Book Review

Abstract

Reading Comprehension Assessment is a timely contribution. As Johnston notes, research on reading comprehension has taken on a flavour distinct from, say, some 15 years ago and an attempt to analyze implications of this shift for the measurement of comprehension skills is welcome. This is a relatively modest book. In just under 100 pages the author deals in four chapters with some of the persistent questions in the assessment of comprehension, with the contribution of current psychological thought to understanding the concept of reading comprehension, with some general issues of assessment also relevant to measuring comprehension, and finally with his view of the future of reading comprehension assessment. Chapter One, "Defining Reading Comprehension," is largely devoted to the familiar questions of whether comprehension is a product or a process and whether comprehension "has" subskills. After delineating the issues, Johnston, drawing largely on currently fashionable cognitive psycholinguistics, introduces "an emerging perspective on reading comprehension" in order to resolve the questions of interest. He concludes that "reading can be reasoning and have subskills at the same time" (p. 17) by calling attention to the possibility that "reasoning" itself may be divisible. To his credit, Johnston recognizes that the product/process dichotomy is ultimately unproductive; a focus on one aspect or the other is a mere matter of perspective. It is not clear, therefore, why Johnston believes that we "are stuck for the most part with product measures, when we are more interested in processes" (p. 17). As most processes are not observable directly, normal measurement procedures dictate the invention of telltale products. The work of Daneman and Carpenter (e.g., Daneman, 1982) illustrates the point. The trick is to invent clever, and