Assessing reading

                I personally believe that, it is true, assessing extensive reading tests is very tough due to the fact that you can obtain different answers and perspectives you can obtain from your students; better not to take into account the possible answers but the structures and style your students use to express what they understood about the reading. I think that extensive reading is a habit that should be built in the classroom, despite the fact that it increases the rate of learning new vocabulary, and beyond this, when extensive reading is practiced along with the teaching English process, this it aslso helps students to understand certain words from the content and do not oblige them to know the exact meaning of it. Moreover, in extensive reading there exists material that is adapted depending on the reading level that students have. For example, beginners, pre-intermediate reader etc, also words appear many times along with the story or reading in order to have as many possible encounters with the learners, until it seems familiar. These kinds of texts also have determined the number of unknown words and are provided with pictures, but it also depends on the level of the reader. Apart from this interesting topic, extensive reading, I would like to add that not always you need to have your students write long papers to know if they understood the gist or the relevant information about a text. I mean, it can be simplified with impromptu reading and comprehension questions as well as true and false exercises which are the most accurate form of testing students’ reading comprehension. At this point, I would use note taking as a way of testing reading comprehension because the students had the opportunity to see the word and to interact with the different contexts this word can be used in, but, anyway, I want to be very clear when I say that time must be an important factor to take into account before administering the test.