comprehension and the effects are greatest for students with low initial vocabulary knowledge levels (Nelson & Stage, 2007).

_Text comprehension_ is a complex cognitive process. The NRP research (NRP, 2000) concluded that vocabulary development and vocabulary instruction play a very important role in the understanding of what has been read; it is also an active process that requires an intentional and thoughtful interaction between the reader and the text; and finally, the preparation of teachers to better equip students to develop and apply reading comprehension strategies to enhance understanding is intimately linked to students’ achievement in this area. They found that teaching a combination of reading comprehension techniques (comprehension monitoring, cooperative learning, use of graphic and semantic organizers, question answering, question generation, story structure, and summarization) is the most effective method to enhance text comprehension, and that when used in combination, these techniques can improve results in standardized comprehension tests.

Taylor’s (2002) results for grades 2 and 3 revealed that students had higher growth in reading comprehension when teachers used less teacher-directed approaches (telling or recitation). In grades 4 through 6, asking students higher-level questions after reading is related to their growth in fluency, comprehension, and writing. Coaching in word recognition strategies during reading was related to students’ growth in fluency and writing, but not in comprehension. Having students engaged in active responding was also related to their growth in fluency. Teaching with a highly teacher-directed stance and providing whole-class or large-group instruction were negatively related to growth in fluency, comprehension, and writing (B. M. Taylor, Peterson, Rodriguez, & Pearson, 2002).

# **2.2. Assessing reading skills**

There are dozens of tests currently in the market that assess reading skills (see Annex 7.1 for a detailed list). Thus, this is not meant to be an extensive review of all these measures, but only focus on the general approaches to assessing key early-reading skills, discussing examples of oral fluency and written comprehension measures, the relation between the two, and the criteria to choose the most appropriate one.

## **_a. Common measures of early reading skills_**

As noted before, there are five key beginning reading skills: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. _Phonemic awareness_ is usually assessed by examining a student's knowledge of how sounds make words. Common measures of phonemic awareness ask the student to: (1) break spoken words into parts, counting the number of phonemes; (2) blend spoken parts of a word into one word; or (3) delete or add a phoneme to make a new word (Wren, 2004).

_Phonics_ is assessed only with oral instruments, using for example Letter Recognition, Pseudoword Decoding and Word Reading. In the Letter Recognition subtests (Grades K, 1), the student must identify letters of the alphabet by name. In the Pseudoword Decoding or Nonsense Words subtests (Grades 1, 2), the student must correctly identify nonsense words from a list, which assesses knowledge of letter-sound correspondences as well the ability to blend letters together to form unfamiliar "nonsense.” The Word Reading subtests (Grades 1, 2, 3) require the student to correctly identify words in a sight-word list (The Access Center, 2005; Wren, 2004).

9