For ESL teachers, an informal reading inventory (IRI) can be a useful tool in determining a student's position and progress in their English literacy, as well as determining a course of action for their future language development. A well-prepared IRI can help a teacher spot problems and prepare lessons accordingly.
For my first IRI, I worked with "Joseph" (not his real name), a 9th grade boy originally from the Dominican Republic who has been in America for about two years. The passage I chose came from "By the Waters of Babylon" by Stephen Vincent Benet. The comprehension questions, however, were written by myself.
Joseph's progress through the reading was satisfactory, pausing only at some of the longer words, and making relatively few errors. I was at first concerned about some of the longer words, and had considered abandoning the passage due to the "rule of five" – if there are five words in the passage that an ESL student might potentially stumble on, it shouldn't be used. But Joseph not only managed to successfully read the passage, but, when quizzed orally on the comprehension questions, was able to find the right answers within the passage and explain them to me in his own words. Joseph read a passage of almost 700 words with only five miscues, only one of which affected his comprehension. I would have to therefore conclude that both the vocabulary and the comprehension of the passage were at Joseph's independent level.
It is no easy task choosing an appropriate passage for an IRI, and finding the right one cased me a great deal of frustration. The reading should be of an appropriate age level, and the vocabulary should follow the "rule of five. The "rule of five" eliminated nearly my entire personal library, which included various textbooks from my English Literature and Grammar/Composition teaching days. The reason is simple enough to understand: The passages in those books were designed to be challenging for native speakers, to say nothing of an ESL student.
After much searching, I finally found an appropriate passage in the short story "By the Waters of Babylon." The story itself is compelling: We are introduced to the narrator, a young man from some sort of tribal society who must travel to "the Dead Places" as part of his initiation into his tribe. By the end of the story, the reader is made to understand that this "Dead Place" is actually the ruin of a great city -- most likely New York City -- and that this tribal society is actually living in some sort of post-apocalyptic future.
At this point, I would like to recommend Stephen Benet's "By the Waters of Babylon" as a short story for any class, mainstream or ESL, as well as a gripping read in its own right:
What makes a passage appropriate for an IRI? Obviously, both the reading level and content should be age-appropriate, but I personally believe that the content should also be engaging. While non-fiction passages might be considered more suitable for IRIs, I find fiction to be more engaging. The standardized tests and sample IRIs I consulted contained suitable, if dull, passages about the Nile River, how bread is made, and a history of immigration in America from the 1860s to the 1920s. I chose instead to find something that would engage the reader and make him want to read further. I was rewarded when Joseph, at the end of the IRI exercise, asked me if I had the rest of the story for him to read -- confirming without a doubt that this was, in fact, on his independent reading level.
When it came time to write comprehension questions for the passage, I chose not to follow the textbook's guidelines, but instead compose my own questions with this overarching criteria: If I were to assign this passage in my class, what, if nothing else, would I want my own students to understand and remember from it? Keeping this in mind, I expected Joseph to be able to identify both main and supporting ideas from the passage, which he was able to do without any difficulty.
In the short time I spent with Joseph, I found him to be a bright boy who studies hard and gets good grades in school. I also pleased to hear that he prefers to read for leisure, usually in his native Spanish. What I learned from this IRI is that his English literacy is superb -- on par with nearly any native speaker in his age group. At the end of the session, I thanked Joseph for the session, and walked away with a new tool in my ESL repertoire, and with a promise to keep -- to send Joseph a copy of the entire short story.
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