Op weg Naar een Diagnostische Toets Leesvaardigheid Engels

Foreign-language reading occupies a major place in Dutch secondary education and the diagnosis of specific reading comprehension problems is important to help students improve their reading. Therefore, it is interesting to see if and how these problems can be identified by means of a diagnostic test. On the basis of a literature study, seven factors were hypothesised to contribute to FL reading comprehension problems: vocabulary knowledge, syntax knowledge, understanding explicit information, understanding implicit information, understanding relations and structure, world knowledge and monitoring skills. These factors were tested in an experimental diagnostic test that was administered to 449 students, together with a general test of FL reading comprehension. The results show that linguistic factors such as vocabulary knowledge and syntax knowledge are strongly related to FL reading comprehension, whereas non-linguistic factors such as world knowledge and monitoring skills are only weakly related. The study also shows that individual students' reading problems are due to different combinations of factors.