Assessment of Students’ Reading Comprehension Skills in Teaching English

Abstract

This article presents the reading comprehension skills of freshmen and sophomores majoring in English at the Azerbaijan State Pedagogical University. The main goal of the paper is to discuss the value of assessment in identifying students’ reading proficiency in higher education. Another goal is to help teachers identify assessment criteria and give feedback to students in developing reading comprehension skills. In addition, the article explains the application of assessment strategies and evaluation criteria for various reading comprehension skill levels. The last goal of the research paper is to demonstrate the benefits of formative assessment to both teachers and students. For this purpose, the experiment examines the students’ reading comprehension abilities. The study included 31 female and 23 male student participants from the English language faculty. The participants were chosen on purpose from the first and second years of the academic year 2021-2022. The designed survey questions were used to collect data. Qualitative analyses were used to analyze the students’ results. According to the findings, teachers believe that reading assessment is an important component of effective reading instruction. Throughout the study, both teachers and students valued the role of formative assessment in improving reading comprehension.