Assessing English Language Learners

Chapter III Assessing Reading

Reading is an invisible and interactive skill. Teachers cannot see what is going on in the mind of the students while reading. It gives it a difficult to assess connotation. However, there are a variety of sub skills that can help to assess the reading abilities. On the other hand, it’s interactive because while reading, students think on possibilities, search in their background knowledge, guess and construct meaning.

 For reading purposes, bottom up and top down process are needed among other approaches to reading that help to make it more efficiently.  In addition there are some sub skills that make reading a skill easier to assess: skimming, scanning, read for main ideas, fact and opinion, information transfer, drawing inferences, understanding vocabulary, sentences, understanding meaning. Some considerations when assessing reading have to be taken: the assessment has to match the reading program, use sample of reading sub skills with different tasks types that at the same time have to be selected from a range, nonlinear and prose texts must be used, authenticity must be used as much as possible, the entire text must be exploited, grammar and vocabulary must be included in context, grammar and vocabulary are focused as sub skills, critical thinking and inferencing must be encouraged and assessed, timing should be considering when skimming and scanning.

Some recommendable tasks when assessing reading are: questions, they must be slightly lower than the reading passage, with the same order as the information in the text. Cloze tests for specific vocabulary. Multiple choice and true/false tasks are ideal for main ideas and supporting details, short answer tasks such as scanning focus on main idea or details.