The Effect of Classroom Performance Assessment on EFL Students' Basic and Inferential Reading Skills

Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of classroom performance assessment on the EFL students' basic and inferential reading skills. A pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was employed in the study. The subjects of the study consisted of 64 first-year secondary school students in Menouf Secondary School for Boys at Menoufya Directorate of Education (Egypt) during the academic year 2006/2007. These subjects were divided into an experimental group and a control group. Both groups were pretested to measure their basic and inferential reading skills before conducting the experiment. During treatment, students in the experimental group used the KWL chart and the self-assessment checklist for assessing their own reading strategies and comprehension in each reading session. The KWL chart and the self-assessment checklist were then compiled in a portfolio for each student. This portfolio was read by the teacher every week to provide both 'feedback' and 'feedforward' for improving each student's reading strategies and comprehension. Students in the control group answered a traditional discrete item test at the very end of each lesson and unit. This traditional test focused mainly on the phonological, lexical and grammatical elements of the reading skill, and students were judged on the basis of how well they achieved as compared to each other. The experiment lasted for six months. After treatment, the same pretests were readministered to both groups. The collected data were analyzed using the t-test. The pre-test data analysis revealed that there were no significant differences in the basic and inferential reading skills between the experimental group and the control group (t=0.48, p > 0.05; t=-0.46, p > 0.05, respectively). However, the post-test data analysis showed that there was a statistically significant difference between the two groups of the study in the basic reading skills in favor of the control group and in the inferential reading skills in favor of the experimental group (t=-2.61, p=0.01; t=7.75, p=0.000, respectively). These findings suggest that classroom performance assessment is less effective in improving secondary school EFL students' basic reading skills, but more effective in developing their inferential reading skills than traditional assessment. In light of these findings, the researcher recommends that a multi-dimensional comprehensive approach to classroom assessment is more likely to improve both the basic and inferential reading skills of intermediate-level EFL students