By teacher Carlos Salgado

Summary about the video Assessing Reading Skill.

To improve students' reading comprehension, teachers should introduce some techniques of learner
readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing,
and visualizing-organizing. These techniques reading comprehension skills benefit every learner, but
are essential for beginning readers, struggling readers, and English Language Learners.

Reading Comprehension is the ability to understand written language, from decoding the text to
establishing a dialogue between what the author presents and the reader's previous knowledge,
generating knowledge through this exchange and through the use of inferences and other reading
strategies.

Regardless of what we read from; we use the same basic processes to create meaning. We set goals
depending on our purpose for reading. We recognize individual words and use our understanding of
the grammar of the language to build up and check the meaning of the text; the more we read, the
more we understand. Eventually we reach an almost complete understanding of the text.

Reading speed is the ability to read written words in a certain period of time trying to understand
what is read. At higher speeds, the chances of losing mental concentration decrease because our
ability to interpret what is written is faster than our ability to speak or pronounce words while
reading. For this reason, it is important to try to increase our reading speed and to evaluate it in our
students it must be observable or listenable for which a reading aloud is required Speed is expressed
in words per minute.

Reading tests may be completed using traditional pencil and paper methods, or the tests may be
delivered and responded to on a computer. Either way, good reading tests will consist of an efficient
and suitable combination of texts and tasks.

Reading Fluency is the ability to read aloud with the appropriate intonation, rhythm, phrasing, and
pauses to understand and make sense of reading by identifying ideas framed by punctuation. Like
speed, fluency is evaluated during reading aloud, so it is very important to differentiate the dramatic
intonation that can accompany a literary text from the emphasis that is made when understanding
situations, phrases or words relevant to the idea general text.

The evaluation of each of these dimensions occurs in a different way but must be integrated. The
SEP published the Manual of procedures for the promotion and assessment of reading competence
in the classroom, which explains in detail these dimensions of reading ability and the materials and
ways of evaluating and registering them.

In general, Fluency is evaluated by listening to the reading aloud.

Comprehension is assessed from the reading of a literary text and through questions whose answer
includes the characters, the sequenced situations, the resolution and some aspects of temporal and
physical location.

A reading test will only provide useful information about a test-taker’s reading ability if the
assessment is done in a meaningful way. This means choosing the right texts, deciding on the most
appropriate tasks, and scoring everything efficiently. All this takes time, effort, experience and,
above all, a lot of common sense.