessment.

Assessing is not an easy process and many teachers often recoil from it, not least because it is often deemed to be a reflection of how good or bad a teacher we are. Assessing language is all the more difficult because we are asked to teach and assess skills rather than content. The acquisition of skills is much more difficult to pass on but also to quantify than the acquisition of specific subject-based information. ¹ Moreover, we are meant to teach four different skills and our students will each be gifted in their unique way for each of those skills, making the case figures exponentially more complex. It is therefore important to acknowledge the difficulty of the task ahead for us all, teachers of languages. However, it need not be as arduous as it sounds. Going from the premises that we are all positively engaged in our teaching activity and work in cooperation with our team, setting a number of assessment criteria, it is important to remember we must trust our own judgment.

Our aim is to become language facilitators as well as language assessors ². Whether consciously or not, we all constantly assess the way our students are working and therefore their progress or lack of progress. We do this through our general interaction with them and by making a note of attitude and participation in classroom activities. We also monitor, more or less formally depending on the circumstances and our teaching methods, the work they produce. Finally, regular tests and homework as well as end of term and/or year assessments can enable us to understand more objectively where they have got to and what they have understood or failed to understand. These methods work hand in hand and vary greatly on the personality of the teacher as well as the students that are involved in the process. No professional should be made to use a rigid testing method on a day-to-day basis, indeed understanding the students and using information from them ² ensures effective teaching and every teaching scenario is different.

2. What is Reading ?

There are four skills involved when learning a language. Speaking and writing are productive skills and the word productive points to the fact that these skills are assessed through a tangible product , thus making the assessment more concrete. Reading and listening are receptive skills and, as such, harder to assess it is difficult to get into the mind of the learner and evaluate precisely their (level of ) understanding. Which skill is more important is a frequently debated topic but, really, it largely depends on the use the learner will make of the language. Within an academic context, it could be argued that reading takes the lead since it will be used subsequently as the basis for other subjects.

The acquisition of reading as a skill in the school environment takes place in a number of ways at different times and in different spaces within the school day, like it does here at Wickham. According to primary school based reading and SENCO expert, Kate Hamilton-Bowker, reading acquisition happens in three stages:

1. Decoding. Linking the written word to a sound.

2. Literal comprehension. the meaning of a word or cluster of words

3. Inferential comprehension. Understanding the subtext, a meaning that is implied rather than explicit, ie the child has to deduce understanding from the text rather than from words themselves.

From the previous presentation, you will have understood the difficulties our young Chinese students face and the importance to teach them to read for joy and pleasure. We have identified three different types of reading activity:

1. Decoding or specific reading comprehension

2. Extended reading for general comprehension

3. Extended reading for pleasure

The first two activities are assessed in different ways to give an idea of the progress of the student. The last activity should be strongly encouraged but should not be evaluated . The students can keep a tab of the new words encountered along their reading journey, a sort of vocabulary journal. However this practice should not be compulsory when it comes to extended reading as it could stop the flow and kill the enjoyment.

The first activity is either done in class or for homework and can include reading outloud. It will assess the decoding of words, pronunciation and reading for meaning, with questions that vary from yes or no questions and multiple-choice answers to more involved comprehension questions. It is often followed by writing activities.

The second activity can be done in the classroom, in the library or at home. It can also include reading outloud. Graded books, such as the Oxford Reading Tree books, are used and the students graduate through the different levels. It is a stepping-stone towards becoming an independent and enthusiastic reader.

3. Assessing Extended Reading

There is a school of thought that believes it should be assessed by the percentage of words a student understands in the text.³ However, we believe this is too limited and limiting and is not a reflection on whether or not the meaning of the text has been understood, which is after all the name of the game! Students actually only need to understand 50% of the words in the text. We believe is that Extended Reading should be assessed by checking meaning using both literal and inferential questions.

Indeed, students need to infer meaning as well as read what is on the page. Inferential meaning is more difficult to get both because it is a subtext and because it is not based on any specific word that s in the text. Another layer of difficulty for our Chinese students is that there may well be, in this inferential meaning, a cultural dimension which can be neither obvious nor easy to grasp.

An example of this is as follows:

The ground was covered in snow..

The ground was covered in white sparkly flakes.

Both sentences refer to snow, and when asked the question: What time of year is it? the answers should be winter in both cases.

However, when that question is asked for statement 1 it is testing the student s literal comprehension of the text whereas it tests inferential comprehension when it refers to the second statement.

The harder the text, the more inferences there will be but inferential comprehension can also be assessed in simple texts.

Mummy came home with some fruit and cakes. Johnny looked up and carried on playing with his train.

Was Johnny hungry? is testing inferential comprehension, it is an inferential question. There is no specific answer in the text and the student will have to infer whether Johnny is hungry or not from the fact that he carried on playing with his train.

In order for you to assess the students reading progress, we are recommending that using a collection of graded books, such as the Oxford Tree Books, you identify two books, or passages if that s easier, for each level. One book will be used for a pre-test, to determine whether the student can read at that level, and the other book will be used for a post-test, to determine whether the student can start reading at the next level. For each book, or passage, there should be 5 literal questions and 5 inferential questions.

To assess whether the student has passed and is able to progress to the next level the student should get the correct replies to all 5 literal questions and to 3 or 4 inferential questions.

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Although you may choose to assess the students comprehension of each book using this type of questions or a different method, it is not necessary. You could simply decide to monitor their progress loosely and only assess their progress formally when you see it fit.

Bibliography:

Teacher cognition and assessment | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBCwww.teachingenglish.org.uk

³ Reading Level Placement and Assessment for ESL/EFL Learners: The Reading Level Measurement Method Aaron David Mermelstein, Ming Chuan University ORTESOL Journal, Volume 32, 2015 . lt;sup>

⁴ Kate Hamilton-Bowker, Specific Learning Difficulties Diploma, CELTA.