Understanding the meaning of
assessments are systematic, planned sampling techniques constructed to give teacher and student an appraisal of students’ achievement. To extend the tennis
analogy, formal assessments are the tournament games that occur periodically in the course of a regimen of practice. On the other hand, informal assessment can
take a number of forms, starting with incidental, unplanned comments and responses, along with coaching and other impromptu feedback to the student.
Furthermore, a good deal of a teachers informal assessment is embedded in classroom tasks designed to elicit the performance without recording results and
making fixed judgments about a students competence. An assessment can be done by test, interview, questionnaire, observation,
etc. Nation 2009 states that there are several reasons for assessing reading and the skills and knowledge that are involved in reading. They include assessing to
encourage learning, assessing to monitor progress and provide feedback, assessing to diagnose problems, and assessing to measure proficiency. The same form of the
assessment may be used for a variety of goals. More specifically, this is a table which consists of goals, purposes, and means of assessing reading proposed by
Nation in 2009.
Table 2. Goals, purposes and ways of assessing reading. Goals of assessment
Purposes Ways of assessing
Motivate Measure achievement
Encourage learning
- Monitor progress - Guide teaching
- Provide feedback to the - Reading logs
- Book reports - Comprehension tests
- Speed reading graphs
- Comprehension tests - Speed reading graphs
Diagnose problem Measure proficiency
learner - Award a grade
- Isolate reading difficulties
- Provide focused help - Award a grade
- See if standards are
achieved - Reading aloud
- Vocabulary tests - Receptive grammar
tests - Translation
- Speed reading tests
- Comprehension tests - Cloze tests
- Speed reading tests
According to Brown 2004, the formal assessment of reading can be carried out in a number of different ways. These are several examples of them.
1 Written response The students should reproduce the probe of the text in a written form. If the
teachers find an error or a mistake in their writing, the teacher should make sure if the error or mistake comes from students’ writing or from students’ reading.
2 Multiple-choice Multiple choice responses are not only a matter of choosing one of four or,
even, five possible answers. The teachers may try other formats of multiple- choice tests. Some of formats are especially fruitful at the low levels of reading,
include same or different, circle the answer, true-false, choose the letter, and matching. However, the teachers should carefully choose the appropriate
‘distractors’. 3 Picture-cued tasks
The students are asked to read a sentence or passage and then choose one of some pictures that is being described in the text or passage. On the higher level,