EARLY READING ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENTS: ABILITIES AND PROCESSES INVOLVED

Abstract

This study investigates the following early reading assessment instruments: “Bateria de Recepção e Produção da Linguagem Verbal” (SCLIAR-CABRAL, 2003a) and “Teste de Competência de Leitura de Palavras e Pseudopalavras” (SEABRA; CAPOVILLA, 2010). The main research goal is to analyze in each one of these reading assessment instruments some of the multiple cognitive processes and basic low-level abilities involved in reading. In this sense, decoding, word recognition, lexical access, syntactic and textual processing, and comprehension are the cognitive processes taken into account. With regard to the basic reading abilities, accuracy and fluency (rhythm, prosody and speed) are considered. The results indicate that each one of the analyzed reading assessment instruments assesses different aspects of the reading processes and abilities, mainly through off-line measures. ScliarCabral’s assessment battery allows the researcher or the teacher to evaluate the following processes: perception of the grapheme opposition in minimal pairs of words and in sentences, difficulties in sentence processing, skills in decoding the graphemic-phonemic relationship, and textual comprehension. In its turn, the reading assessment instrument proposed by Seabra e Capovilla allows one to evaluate student’s reading development level, by classifying the kind of processing as logographic, alphabetic or orthographic.

Keywords

• Reading assessment
• Language processing
• Basic reading skills