Assessing Reading
by Amy Henriquez Leiva
1. Genres
1.1. Academic Reading
1.1.1. textbooks, essays, papers
1.2. Job-Related Reading
1.2.1. messages, letters, reports, financial documents
1.3. Personal Reading
1.3.1. Newspaper, magazines, e-mails , greeting cards
2. Types
2.1. Perceptive
2.1.1. Goal is to find out if the learner can read or not.
2.2. Selective
2.2.1. recognition of grammar and discourse features.
2.3. Interactive
2.3.1. Use context to understand meaning of words.
2.4. Extensive
2.4.1. Reading long texts and being able to get the main idea.
3. Difficulties
3.1. Grammatical rules
3.2. Irregular verbs
3.3. tricky letter combinations
3.4. lacking background knowledge
4. Microskills
4.1. Discriminate grapheme and orthographic patterns
4.2. Retain chunks of language, short term memory
4.3. Effective rate in writing process
4.4. Recognize and interpret words
4.5. Recognize meaning
5. Macroskills
5.1. Recognize rhetorical forms
5.2. Recognize communicative functions
5.3. Infer context with help of background knowledge.
5.4. Identify cause and effect, main idea, generalization, etc.
5.5. Distinguish literal from implied meaning.
5.6. Develop and use reading strategies.
6. Forms of processing
6.1. Bottom-up
6.1.1. the goal is to read words
6.2. top-down
6.2.1. uses prior knowledge to understand what is being read.