How to Assess the Five Components of Reading 

A robust, comprehensive assessment plan can help you ensure that students are developing skills in all five components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.    

• Universal screeners can identify which students are at risk of developing reading difficulties.  
• Diagnostic assessments can help determine why a student is having reading problems so the right interventions can be planned. Diagnostic assessments help you pinpoint which component needs intervention. 
• Progress-monitoring assessments can help you find out whether instruction, support, and interventions are working. Some experts recommend using progress-monitoring assessments as often as every month. 

Assessing Phonemic Awareness  

The first step in learning to read is becoming aware of how the 44 sounds of English can be put together to make different words. That process, known as phonological awareness, includes these increasingly challenging skills: 

1. Breaking words into syllables 
2. Rhyming 
3. Recognizing when words start or end with the same sounds (alliteration) 
4. Segmenting onset (first consonant or consonant blend in a word) from the rime (the vowel and final consonants) 
5. Identifying the first and last sounds in a word 
6. Blending separate sounds into words 
7. Analyzing the separate sounds in a word 
8. Manipulating sounds, such as replacing one sound with another to make a new word 

Skills 4–8 are known as phonemic awareness. Researchers further subdivide phonemic awareness into synthesis, or the ability to blend phonemes into words, and analysis, or the ability to separate and work with the sounds in a word. Phonemic synthesis and phonemic analysis each contribute to reading ability in different ways.  

Why Assess Phonemic Awareness? 

Researchers recommend assessing phonological and phonemic awareness skills early because they can predict whether students are likely to have reading difficulties later. 

How Is Phonemic Awareness Assessed? 

Readers develop phonemic awareness skills gradually. The earliest skills to develop are often phoneme-matching skills, which emerge near the midpoint of the kindergarten school year. The last skill to develop is the ability to swap phonemes to make a new word.  

Phonemic awareness tests usually involve tasks such as these:

• matching: Which words have the same sound? (cat/cow/fox) 
• isolating the first sound: What’s the first sound in “dog”?  
• isolating the last sound: What’s the last sound in “him”? 
• isolating the center sound: What’s the middle sound in “wet”? 
• blending sounds: What word has the sounds /c/  /a/  /t/? 
• segmenting sounds: What sounds make up the word “pig”? 
• manipulating first sounds:  Can you say “hit” without the /h/? 
• manipulating last sounds:  Can you say “storm” without the /m/? 
• substituting sounds: What’s the new word when you change the /f/ in “fox” to /b/? 

Learn more about the role of phonemic awareness in dyslexia evaluations. 

Assessing Phonics  

Phonics refers to a student’s ability to pair phonemes (units of sound) with graphemes (letters in written language). When students understand which letters and sounds match, they can decode words.

Why Assess Phonics?    

The ability to link sounds to letters quickly and efficiently is important because that skill is part of a larger capability known as orthographic mapping. Orthographic mapping is a mental process where letter–sound associations and spelling patterns are stored in memory so they can be accessed automatically. Orthographic mapping makes words instantly familiar, so they don’t have to be sounded out each time we read them.    

How Are Phonics Skills Assessed?  

Phonics assessments generally include  

• letter-naming tasks; 
• real-word identification tasks; and 
• nonsense-word (pseudoword) decoding tasks.  

Research shows that nonsense-word reading may be a better indicator of a child’s decoding ability than real-word identification. That’s because some children who have less developed phonological skills can still recognize familiar sight words (Levlin et al., 2020). As words get longer and texts become more complicated, these students are likely to encounter reading difficulties because the underlying phonological-core deficits have been present from the start (Kilpatrick, 2015).  

Some assessments, such as the Test of Word Reading Efficiency, Second Edition (TOWRE-2), include timed nonsense-word decoding subtests. It’s important to use timed measures because slow letter–sound decoding points to problems with orthographic mapping.  

Assessing Fluency   

Fluency is more than just the speed of reading. It also incorporates these skills: 

• accuracy, which is reading aloud without making mistakes 
• automaticity, which is quick and effortless decoding 
• prosody, which is the ability to read expressively, pausing in the right places and changing the pace, tone, or emphasis of oral reading in ways that show you understand what you’re reading 

Why Assess Fluency?     

Fluency should increase as young readers gain experience. Good readers steadily build the number of words they can immediately identify. They apply what they’ve learned about letters–sound connections to new words they encounter. When reading is slow and laborious, it can be a sign that automaticity is not developing as it should. For that reason, some reading specialists compare fluency to the canary in the coal mine—it is an early sign of trouble. 

Prosody has special significance. Studies have shown that prosody is closely related to comprehension. In fact, some studies show that prosody and comprehension influence each other. That is, students who can break the text into logical chunks as they’re reading can more easily store those chunks in memory. Likewise, understanding the text helps a reader know where they should pause or change tone in oral reading (Veenendaal et al., 2016). These skills depend on the ability to decode quickly and accurately (Kang et al., 2019).  

How Is Fluency Assessed?   

Speed and accuracy can be calculated using a words-correct-per-minute formula, reflected as the percentage of the words a student reads correctly out of the total words in the test item. That percentage can be compared to oral reading fluency norms. 

 Many reading fluency tests include: 

• rapid automatized naming tasks, which ask readers to identify numbers, letters, colors, or objects; 
• word-level fluency tasks, which ask readers to identify real and nonsense words; 
• sentence-level fluency tasks, which ask readers to recite sentences aloud; and 
• passage-level fluency tasks, which ask readers to read longer texts. 

Some researchers have questioned the usefulness of sentence- and passage-level texts, since readers may be able to identify words based on the context in which they appear (Kilpatrick, 2015). The older a student is, the more likely it is that their background knowledge or reading experience will help them identify words. Using word lists may be a more accurate reflection of word-reading skills. 

Download the infographic: Strategies to Improve Word-Reading Skill in Struggling Readers

Assessing Vocabulary     

Vocabulary refers to the words a person recognizes and understands. Vocabulary begins as an oral skill. Most children learn words by hearing them and later transfer that oral knowledge to written words as they learn to read. A student’s background knowledge helps them make connections between what a word sounds like, what a word looks like, and what a word means.   

Why Assess Vocabulary?     

Assessing vocabulary is complex, largely because educators and clinicians measure different kinds of vocabulary, each of which plays a role in the development of reading ability and reading comprehension (Elleman & Oslund, 2019). In other words, vocabulary plays a role in the words people recognize and the words people comprehend. Vocabulary knowledge may help people learn to read. As people read, they sometimes have to choose between pronunciations, asking themselves which pronunciation makes sense in a given context.  

How Is Vocabulary Assessed?  

Different kinds of vocabulary are assessed directly and indirectly. Classroom teachers assess content area vocabulary with curriculum-based measures such as classroom projects and tests. Sight vocabularies, background knowledge vocabularies, and word-structure vocabularies factor into reading inventories, fluency assessments, comprehension tests, and other formal and informal reading assessments.  

Could your student have dyslexia? This infographic can help you recognize dyslexia characteristics at different ages.

Or download the Dyslexia Assessment Tool Kit here.

Assessing Comprehension

The “Simple View of Reading” states that comprehension is the result of two interactive factors (Gough & Tunmer, 1986). Reading experts often show this relationship as an equation: 

word recognition  x  language comprehension = reading comprehension 

Recent research highlights several factors that may influence this formula, including working memory, executive function, motivation, engagement, cultural context, and knowledge of reading strategies (Duke & Cartwright, 2021). 

Why Assess Reading Comprehension? 

People read for meaning. They read to build knowledge and to develop empathy. In many ways, comprehension is the reason we read. When clinicians and educators assess reading comprehension, they do so to find out whether readers understand  

• what has been explicitly stated;  
• what can be inferred; and 
• what conclusions can be drawn from a text. 

When an assessment reveals a need, you can assess other reading components to find out where specific deficits exist. Then you can design intervention plans and keep track of progress (Farrell et al., 2019). 

How Should Reading Comprehension Be Assessed? 

Reading comprehension is measured in different ways on different assessments. Students may be asked to 

• retell a story to see how well they understand key ideas, details, and text structures; 
• answer multiple-choice or open-ended questions about information and inferences; 
• fill in missing words (cloze tasks) or choose the right word to match the meaning of a sentence (maze tasks); 
• identify sentences with similar meanings (sentence verification tasks);
• explain the meaning of figurative language; 
• determine whether a social response is appropriate (pragmatic language); 
• describe an author’s intent or purpose; or 
• place events in sequential order (Cao et al., 2020). 

Some measures also explore a reader’s knowledge of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary since these skills can also affect comprehension. 

Assessing the five components of reading is a complex and ongoing process. That’s because reading is an interwoven set of abilities that develop at different rates. Looking carefully at strengths and needs as they change across each school year can help you pace and individualize instruction and intervention to match each student’s changing needs. 

Related Assessments: 

• (TORC-4) Test of Reading Comprehension, Fourth Edition
• (FAR) Feifer Assessment of Reading
• (TOWRE-2) Test of Word Reading Efficiency, Second Edition
• (TERA-4) Test of Early Reading Ability, Fourth Edition

Research and Resources