Reading Assessment & Instruction

Chapter 10, Reading Assessment & Instruction, Peregoy & O. Boyle

This chapter is mainly of students in the elementary grades who are English language learners. There are three things to know about ELL students: 1) knowing student’s life experiences, interests, and aspirations is to use student’s prior knowledge to give him/her a purpose or motivation to read. 2) language knowledge, or how well they know their second language, 3) prior literacy experiences in their primary language means that knowledge of strategies can transfer over to their second language.

For the primary grades, especially kindergarten level, their experience with text varies. Students who have been read to at home, who have exposure to variety of print come to school with knowledge of concept of print (reading left to right, top to bottom, opening the page, title and author). Another assessment we give out is to see how many reading strategies they know (do they look to the illustrations to get meaning? Are they able to predict what will happen next? And how many letters do they know?). Students who have funds of knowledge about print usually get the Yugtun concepts right away.

One procedure I found interesting in the reading is on echo reading. In echo reading students are assessed to see if they are able to repeat what the teacher said. If they have difficulty repeating word for word, then the students will probably have difficulty with the book which the phrase or sentence was taken from. Another procedure I liked was the ReQuest where the students ask a question and the teacher answers the question and then asks another question. This is done after reading a passage. For younger kids the teacher says the answer and has the students ask the question for it. The purpose of the activity is to be able to question while developing student’s comprehension. I noticed that in kindergarten students tend to say a statement when someone asks, “do you have a question?” I often wonder if that is part of developmental process. Is it too early to teach students to ask questions in kindergarten?