Through observation and dialogue with learners, practitioners need to determine whether learners can comprehend better when they read or listen to a passage. In addition, an attempt should be made through observation and discussion to gain an understanding of whether learners use any form of comprehension strategies. Practitioners could ask learners about their use of strategies during reading (i.e. when comprehension fails, do they make use of strategies such as rereading?).

When assessing learners' comprehension (oral, silent or listening), look for their ability to:

• Understand the main idea
• Make inferences and build on prior knowledge
• Recall or find factual information
• Organize events in sequential order

Reading struggles to assess:

• Mispronouncing, repeating, skipping, substituting and transposing the letters in words
• Unable to associate sounds with letters (consonant, vowel and vowel with "r" combinations)
• Unable to sound out words in units - endings or beginnings, plurals, silent letter rules, words with several syllables, nonsense words
• Cannot hear the sounds in the words and the number of syllables
• Difficulty with reading common words including function words: a, in, the, is
• Unable to recognize a word from a list of similar words both by visual and by auditory means
• Difficulty understanding what is read to them independent from their reading skills⁴⁵

Fluency:

Examine the accuracy and rate of reading, the time it takes learners to read the text out loud (the number of minutes divided by the number of words read correctly will give the percentage of words read correctly). The major elements in fluent reading are accuracy, effective decoding and reading text with rhythm and appropriate expression.