Assessing English Skills [microform] : Reading. A Resource Book for Adult Basic Education / David Harrison and Barbara Little

Covering the most important aspects of assessing adult basic readers, this collection of articles is introduced by a discussion of the purpose of resource books for adult education. The first article then examines the rationale for assessing reading ability and stresses the importance of purpose and design in assessment. The second article reviews problems in defining reading and establishing what aspects of reading may be measured while the third provides a rationale and a number of practical examples for assessing attitudes and interests. Similarly, the fourth article presents the background and sample resources for assessing content area reading and study skills. The fifth article focuses on comprehension, dealing separately with standardized tests, informal approaches, and the cloze procedure, and the sixth article provides two measures for rapidly estimating test material readabliity and offers suggestions for making qualitative comparisons of books' readability. The collection contains numerous examples of various reading assessment measures, and concludes with a brief glossary of terms. (Author/MM)