In the end, basing on the teaching reading principles will help teachers find a way to conduct effective reading instruction. The teachers can select
what principles work best for the students, and even they can integrate some key principles in order to achieve the success of teaching reading.
h. Assessing Reading Comprehension
Assessment is done to check students’ progress during teaching and learning process whether they make improvement or not. However, it should
be highlighted that assessing is different from testing. As stated by Brown 2004: 4, tests are defined as planned administrative procedures which were
done to measure students’ performance at identifiable times. While, assessment is an ongoing process that can be done whenever in the occurance
of learning process or after learning process. He adds “Whenever a student respond to a question, offers a coment, or tries out a new word or structure, the
teacher subconsciously makes an assessment of the student’s performance”. According to Brown 2004, assessment is classified into two types
including informal and formal assessment. Informal assessment has various forms and it usually is not prepared by the teacher. This assessment can be in
the forms of incidental, unplanned comments and responses, or spontaneous feedback to the student. Some examples include saying “Good job”, “Nice
try”, “Welldone”, and so on. In addition, the teacher can do this kind of assessment by correcting students’ pronounciation, putting symbols like
smiley symbol or stars on students’ work, and comenting on students’ paper.
In contrary to the informal assessment, formal assessment is specifically designed assessment to assess students’ skill and knowledge. The
teacher does this kind of assessment usually in the form of giving exercises or quizzes, giving assignment, or using student’s journal or portofolio of
materials. However, formal assessment cannot be called testing in some way Brown, 2004: 5-6.
In addition to reading comprehension, Alderson 2000: 206-232 suggests some kinds of reading assessment. They are:
1 Integrative test
Integrative test is a kind of test which is used for assessing students’ comprehension skills. This test assesses deeper than how well the
students read, but how well the students’ skill in understanding the message of the text.
2 The cloze test and gap-filling test
The cloze test refers to a test that is some words are deleted from a text usually being a number somewhere between 5 and 12. The task for
the test take is to restore the words that have been deleted. Meanwhile, gap-filling test is test which is made by deleting some words or
phrases, and it requires the test taker to create sentence completion based on the text that they read.
3 Multiple-choice techniques
A multiple-choice technique provides several choices for the students to answer. The choices consist of one right anwer, while the others are
distracters. 4
Matching techniques This technique allows the students to match against each other, for
example matching paragraph with the title. 5
Dichotomous techniques In dichotomous technique, the students are presented with statements
that are related to the target text and they are offered by only two choices. Examples of this technique are exercises to decide true or
false or agree disagree. 6
Short-answer techniques In the short-answer technique, the student reads the text provided and
responds to questions by giving only short answers in a sentence or two.
7 The summary test
The summary test is a test technique that rquires the student to summarize the main idea or key points of the text that they have read.
This indeed will check the students understanding of the text based on the points of summary that they make.
i. The Problems of Reading Comprehension
