A Novel Approach for Assisting Teachers in Assessment of Student Reading Ability in web-based Learning Environment

Reading exercises are critical for developing strong reading comprehension. However, due to resource constraints and a lack of accurate evaluation methods, English instructors can hardly assess student reading ability effectively. In past decades, learning by reading is known to be challenging for both teachers and students involved, especially for students learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL). To cope with this problem, in this paper, we proposed a Tag-based assessment approach to both elicit reading behaviors from EFL learners and assist the teachers in tracing and evaluating the student reading ability effectively. The experimental results showed that the novel approach can not only find out the relations between learners’ tags and their comprehension, but also help teachers to evaluate students’ reading ability.