“READS” Feedback on Tri-Component Skills in Resuscitating Learners’ Reading Ability

This article reports the findings of a reading comprehension test (pre-test) consisting of the tri-component skills namely literal, reorganisation and inferential, conducted among students of a public secondary school in the central state of Malaysia. READS (Reading Evaluation and Decoding System) was utilised to capture students’ reading ability and comprehension skills and introspectively made sense of students’ actual reading ability in terms of what they could and could not do. Precisely, with a standard Reading Matrix table which was previously developed, the English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers were able to tell their students’ reading abilities by conveniently referring to the Performance Standards of READS so to ascertain whether their students were at meet standard, below standard, above standard or at academic warning status in terms of the tri-component skills. Subsequently, a series of intervention lessons were developed based on the READS feedback and immediately conducted to resuscitate and revive the learners’ shortcomings. Results of the post-test indicated an increase in students’ overall test scores. Consequently, the findings suggest that the deployment of READS has the potentiality in improving students’ reading and comprehension ability.