Abstract

Assessing reading comprehension ability of EFL learners has always been one of the disputable factors in language testing. Considering reading comprehension as one of the significant skills in learning a foreign language, it is essential for EFL teachers or experts to evaluate the ability of the learners in their reading performance. Thus, they always try to find and examine different kinds of methods to assess reading comprehension ability of the students more perfectly.

It is sometimes argued that the established means of assessment may not measure the actual learning of some students. In other words, the reading tasks after reading passages can affect the way we evaluate our learners’ comprehension ability. Therefore, we can conclude that finding an appropriate method to estimate the reading ability of EFL learners is one of the crucial factors in language testing and teaching.

Based on the literature, there are a lot of techniques for assessing reading comprehension in a foreign or second language context. However, none of them can be accepted as a perfect method to evaluate reading ability. The present paper tries to introduce different assessment means which are used to measure EFL learners’ reading comprehension. In other words, this article is a brief review on literature about the most common techniques and their strengths and weaknesses in evaluating the reading comprehension of our students. (more…)