The European battery for reading assessment: Interlingual comparative study of reading abilities

School and health operators have to deal more and more with bilingual children with learning disorders. The European Battery for Reading Assessment project aims to adapt the IReST battery to design a standardised assessment suitable for measuring a child’s reading performances during his/her developmental age. This tool could be used with bilingual and multilingual children, for both clinical and educational purposes. We tested the battery on 370 Italian children attending the second cycle of primary school and the lower secondary school. The tool for this analysis has to maintain the linguistic complexity of each language and we have decided to use the International Reading Speed Test. The texts are equivalent in all languages (17 idioms). In the same time, all the subjects of our sample were evaluated using a list of single words and a list of pseudo-words to read aloud and a reading test. The results seem to confirm that the battery can also be employed in the evolutionary developmental field. © 2015, Giunti O.S. Organizzazioni Speciali. All rights reserved.