Reading is fundamental

At the beginning of our teaching process, the majority of teachers just thought about many concerns related to students´ learning process. In our minds there were many questions that couldn’t be answered because we didn’t know how to deal with. It was pretty difficult to affirm if what we were doing were correct or incorrect just because we threw ourselves into the void without taking into account theories, authors, theoretical support, etc.   

Now that that we have read about their processes, how they acquire and synthetize knowledge, their ways of learning, factors that affect them, their performances, etc,  we can have a clear idea of how to teach or assess learners. Language acquisition is a process and we can’t pretend they acquire everything in the first class and just store this knowledge in their minds; many abilities are unobservable and we can’t see the process.  In this moment is when assessment becomes more complex because it´s just by inference and we as teachers should start to rethink and consider more factors that simple give them a grade.  

Talking about these unobservable abilities, reading is one of these skills that must be taken into consideration because many people have thought that it is something that every single person must have and acquire as the time went by.   But it isn’t so easy, this ability should be analyzed deeper because according to Brown (2003), there are2 primary hurdles in order to become successful readers:  first, they need to be able to master fundamental bottom – up   strategies for processing separate letters, words, and phrases,  as well as  top – down, conceptually driven to strategies for comprehension. Second, as part of that top – down approach, learners must develop appropriate content and formal schemata; it means background information and cultural experiences to carry out those interpretations effectively.

 The assessment of reading it’s not only assessment comprehension, as we could see below there are other aspects to take into consideration and they vary according to the types of readings, tasks or purposes. To sum up, this ability allows learners discriminate, recognize, infer, distinguish, identify not only in this skill but also with the other abilities.