d Reports
e Schedules, labels, signs, announcements
f Forms, applications, questionnaires
g Financial documents
h Directories
i Manuals, directions
3 Personal reading
a Newspapers and magazines
b Letters, emails, greeting cards, invitations
c Messages, notes, lists
d Schedules
e Recipes, menus, maps, calendars, etc
d. Classroom Reading Activities
According to Brown 2003:189 several types of reading performance are typically identified, and these will serve as organizers of various assessment
tasks. 1
Perceptive
. In keeping with the set of categories specified for listening comprehension, similar specifications are offered here, except with some
differing terminology to capture the uniqueness of reading. Perceptive reading tasks involve attending to the components of larger stretches of
discourse: letters, words, punctuation, and other graphemic symbols. Bottom
– up processing is implied. 2
Selective
. This category is largely an artifact of assessment formats. In order to
ascertain one’s reading recognition of lexical, grammatical, or discourse features of language within a very short stretch of language,
certain typical tasks are used: picture-cued tasks, matching, true false, multiple choice, etc.
3
Interactive
. Included among interactive reading types are stretches of language of several paragraphs to one page or more in which the reader
must, in a psycholinguistic sense, interact with text. 4
Extensive
. Extensive reading, applies to texts of more than a page, up to and including professional articles, essays, technical reports, short
stories, and books.
e. Assessing Reading
Brown 2003 proposes the idea that assessment is an ongoing process during teaching and learning process. The process can be in a written work,
formal essay, productive performances like in reading and listening activities,
and so on. Moreover, when students offer a comment or response to a question, the teacher subconsciously makes an assessment of the student’s
performance. Before assessing reading skills, the first thing that should be noticed is
that reading has various genres. According to Brown 2003, there are three types of reading such as academic reading, job-related reading, and personal
reading. The product of this research used the academic reading in almost all of the tasks. The materials from this genre are magazines, newspapers,
articles, dictionaries, and so on. The genre of a text will guide the readers to apply certain schemata that will help them in extracting appropriate meaning.
The product of this research used some assessments such as matching tasks, comprehension questions, picture-cued items, short-answer tasks, true-
false questions, scanning, ordering tasks, skimming, summarizing, and note- taking. In line with these assessments, Brown 2003:190-214 proposes some
types of reading assessments as stated follow. 1
Assessment of Basic Reading Skills a
Reading aloud Reading aloud is a strategy to assess students’ ability in reading the
provided text orally. This strategy will help students in developing their spelling awareness.
b Multiple choice
This assessment is asked students to choose one of four or five possible answers. This kind of assessment is not only a matter of
choosing. Sometimes, the teacher will provide the outwitted possible answers to see the students understanding related to the presented
texts. 2
Assessment of Selective Reading skills a
Matching tasks Some tasks in this product are used matching tasks assessments. In
the developed materials, this task is used in identifying the parts of speech.
It is the simple task which asks students to respond correctly or match an appropriate format.
b Editing tasks
T his assessment is more appropriate to measure students’
grammatical errors. This technique is not only focus on grammar but also introduce a simulation of the authentic task of editing.
c Gap-filling tasks
This kind of task can be converted in the multiple choice tasks. The students are asked to write a word or phrase. Another option is to
create sentence completion items where the students read part of a sentence and then complete it by writing a phrase.
3 Assessment of interactive reading
a Impromptu reading plus comprehension questions
This is the most common technique in reading assessment. This assessment provides a passage then the students respond to questions.
