Development and Piloting of the Receptive and Expressive Language Module

Students’ ability to read with comprehension is largely facilitated or obstructed by a combination of their decoding and language comprehension skills (Hoover & Tunmer, 2020). Strong reading comprehenders can both sound out words (decode) and understand their significance (language comprehension) in order to apply meaning to any given text. Language skills become even more critical for students in multilingual education contexts, where they likely do not have the same facility with vocabulary and listening comprehension in a second or third language as with their first language. The need to measure various facets of language to understand better reading comprehension is critical in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), where millions of children learn to read in languages they may not speak or use at home. Yet, most existing assessments in LMICs do not measure language skills. The Receptive and Expressive Language Module (RELM) is designed to fill this gap by assessing pertinent aspects of receptive and productive language skills in learners in pre-primary and primary grades across LMICs. The foundational assumption behind the formulation of the RELM is that language skills play a crucial role in shaping learners' reading comprehension performance.