Diagnosing Comprehension Skills

Abstract

The skills approach to reading facilitates diagnosis of reading comprehension by enabling various reading skills to be isolated. By testing students on each of these skills, teachers are able to develop a focused remedial programme. This paper presents four reading comprehension skills and shows how a diagnostic test based on these skills can be developed for students of English as a second or foreign language. The strategies here form the basis of the Reading Comprehension Skills Battery, developed as a research project in the National Institute of Education, Singapore (Lim, 1994; Lim, Ho and Wong, 1994). It is hoped that English teachers will benefit from being able to focus on specific reading comprehension strategies to assist the students improve their comprehension capabilities, both in the language and content area subjects.