Teaching Reading Comprehension Theoretical Review

Brown 2004: 4 states, assessment is the process of measure that is done by the teacher whenever students practice language skills. The teacher can assess the students during the learning process and after the learning process. Moreover, Caldwell 2008: 15 says “Assessment and instruction can happen at the same ti me.” It can be said that the assessment is a part of the teaching process. Assessment can be done by the teacher during the lesson; when students respond to a question, give comment, and ask questions. According to Brown 2004: 5, assessment is divided into two types. The first type is informal assessment. It is done by the teacher without designing the assessment first. The form of this assessment is incidental, unplanned comment or responses or impromptu feedback to the students like “Good job”, “Great”, and “Well-done”. Moreover, this kind of assessment can be done by commenting on students ’ paper, and correcting students’ pronunciation. The second type is formal assessment. It is in the opposite of informal assessment. Using this kind of assessment, the teacher prepares first some exercises to assess stude nts’ competence, for example quizzes, assignments, and examinations. Nevertheless, formal assessment is not testing, because it is designed by the teacher himself not by the administrative of government. Those are kinds of assessments that are usually done by the teacher. In teaching reading comprehension, the teacher needs to assess hisher stude nts’ competence in reading comprehension. The teacher can use some reading assessments that are proposed by Alderson 2000: 206-232, as follows: 1 Integrative test Integrative test is testing students reading comprehension on more than one aspect. It aims to assess more than how well students read, but also how students understand the text and respond to the message of the text. 2 The cloze test and gap-filling test The cloze test is test that is constructed by deleting from selected texts every number of words usually being a number somewhere between 5 and 12. Test taker has to restore some words that have been deleted. Whereas gap-filling test is test which is constructed by deleting some words in rational basis so there is no pseudo-random deletion. 3 Multiple-choice techniques A multiple-choice technique is testing technique that provides choices for students in answering the questions. Using multiple-choice techniques, testers can control the range of possible answers as distracters and the stude nts’ thought process when they are responding the text. 4 Matching techniques Matching technique is testing technique which allows students to match against each other. For example match the title to its paragraph. 5 Dichotomous techniques Dichotomous technique is a testing technique which presents a statement which is related to the target text, and provides two choices only for students to answer. For example, exercise true or false and agree or disagree.