The modified EGRA subtest measures—including listening comprehension, phonemic awareness, letter-

sound knowledge, and familiar word reading. —have been used to fulfill a diverse range of assessment
needs, including screening, diagnostic, and progress-monitoring purposes. Using results on these
components will help teachers and school heads screen learners for learning difficulties, diagnose
strengths and weaknesses to guide instruction, and made decisions regarding the effectiveness of their
teacher training and professional development programs.

EGRA can be used as part of a comprehensive approach to improving student reading skills, with the first
step being an overall system-level identification of areas for improvement.
I. Listening comprehension- Respond correctly to different types of questions including literal
and inferential questions about the text the enumerator reads to them
II. Phonemic awareness- Segment words into phonemes. Identify the initial sounds in different
words
III. Letter sound knowledge- Provide the sound of upper- and lowercase
IV. Familiar word reading- Read simple and common one- and two-syllable words

Phonemic Awareness
In order to read, each of us must turn the letters we see into sounds, sounds into words, and words into
meaning. Successfully managing this process requires the ability to work in reverse; that is, in order to
understand the process of moving from letters to sounds to words, students should also grasp that
words are composed of individual sounds and understand the process of separating (and manipulating)
words into sounds. This ability to identify sounds in words, to separate words into sounds, and to
manipulate those sounds is termed phonemic awareness, and is a subset of phonological awareness, a
more general appreciation of the sounds of speech as distinct from their meaning (Snow et al., 1998). As
Stanovich (2000) and others have indicated, “children who begin school with little phonological
awareness have trouble acquiring alphabetic coding skill and thus have difficulty recognizing words.”
Research has found that phonemic awareness plays an important role in reading acquisition. It has been
shown to be the number one predictor of success in reading, better than socioeconomic status,
preschool attendance, or reading time in the home (Share, Jorm, Maclearn, & Matthews, 1984). Testing
for and remediating this skill is thus important for later reading development.

Second Approach: Initial Sound Identification. A second approach to assessing phonemic

awareness is to have students identify the first sound in a selection of common words. The
example below uses 10 sets of simple words and asks students to identify the initial sound in
each of the words. The enumerator reads each word aloud twice before asking the student to
identify the sound.
Data. The examiner records the number of correct answers. This is not a timed segment of the
assessment.

Letter sound knowledge

Knowledge of how letters correspond to sounds is another critical skill children must master to
become successful readers. Letter-sound correspondences are typically taught through
phonics-based approaches, which have moved in and out of favor in the past several decades.
This subtest, like the unfamiliar nonword decoding exercise, is likely to be somewhat
controversial among some groups of educators. Letter sound knowledge is a fairly common
assessment approach and is used in several early reading assessments, including the Preschool
Comprehensive Test of Phonological and Print Processing (Lonigan, Wagner, Torgesen, &
Rashotte, 2002). The assessment covers a range of letters and graphemes, including single
consonants and vowels as well as vowel digraphs and dipthongs (i.e., ea, ai, ow, oy).

Data. As in the letter naming exercise, the child’s score for this subtest should be calculated based on
the number of correct letter sounds per minute.

Familiar Word Reading

Children’s decoding skills are often assessed using reading lists of unrelated words. This allows
for a purer measure of word recognition and decoding skills than does reading comprehension
paragraphs, as children are unable to guess the next word from the context. For this
assessment, familiar words should be high-frequency words selected from early grade reading
materials and storybooks for first-, second-, and third-grade materials (progressively increasing
in difficulty). Sources for such word lists abound. In English, Zeno, Ivenz, Millard and Duvvuri’s
work (1995) is based on a corpus of 17 million English words.
Data. The enumerator records the number of correct words per minute. If the child completes all of the
words before time expires, the time of completion should be recorded and the calculations should be
based on that time period. Correct words per minute should be recorded and scored. The same three
variables collected for the letter naming exercise, above, should be collected for this and the other
timed exercises, namely: Total words read, Total incorrect words, Time remaining on stopwatch.

Listening Comprehension
A listening comprehension assessment involves passages that are read aloud by the
enumerator; students then respond to oral comprehension questions or statements. Testing of
listening comprehension separately from reading comprehension is important due to the
different ways in which learners approach, process, and respond to text. Listening
comprehension tests have been around for some time and in particular have been used as an
alternative assessment for disadvantaged children with relatively reduced access to print (Orr &
Graham, 1968). The purpose of this assessment is to see whether the student can listen to a
passage being read and then answer several questions correctly with a word or a simple
statement. Poor performance on a listening comprehension tool would suggest that children
simply do not have the basic vocabulary that the reading materials expect, or that they have
difficulty processing what they hear.

Data. Students are scored on the number of correct statements they give as their answers (out
of the total number of questions). Instrument designers should avoid questions with only “yes” or
“no” answers.