The not so simple view of reading assessment

Claudia Pik-Ki Chu and Michelle Ellefson, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK Conceptualisation of reading Reading comprehension is a term that is commonly used in educational and psychological settings, but its conceptualisation and definition vary in different contexts. For instance, Cain (1999) defined ‘successful understanding of a text’ as the ‘ultimate aim of reading’ (p. 239), and the National Assessment Governing Board (2008) described reading as ‘an active and complex process that involves multiple different behaviours’ (p. 4). The lack of consensus in the definition of reading comprehension makes reading assessment challenging. In the classroom setting, the ‘Simple View of Reading’ (Gough and Tunmer, 1986; Hoover and Gough, 1990) is often adopted as the theoretical framework of teaching and assessing reading (Tennent, 2014). This framework suggests that reading comprehension is the output of decoding (word recognition) and linguistic compreh