This website has a story meant for learning English. It might be good for a University student to read: http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish-central-stories-university.htm
It also contains some True and False comprehension questions which I think the student would have to read the story to be able to answer.
According to Nation’s recommended word list evaluator http://language.tiu.ac.jp/flc/), there is 85% of level 1 words. 4.89% for level 2 and 1.12% of level 3. Then 8.99% from outside lists but many of these were proper names and places. Therefore it seems like it might work well as extensive reading homework exercise for a lower intermediate student. It is something you could do an exercise on vocabulary before going home and grade the comprehension questions when they got back to class.
Based on the level and content of the vocabulary I think it could be an effective extensive reading assignment. It was also an interesting read with several different characters. It is also an extensive reading activity which could be shared by the whole class.
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I found a couple of web sites with formal reading comprehension tests, the first one (www.miguelmllop.com), the reasons I liked it were first of all a huge variety of the material to read which suits the reader's level and interest and at end of each story there were different type of exercises to assess student's comprehension of the reading material,which included WH questions about the story, information true or false,vocabulary exercise provided with the synonym words and incomplete sentences with three options to complete true or sentences about the story. inclusion of synonym words in vocabulary assessment is a good way of learning new words.
ReplyDeleteThe other site I liked was http//the_english_dept.tripod.com/exos.html , on this site the readings were based on newspaper articles including all kind of stories and letters to editors, variety of issues are followed by comprehension questions, multiple choice reading comprehension, CLOZE exercise, vocabulary exercises and matching exercises. A good thing about these assessment activities was that there was a big variety in reading material from fairy tales to current affairs and from literature to Science.
The web adress mentioned in the Nation's book included activity which involved writing and based on writing it would evaluate the level of student's proficieny, which i did not find very useful for assessing student's reading comprehension.