About ESL Benchmarks

Introduction
The Benchmark Levels
Language Strands
Communicative Competence
Strand Specific Competencies
Communicative Competence by Language Strand
- Listening
- Speaking
- Reading
- Writing
Assessment Tips
Sample Processes for Assessing Language Proficiency
Ongoing Assessment and Reporting
Tracking Strategies

Communicative Competence by Strand – Reading

The process of reading involves decoding (recognizing and understanding letters, numbers and symbols and how they are used to form words and represent ideas) and comprehension (constructing meaning from words, numbers and symbols in different contexts).

Linguistic Competence	It includes knowledge of vocabulary, punctuation, phonological awareness and decoding skills. It involves the reader’s knowledge of linguistic structures to understand text.
Strategic Competence	A strategic reader has a repertoire of strategies to compensate for missing knowledge. Cueing systems such as graph-phonemic, syntactic, semantic and contextual cues are applied to regain meaning.
Socio-linguistic Competence	It involves the rules and principles that the reader applies to understand the author’s purpose, genre, and level of formality, format and topic. This competence includes knowledge of allusion, metaphors, idioms and figurative language.
Discourse Competence	Readers identify various connectors such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, repetition and lexical cohesion in order to understand the relationships between ideas to develop holistic comprehension.