Assessing Reading Flow Map.

Reading ability is very difficult to assess accurately. In the communicative competence model, a student's reading level is the level at which that student is able to use reading to accomplish communication goals. This means that assessment of reading ability needs to be correlated with purposes for reading.

Reading Aloud

A student's performance when reading aloud is not a reliable indicator of that student's reading ability. A student who is perfectly capable of understanding a given text when reading it silently may stumble when asked to combine comprehension with word recognition and speaking ability in the way that reading aloud requires.

In addition, reading aloud is a task that students will rarely, if ever, need to do outside of the classroom. As a method of assessment, therefore, it is not authentic: It does not test a student's ability to use reading to accomplish a purpose or goal.

However, reading aloud can help a teacher assess whether a student is "seeing" word endings and other grammatical features when reading. To use reading aloud for this purpose, adopt the "read and look up" approach: Ask the student to read a sentence silently one or more times, until comfortable with the content, then look up and tell you what it says. This procedure allows the student to process the text, and lets you see the results of that processing and know what elements, if any, the student is missing.

Comprehension Questions

Instructors often use comprehension questions to test whether students have understood what they have read. In order to test comprehension appropriately, these questions need to be coordinated with the purpose for reading. If the purpose is to find specific information, comprehension questions should focus on that information. If the purpose is to understand an opinion and the arguments that support it, comprehension questions should ask about those points.

In everyday reading situations, readers have a purpose for reading before they start. That is, they know what comprehension questions they are going to need to answer before they begin reading. To make reading assessment in the language classroom more like reading outside of the classroom, therefore, allow students to review the comprehension questions before they begin to read the test passage.

Finally, when the purpose for reading is enjoyment, comprehension questions are beside the point. As a more authentic form of assessment, have students talk or write about why they found the text enjoyable and interesting (or not).

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http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/reading/assessread.htm

The 5 Principles of Language Assessment

The first one of the 5 principles  is PRACTICALITY. This principle regards how easy a test is to administer taking into account that tests should be easy to administer, not excessively expensive, they should be planned and applied within appropriate time limits (not time consuming), and they have a scoring process that is specific and time efficient.
         
The second principle that the author points out is the RELIABILITY.  A reliable test needs to be consistent and dependable. There are some subdivisions of reliability: Student-Related Reliability, rater Reliability, test Administration Reliability and, test Reliability. To sum up, reliability  is the degree to which an assessment tool produces stable and consistent results.
          
Another principle is VALIDITY.  It refers to how well a test measures what it is supposed to measure.  Validity is also devided in different categories such as:  Face Validity, exams like Toelf that measures English and it is valid in every university in the world, and consequential validity, gives information about the benefits of dangers after taking the exam.

AUTHENTICITY regards if the items are as contextualized, if the topics and situations are interesting and enjoyable, and if the tasks are real-world tasks.

Finally, Brown mentiones the fifth priciple, WASH BACK. It includes the effects of an assessment on teaching and learning prior to the assessment itself, that is on preparation for the assessment: Informal performance assessment is by nature more likely to have built-in wash back effects because the teacher is usually providing interactive feedback. Formal tests can also have positive wash back, but they provide no wash back, if the students receive a simple letter grade or a single overall numerical score. Classroom test should serve as learning devices through which wash back is achieved.

Wash back enhances a number of basic principles of language acquisition: intrinsic motivation, autonomy, self confidence, language ego, interlanguage, and strategic investment, among others. Wash back implies that students have ready access to the teacher to discuss the feedback and evaluation he has given.